Somewhere in the mountainous region of northern Sichuan, a young woman harvests soybeans alone in a field. She cuts through the beanstalks with a sickle and stuffs them into a wicker basket. Once the basket is full, she makes her way to a courtyard garden, where she shells the beans by hand and grinds them in a stone mill. Working industriously yet serenely, she boils the resulting pulp in a wood-fired wok, drains it in a cloth, curdles it with salt, and finally presses it into a large block of tofu.
在中国四川北部的山区某处，一位年轻女子正独自在田间收获大豆。她用镰刀割断豆秆，将它们塞进一个柳条编织的篮子里。篮子装满后，她便提着它走向庭院花园，在那里她手工剥去豆壳，并用石磨将豆子磨碎。她工作勤奋而宁静，将磨出的豆糊在柴火大锅中煮沸，用布过滤，用盐使其凝固，最后将其压制成一大块豆腐。
The scene I am describing might seem like an outtake from some period drama. She is, say, a farmer living during the Six Dynasties period, forced to cultivate soybeans alone after her husband has gone to the northern frontier. Or she is a diligent worker manufacturing tofu for the People's Republic. Instead, this is the opening scene of a five-and-a-half-minute- long online video on how to make mapo tofu from scratch. And the young woman is Li Ziqi, a thirty-three- year-old Sichuanese influencer and the proprietor of what Guinness World Records has dubbed the most popular Chinese-language channel on YouTube.
我描述的这一幕，或许会让人联想到某个古装剧的片段。她可能是六朝时期的一位农妇，在丈夫被征召到北方边疆后，不得不独自耕种大豆。又或许她是一位为人民共和国辛勤制作豆腐的工人。但实际上，这是一段时长五分钟半的在线视频的开场，展示了如何从零开始制作麻婆豆腐。而视频中的这位年轻女子，就是李子柒，一位33岁的四川网红，同时也是吉尼斯世界纪录认证的YouTube上最受欢迎的中文频道的主人。
Li began posting these Waldenesque vignettes to Chinese social media in 2016, and quickly gained a loyal following. She then took a rare leap for Chinese infuencers and began posting her content to YouTube, a service that had been blocked in China since2009.Her Arcadian aesthetic proved just as popular with a global audience, specifically during the pandemic, when Li's life of “simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust,” as Thoreau put it, tapped into a desire to escape a sick society. By 2021, she had more than fourteen million followers on YouTube, the most ever for a Chinese- language account. But then, in July of that year, she stopped posting. Li, or at least the version of her that we knew in the videos, disappeared.
李子柒自2016年起开始在中国社交媒体上发布这些带有田园风光的视频短片，并迅速积累了一群忠实的粉丝。随后，她做出了中国网红中较为罕见的举动——开始将她的内容上传至YouTube，尽管这个平台自2009年起在中国被ping蔽。她那种田园牧歌式的风格在全球观众中同样大受欢迎，尤其是在疫情期间，李子柒那种“简单、独立、慷慨和信任”的生活方式，正如梭罗所描述的，触动了人们逃离病态社会的欲望。到了2021年，她在YouTube上的粉丝数超过了1400万，创下了中文账户的最高纪录。然而，就在那一年的7月，她突然停止更新。李子柒，或者说我们在视频中所熟知的那个她，就这样消失了。
There is a fairy-tale quality to Li's videos. Sometimes she is reminiscent of Cinderella, toiling alone in the kitchen. Other times, she is Little Red Riding Hood, traversing a forest of blooming magnolia on horseback. It is a contrived persona, to be sure-and one that she safeguards carefully. Li gives few interviews and renders sparse intimate details about her life beyond the videos. Most publicly available information about her comes from interviews with Chinese state media or outlets with some government affiliation. In those interviews, she suggests that her life has followed a Disney-like narrative arc.
