One year ago today—on November 12, 2024, after a three-year and four-month hiatus—China’s most popular YouTuber resurfaced. A woman in her mid-30s from the Sichuan countryside, Li Ziqi (李子柒) posted three new videos to her channel, which has over 28 million subscribers worldwide. In the first video, in order to lacquer her grandmother’s old wardrobe, she climbs up scaffolded lacquer trees to tap their sap. In the second video, she builds a large bamboo-themed hut for the display of her clothes. In the third video, with silk from silkworms she has cultivated herself, she makes a flower that she then wears, while playing the piano and singing a pop song. Each of these videos quickly garnered millions of views, as a global audience cheered her return, following the resolution of a legal and financial dispute with her former management company.
In Li’s videos, labor is not degraded but creative. Critics may argue that it is presented almost entirely as DIY: an individualistic rather than communal endeavor, even when traditionally communal activities like planting and harvesting are involved. What Li performs cannot be scaled up into a plan to mobilize the masses. But the vision she offers is, at the same time, emancipatory. In The German Ideology, Marx famously sketches this one day in the life of the man of the future:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Except for post-dinner debate, we could say that Li Ziqi realizes this passage in visual form (if not in reality). She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities. She does not restrict herself to one sphere of activity; indeed, she is masterful in numerous spheres, from making shoes, paper, and furniture from scratch to practicing woodblock printing and sericulture.
We need not be naive about Li Ziqi’s link in the longer chain of production and consumption. The scholar Limin Liang has remarked upon the e-commerce base of her YouTube superstructure, with “Li’s” food and handicraft products raking in hundreds of millions of dollars across Taobao and Tmall. As Liang astutely observes, “One might argue that the invisible scenes of assembly-line workers toiling away in food factories producing the Li Ziqi brand items are the true faces of ‘laboring people’ in today’s society. Omitting them while foregrounding Li’s performance is perhaps the real irony underlining the popularity of these video series.” What is more, Li’s very ascent, as well as that of other online “influencers,” cannot be construed solely as the result of “natural popularity,” but must be considered inseparable from the influence of capital. According to Liang, it is due to her former multichannel network (MCN)—the kind of company that she broke from—and its “marketing strategies, data analytics capacity, and capital that she transformed from an obscure vlogger to a social media influencer with a unique angle in depicting rural life.”
Despite this invisible background, I nevertheless insist on the hopeful potential of the visible foreground, that is, the images of Li Ziqi displayed on cellphones and tablets from China to Ghana. For the story they tell is one of decommoditization. In lieu of the mystifications of the commodity form, we witness the entire process of the making of something from beginning to end, whether it is rouge, a washstand, or soy sauce.
Sure, that process is chopped up into no more than 20 minutes of finished film, but each step is shown—and shown to be whole, performed by one person with her own hands and precisely not by nameless hands along an assembly line or the mechanized arms of efficiency and uniformity. Li’s images are in this way anti-capitalist. They are also anti-socialist. They eschew the collective and are therefore unprogrammatic, ultimately rendering them unamenable to narratives such as the good China story.
If they evoke a nonexistent past, they also long for a yet-to-be future: a China, nay, world rid of bullshit jobs, of drudgery and the gig economy, of the kind of fulfillment to be found from Amazon fulfillment centers. Li’s own life story, of having worked in cities before returning to the countryside, constitutes a rejection of urban, alienated labor that is dominant in China as elsewhere.
The return of Li Ziqi reignited an old debate: what, after all, did she stand for? Two opposed positions are represented on the one hand by a BBC article, and on the other hand by an editorial in the Chinese state tabloid Global Times written in response to the BBC piece.
Li Ziqi must have the “apparent approval of the Communist Party,” argues the BBC. Why? Because YouTube is blocked in China; since Li is nevertheless on the platform—not to mention, a sensation—this fact thus raises “questions about whether her videos are akin to soft propaganda.” Moreover, Li’s rise, according to the BBC, has occurred amid the government’s ongoing control of the internet and of social media in particular. While dissent is quashed, her productions are allowed to thrive: because they “offer a distraction from the realities of rural China, which is poorer and older than the country’s bustling cities.”
