On April 27, Chinese food blogger Li Ziqi saw her followers on YouTube exceed 10 million after posting a short video on pea cultivation and cooking. This places Li, who has become famous with short videos that show her traditional and idyllic lifestyle in the Chinese countryside, among the platform's most popular Chinese-language content creators. "It's really surprising. I didn't expect such a broad response," Li said in an interview with Xinhua. "What I present to you is just a lifestyle that I have followed and enjoyed for a long time," he said. "Maybe that's what many other people appreciate too?"
Li's videos on YouTube talk about her life with her grandmother in rural areas of Sichuan province. In the videos, Li, often dressed in pretty traditional clothes, gets up at dawn, goes to sleep at sunset, plants seeds and collects flowers, cooks Chinese dishes and creates bamboo furnishings. Unlike many other food bloggers, Li's videos stage the countryside of China and begin with how food is planted and harvested on the farm. In movies, Li rarely speaks .
Li's followers overseas praised his videos for showing the incredibly picturesque, simple and elegant side of Chinese rural life, but there has been much discussion at home about whether his portrayal is unrealistically poetic.
In response, Li, who grew up in the countryside, said she never needed a script or special preparations when shooting a video on rural life because "it's all in my mind." "In the countryside, planting flowers, vegetables and trees isn't difficult. There are difficult elements of rural life, of course, but I haven't put them in my videos," said the blogger. "Most people today face enormous stress at work and in life, so I hope they can get up and feel better by watching my videos," he added.
Li told Xinhua that she usually leads a quiet life with her grandmother but that was not the case during the Covid-19 epidemic , because she took care of arranging medical supplies to support small hospitals in remote areas.