李子柒的视频带有童话般的色彩。有时她像是灰姑娘，在厨房里独自辛勤劳作；有时她又像是小红帽，骑着马穿越盛开的玉兰花林。这无疑是一个刻意塑造的形象，而她也小心翼翼地维护着这个形象。李子柒很少接受采访，对于视频之外的个人生活细节也鲜少透露。关于她的大部分公开信息，都来自中国官方媒体或与政府有关联的媒体的采访。在这些采访中，她暗示自己的生活经历遵循了一个类似迪士尼故事的叙事弧线。
According to an interview for Goldthread, a subsidiary of the South China Morning Post, Li grew up in rural Sichuan. Her parents separated when she was young, and she lived with her father but then moved to her grandparents'home. There, she learned traditional cooking techniques from her grandfather, a local chef. At fourteen, Li dropped out of school and, like so many migrant workers of her generation, left the countryside for the city, working variously as a waitress and a d.j. In a profile for United Airlines'in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, Li said that she moved back to the village in2012 to care for her grandmother, who had fallen ill. She opened a store on Taobao, an eBay-like Chinese online- shopping platform, hoping to sell clothing and produce. She noticed that her brother, who posted videos of himself performing on the video-sharing platform Meipai, was getting some views and followers. She wondered whether she might be able to attract a similar following on Weibo, a Chinese social-media platform, by posting scenes from her rural existence and then diverting viewers to her store. “I thought it would be interesting for people to know where their food comes from," she told Hemispheres.
根据《南华早报》旗下子公司Goldthread的采访，李子柒在四川的农村长大。她的父母在她年幼时就分开了，她先是和父亲一起生活，后来搬到了祖父母家。在那里，她从身为当地厨师的祖父那里学到了传统的烹饪技艺。14岁时，李子柒离开了学校，像许多她那一代的农民工一样，从农村来到了城市，先后做过服务员和DJ。在为美国联合航空公司的机上杂志《Hemispheres》撰写的一篇个人简介中，李子柒提到，2012年她为了照顾生病的祖母而回到了村里。她在淘宝——一个类似于eBay的中国在线购物平台上——开了一家店，原本打算销售服装和农产品。她注意到她的哥哥在视频分享平台美拍上发布自己的表演视频，开始获得了一些观看量和粉丝。这启发了她，她开始思考是否也能通过在微博上发布自己农村生活的场景来吸引粉丝，然后将他们引导到她的淘宝店。“我觉得让人们了解食物的来源会是一件有趣的事情，”她对《Hemispheres》杂志说。
This was in 2016, a time when short-form online videos were becoming popular in China, and the so-called Wanghong economy-the influencer-to-online-commerce pipeline-was emerging as a major economic possibility for millennials. Young rural migrant workers, hoping to get noticed, made videos that exaggerated the consumptive excesses of city life. Li's concept went in entirely the opposite direction, speaking to a growing subculture of those embracing Han neo-traditionalism as a solution to ever-westernizing Chinese
cosmopolitanism. In her first video, created in March of2016, she picks peach blossoms and turns them into wine一a pastoral poem made with a smartphone camera. Initially, her retrograde sensibility did not gain much traction, but she bought a D.S.L.R. camera and a tripod and persevered. Her first viral success came in November,2016, when she posted a video in which she prepares Lanzhou beef noodle soup. In the video, Li uses ingredients picked from her garden, makes the stock and dough from scratch, and expertly hand-pulls the noodles herself in her immaculate courtyard--an image of wholesome self-sufficiency.
2016年，短视频在中国变得流行起来，所谓的“网红经济”——即通过网红影响力推动在线商务——开始成为千禧一代的一个重要经济机遇。许多年轻的农民工为了获得关注，制作了一些夸大城市消费主义的视频。而李子柒的理念则完全相反，她的作品迎合了那些拥抱汉族新传统主义、作为对抗日益西化的中国都市文化的解决方案的日益增长的亚文化群体。在她2016年3月发布的首个视频中，她采摘桃花并将其酿制成酒——这是一部用智能手机拍摄的田园诗般的视频。最初，她这种复古的风格并没有引起太多关注，但她购买了一台单反相机和一个三脚架，坚持不懈。她的首个爆红视频成功发生在2016年11月，当时她发布了一个制作兰州牛肉拉面的视频。视频中，李子柒使用自己花园里的食材，从头开始制作汤底和面团，并在她整洁的庭院中熟练地手工拉面——展现了一幅健康自给自足的形象。
According to an article in China's English-language tabloid the Global Times, the noodle video found its way in front of Liu Tongming, the founder of Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management Co., a business which
functions like a talent agency for online-video platforms. According to an open letter Li later posted on Weibo, Liu took her out for a hot-pot dinner, and offered to use his contacts at Weibo to help promote her videos to reach a larger audience on the platform. She agreed, and soon millions of followers flooded in.