“BBC’s distortion cannot obscure the beauty of Chinese rural culture,” thundered the Global Times a few days later, in the title of their riposte to the BBC. Rehashing the familiar charge of “prejudiced reporting,” the editorial condemns how Western media “continue to cling to outdated stereotypes of China’s countryside as ‘poor and old.’” Touting instead the “new socialist countryside,” the editorial lauds Li Ziqi as a “grassroots Chinese influencer” whose work reflects rural China’s “profound transformation.” By contrast, the work of the BBC consists only of “fabricating ‘drama’ and ‘conflict,’ replacing empathy with speculation, and interpreting Eastern culture through a patronizing lens.”
Both points of view are misleading. Li Ziqi is communist, but not in the sense that the BBC implies, or, in fact, that the CCP is. There’s nothing socialist—new or old—about Li’s countryside. Her videos, especially those depicting the growing, gathering, and cooking of her own food, picture not so much a modern China, much less a revolutionary one, rather than a mythic land of bounty from time immemorial. In this respect, the videos can be deemed escapist, furnishing a glamorized, aestheticized pastoral, a “return to nature” for an urbanized viewership around the world ordering take-out and delivery.
But they can also be read as utopian. The power of the utopian imagination lies in its naysaying to the status quo, explained the late Fredric Jameson in his notable reviewing of The Godfather parts 1 and 2. He defined the utopian as “that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs.” Jameson insisted that “the works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order—or some worse one—cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given voice.”
With over 3.3 billion views and counting, Li Ziqi’s videos are firmly embedded in global mass culture. Yet a critique of the reigning regime of austerity can be espied, however “implicitly,” in her scenes of leisure and plenty. They give voice, however “faintly,” to the fantasy that the people, like the plastic from the prepackaged foods they will no longer purchase, will one day not be disposed or disposable anymore.
The Chinese state may want to ride on the gown of a woman whose message seemingly fits the party platform. But there is more than one story that her phenomenon foretells.
To speak further of her own person, Li Ziqi is not a Renaissance man, despite her staggering capability. She is a woman. In her videos, men hardly make an appearance. And what is her own appearance? Hers are not the ruddy cheeks found in high socialist posters. She is “feminine,” with a thin face and long hair. But make no mistake: the persona she presents is not one of weakness or dependence, much less subservience. Her feminism may not be ostensibly militant, yet based solely on her videos, she might as well be an adherent of South Korea’s 4B movement, bi meaning no in Korean: no childbirth, no sex, no marriage, and no dating.
Absent is any romantic subtext in her videos. Indeed, she is self-sufficient to the point of asexuality. The only other recurring figure in her oeuvre is not some dashing man with whom in heterosexual union she’ll one day make a family; it is her paternal grandmother.
We mustn’t forget that, in today’s China, to have two if not three kids is also to follow the good China story. Against this backdrop stands Li Ziqi as not simply a woman, but a Chinese woman. Drawing on her biography, we know that the connection between Li and her grandmother is real: as a child Li was taken in by her when her parents separated, and her grandmother falling ill was what brought her back to the countryside as a young woman. This relationship between grandchild and grandparent—un(re)productive—represents innumerable such relationships in reform-era China, when so many of her own and subsequent generations grew up with their grandparents after their parents migrated to the cities along the coast.
Thus, Li Ziqi is a woman orphaned by post-socialist China. And, in response, she has removed herself, as far as one can tell, from the chain of marriage and childbearing, in a stubbornly patriarchal society that every so often bursts with misogynist violence.
Why is Li Ziqi so popular? Her MCN played a role, to be sure. Yet she’s also popular because women are devalued everywhere, not just in China. As menial and meaningless tasks sap the strength and spirit of women and men across the globe, Li’s videos paint a portrait of a separate if not separatist lifeworld: in which human beings can self-actualize, partaking of the fruits of their own labor.
The Chinese state may want to ride on the gown of a woman whose message seemingly fits the party platform. But there is more than one story that her phenomenon foretells. 
Featured image: Still from Li Ziqi’s video “For Everyone Who Knows My Name” / YouTube.