Professor Yang- Li Ziqi Reflections

Podcast

Podcast Transcript:

You’re listening to The Reflecting Pod with Hannah Findling, coming to you in February 2020 from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Today’s episode will feature my reflections on a presentation given in my food studies capstone seminar. Last week in class, Dickinson College’s Professor of Chinese Language and Literature Rae Yang visited to discuss the popular Chinese social media influencer Li Ziqi.

Li Ziqi is a 29 year old woman from Sichuan province in rural China. She rose to internet popularity in 2016 when she began posting her beautifully shot and edited start-to-finish videos of her life. She posts regularly across social media and has over 22 million followers on Weibo and another 8.3 million on YouTube, despite the website’s officially blocked status in China.

Professor Yang showed our class one of Li Ziqi’s videos, in which she prepares multiple recipes featuring tender bamboo shoots, fermented long beans, and other salad-type dishes. The video was incredibly well shot, and showcased a life lush with color, nature, and beauty. As we were watching, Professor Yang also made note of the fact that Li Ziqi cooks on a stove which she built herself, in another video series where she builds furniture using the raw natural materials in her rural surroundings. In other videos, she weaves her own cloth, dyes it using fruit skins, and crafts it lovingly into a tunic, all backed by a relaxing score of flute music.

The tranquility and idyllic rural lifestyle portrayed in Li Ziqi’s videos is undeniably enviable. I would give anything to spend my afternoons harvesting perfectly ripe home-grown produce for my meals instead of spending them in the library studying. The other students in the class expressed similar sentiments, with Professor Yang agreeing.

Li Ziqi has attained more than social media following and was named a “good young netizen” by the Communist party of China in 2018 and was honored by People’s Daily with a People’s Choice award in September of 2019. The Chinese government has praised Li Ziqi as well, commending her display of Chinese culture and traditional values.

Professor Yang then went on to explain that while a large part of her viewers love Li Ziqi’s videos and long for a simpler rural life, critics have posed that Li Ziqi does not represent China as it really is.

In reality, 40% of China’s population live in rural areas, many of whom live lives of hard

Agricultural labor and cope with the effects of environmental damage and pollution which spreads from the large cities. Many Chinese youth have migrated to cities to seek lucrative employment, and have suffered from burnout, high levels of pollution, and an extreme cost of living in order to support their aging family members who remain in rural China.

In reflecting on the discussion Professor Yang facilitated in class and on what I had learned about Li Ziqi, I returned home and dug a bit deeper into this mysterious figure’s online presence. I watched more of her videos and explored her many fan accounts. One of the most interesting things I found during my search was an article published by the Marketing division of the Robert H. Smith School of Business. In this article, Li Ziqi is said to portray the kind of image of China that someone like Martha Stewart portrays of the United States. The authenticity portrayed by both of these cooking icons is undeniable and conveys images of a simpler life in which one can afford the time and energy to prepare unique multi-course meals. However, just as Martha Stewart does not accurately portray the American working class, Li Ziqi does not reflect the reality of life in China.

Li Ziqi’s work serves as an incredible form of soft propaganda for the Chinese government. She showcases an idyllic life in the bamboo-forested countryside and embodies Chinese values of family heritage and portrays examples of the traditional methods of food preparation and harvesting. Both domestically in China and abroad, her videos cultivate a longing for a deeper connection with nature and a distancing from the clamor of modern life. Without, or perhaps with, intention, Li Ziqi has cultivated a perfect image of China- but has left out the reality of the environment in which she operates.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Professor Yang for sharing her time and knowledge with us, and would like to thank you, the listener. This has been another episode of the Reflecting Pod with Hannah Findling, signing off from Dickinson College here in Carlisle, PA

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