根据《环球时报》的一篇报道，一位制作面条视频的内容创作者吸引了杭州万年品牌管理公司创始人刘通明的注意，该公司的业务模式类似于为在线视频平台服务的艺人经纪公司。在李子柒后来在微博上发布的一封公开信中，她提到刘先生曾邀请她共进火锅晚餐，并提出愿意利用他在Weibo的人脉资源，帮助她在该平台上推广视频，以吸引更广泛的受众。李子柒接受了这个提议，结果她迅速获得了数百万的新粉丝。
Sometime in the summer of 2017, Li signed with Weinian, and soon enough Liu was parlaying her popularity into commercial opportunity. They opened an online store on Tmall, a business-to-consumer retail platform, selling prepackaged versions of her delicacies, as well as a selection of her clothes, jewelry, and kitchen utensils, like Li's signature meat cleaver.
2017年夏天，李子柒与杭州万年品牌管理有限公司签订了合约，很快，刘同明便将她的人气转化为商业机遇。他们在天猫这个面向消费者的在线零售平台上开设了一家网店，销售她的美食预包装产品，以及她的衣服、珠宝和厨房用具，比如李子柒标志性的砍肉刀。
In 2017, Weinian also signed over Li's international publishing rights to WebTVAsia, a Malaysian-owned company. YouTube was blocked in China, but WebTVAsia outlets beyond the mainland were still able to upload her content to Google's platform. Li's videos worked there because they were mostly nonverbal. Non- Mandarin speakers could simply sit back and enjoy watching her make beef ribs and glutinous rice in an earthenware pot without feeling like they were missing the point. In fact, her pastoral poetics evinced the same kind of yearning in the West as it did on the mainland. Under a video in which Li prepares lotus wine, one woman commented that Li made her dream of her tribe, from Attu, Alaska, coming back together to live their
traditional ways.
同年，万年品牌管理有限公司还将李子柒的国际发布权授予了WebTVAsia，这是一家马来西亚公司。尽管YouTube在中国被ping蔽，但WebTVAsia在中国大陆以外的分支机构仍能够将她的内容上传到谷歌的平台。李子柒的视频在国际上广受欢迎，因为它们大多不需要语言交流。非普通话观众可以轻松地观看她如何用陶罐烹饪牛肉和糯米，而不会感觉错过了什么。实际上，她那田园诗般的视频在西方也引起了共鸣，就像在中国大陆一样。在一个展示李子柒制作莲花酒的视频中，一位女性评论说，李子柒的视频让这位来自阿拉斯加Attu岛的女性梦想着她的族人能够重新聚集在一起，回归并过上他们传统的生活。
Liu also encouraged Li to hire a production team. In a Weibo post dated May, 2017, Li estimated that in one year she walked more than a hundred and sixty miles back and forth between her camera and the scene, just to get the shot right. That year, she hired a videographer and an assistant, and her online shop was turning over millions of yuan. By the following year, Li had exceeded seven million YouTube followers. Her videos grew
lengthier and more elaborate. Other characters began to appear more regularly, too, like her grandmother, whom Li dotes on with saccharine flial piety, as well as a few other friends from the village. Sometimes, at the end of the videos, they all feast together on Li's food in the garden-a vision of a happy ending.
刘同明还建议李子柒组建一个制作团队。在2017年5月的一条微博中，李子柒估算自己在一年内为了捕捉完美的镜头，来回在相机和拍摄场景之间走了超过一百六十英里。那一年，她聘请了一名摄像师和一名助手，她的网店营业额达到了数百万。到了第二年，李子柒在YouTube上的粉丝数已经超过了七百万。她的视频变得更加长和精致，其他人物也开始更频繁地出现在视频中，比如她对奶奶的甜蜜孝心，以及村里的一些朋友。有时，在视频的最后，他们会一起在花园里享用李子柒制作的食物，呈现出一个幸福的结局。
The international scope of Li’s success prompted a debate on Chinese social media: was she an apt cultural ambassador? One prominent cultural critic compared Li's influence to that of the Confucius Institute, a state-backed organization that disperses Chinese culture abroad. The implication was that her channel was just as effective in spreading good vibes about Chinese culture as this multibillion-dollar cultural- diplomacy operation. Others were less enthused. One common criticism was that Li glossed over the relative poverty and hardship of rural life. Another suggested that she was framing China as some backward society, stuck in its agrarian past, when it should be projecting its technological prowess and cosmopolitan verve. This debate grew so lively that in early December, 2019,“Li Ziqi” became a trending term on Weibo.
