On a sunny spring day, Wang Min, more widely known by her nickname Sister Xia, picked wild dandelions in the mountains of the northwestern Shaanxi province. She then cooked the dandelions in her yard, mixing them with egg and minced pork, which she used as filling for a giant pot of steamed buns. Her family gathered in the yard to enjoy the buns, as roosters crowed in the background.
These idyllic scenes, captured in a video titled “Xia uses dandelion to make steamed buns, it’s so delicious,” have garnered more than 120,000 views on YouTube, where Sister Xia has over 600,000 subscribers. “Those steamed buns look so soft and fluffy!” a fan from Argentina wrote in Spanish. “You and your husband are adorable,” said another comment in French.
Although YouTube is blocked in China, rural content creators like Sister Xia have amassed thousands or even millions of fans on the platform, thanks to companies that specialize in exporting Chinese content to global social media platforms. These agencies act as cultural brokers across the Great Firewall. They recruit domestic creators and dub viral videos in foreign languages, sharing their content and generating revenue on international platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
“I never dared to think about [sharing my content] on overseas platforms,” Sister Xia, 36, told Rest of World from her home in Shaanxi. But in 2019, she began uploading cooking videos, filmed and edited by her husband, to Chinese social apps Toutiao, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili. These caught the attention of an influencer agency called Xiaowu Brothers. Together, they launched her first YouTube channel later that year.
Although Sister Xia has never used YouTube herself, her channel now contributes to 20% of her income from making videos, her husband Chen Lang told Rest of World. Compared to domestic social media sites, where creators like her make most of their money by selling products, YouTube allows Chinese creators to generate income with minimal additional effort. The platform shares 45% to 55% of their channel’s revenue with them.
Xiaowu Brothers, the agency that represents Sister Xia, has launched YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok channels for around 5,000 Chinese influencers, according to the company’s chief executive officer, Charles Zhang. The company recruits influencers from Chinese social media, and hopes to bring on 2,000 more in 2023, Zhang told Rest of World.
Their most popular clients include woodworking influencer Grandpa Amu; comedian GuiGe, known for dramatic comedy skits about his family life; and Lin Guoer, a young woman who films herself repairing diesel engines in the bucolic countryside.
“Rural creators from China have succeeded [on YouTube] because there is no similar content overseas,” said Zhang. The agency typically reposts videos about comedy, food, and lifestyle because they are entertaining, relatable, and easy to understand despite language barriers. According to Zhang, most of the YouTube channels the agency manages make a few thousand U.S. dollars a month. He refused to disclose how revenue is shared between the agency and creators.
China’s short-video boom has given rise to a large number of rural creators. Their videos appeal to urban residents in China and abroad who are seeking refuge from the stress of city life, according to Zhen Troy Chen, a senior lecturer at City, University of London, who has studied China’s creator economy. The videos’ themes of returning to nature and preserving agricultural heritage have resonated with audiences from different cultures, he told Rest of World.
Chen said that while creators make videos primarily to earn money, the government sometimes appropriates their rosy portrayals of countryside life in China as part of its propaganda, and to promote its rural development campaigns.
Although the Chinese government bans its citizens from accessing overseas social content, it has allowed creators to publish on blocked sites as a way to project the country’s cultural influence. Li Ziqi, who broke a record for having a Chinese-language YouTube channel with the most subscribers, rose to fame sharing scenes of her idyllic rural life. She was praised by state media as a role model in “telling good China stories,” and given a string of official titles such as “rural rejuvenation role model” and “Chinese tea ambassador.”
Sister Xia has also earned official recognition for her influencer career, including a government May Day award celebrating outstanding workers. Raised in a poor family, she had dropped out of primary school because her parents could not afford the tuition. Although she has never left the country, she has garnered fans from across the world — many of whom come from Taiwan, Russia, and the U.S., according to Xiaowu Brothers. Sister Xia said she sometimes read fans’ comments through auto-translation.
A group of her YouTube fans from Canada, Singapore, and the U.S. once reached out to her through Chinese social media, and made plans to visit her in Shaanxi. Although they didn’t make the trip due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, Sister Xia was happy to hear that foreigners wanted to visit her home. “I’m a village person. If I can bring friends from abroad to northern Shaanxi, it would be a great thing,” she said.