李子柒在国际上的成功引发了中国社交媒体上的一场讨论：她是否是一个合适的文化使者？一位著名的文化评论家将李子柒的影响力与孔子学院相提并论，孔子学院是一个由国家支持的组织，致力于在海外传播中国文化。这意味着她的频道在传播中国文化的积极形象方面，与这个数十亿美元的文化外交行动同样有效。然而，也有人持不同意见。一个常见的批评是，李子柒忽略了农村生活的贫困和艰辛。还有人指出，她将中国描绘成一个落后的农业社会，而中国应该展示其技术实力和国际化的活力。这场讨论变得如此激烈，以至于在2019年12月初，“李子柒”成为了微博的热门话题。
Before too long, state media outlets were weighing in, too, decidedly in Li's favor. “Without a word commending China, Li promotes Chinese culture in a good way,” a piece of commentary published on CCTV News’Weibo page read in mid-December.
不久之后，官方媒体也开始表态，明确支持李子柒。“不发一言赞美中国，李子柒以美好的方式推广中国文化，”2019年12月中旬，央视新闻的微博页面上发表的一篇评论文章中这样写道。
Had she? When I spoke to Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and an expert in Chinese social media, he said that this is unlikely. “As far as I know, it is all organic,"he said. “Her motivation has always been commercial. Any sort of soft-power dividends that China has got off the back of it has been a second-order effect.”
她真的那样做了吗？当我与弗格斯·瑞安交谈时，他是澳大利亚战略政策研究所的高级分析师，也是中国社交媒体领域的专家。他表示这种情况不太可能发生。“据我所知，这一切都是自然而然发生的，”他说。“她的动机始终是出于商业考虑。中国因此获得的软实力好处，只是次要的效果。”
Almost all of the biographical information about Li Ziqi comes from her own social-media posts or from state- affiliated media. There is one exception: Li's profile in Hemispheres, from December, 2019, for which she granted an in-person interview. I reached out to the writer, Ellen Freeman, who told me that meeting Li was a dreamlike experience. Freeman took a train from Chengdu to the second-largest city in Sichuan, where she was picked up in a van and driven for hours into the countryside, until she arrived at an expanse of blooming lotuses. Li was waiting there on a wooden pagoda with a picnic of fresh fruits and vegetables. She appeared, to Freeman, exactly as in her videos: beautiful, calm, officious. She spoke candidly of her childhood with her grandparents, those years of hardship in the city. The only point of friction came when Freeman brought up accusations, which routinely spread online, that Li could not possibly do everything she claimed to in her videos all alone. “She kind of bristled,”Freeman said. “There was an edge to her voice when she told me that she did it all herself."Then, as if to prove her bona fides, Li took a palm leaf and effortlessly wove it into a basket, and packed the leftover food for Freeman to take home with her, as a parting gift. “It was very much like being in the presence of a fairy, and I was totally swept up in her magic," Freeman told me.
关于李子柒的几乎所有生平信息，要么来自她自己的社交媒体帖子，要么是来自与官方媒体相关的报道。有一个例外：2019年12月，《Hemispheres》杂志刊登了一篇关于李子柒的个人资料，为此她接受了一次面对面的采访。我联系到了采访她的作者艾伦·弗里曼，她说见到李子柒就像是一场梦境。弗里曼从成都坐火车前往四川的第二大城市，然后被一辆面包车接走，经过数小时的车程到达了一片盛开的莲花地。李子柒就在那里的一座木亭子里等着她，旁边摆放着新鲜的水果和蔬菜作为野餐。在弗里曼眼中，李子柒和她在视频中的形象完全一致：美丽、宁静、有条不紊。她坦率地讲述了和祖父母一起度过的童年以及在城市中经历的艰难岁月。唯一的紧张时刻是在弗里曼提起网上常见的质疑，即李子柒不可能独自完成视频中所有的工作。“她有点生气，”弗里曼说，“当她告诉我一切都是她自己完成的时候，她的声音里带着一丝锐气。”然后，仿佛为了证明自己的能力，李子柒拿起一片棕榈叶，轻松地编织成一个篮子，并把剩下的食物装进去，作为离别礼物送给弗里曼。“那种感觉就像是遇到了一个仙女，我完全被她的魔力所吸引，”弗里曼告诉我。
During the lockdowns, when the need for escape was visceral, some simulated self-sufficiency by putting scallion trimmings in water. Others baked sourdough. Some even fed the city to embrace the cottage-core life(and post about it on Instagram). I binged on Li Ziqi.
在封锁期间，当人们对逃避现实的需求变得强烈时，有些人通过把葱头泡在水里来模拟自给自足的生活。其他人则开始烘焙酸面团面包。还有一些人甚至开始追求乡村生活风格（并在Instagram上分享）。而我，则沉迷于李子柒的视频。
I first came across her videos on my Instagram. It was early 2021, and I was scrolling my way through one of Melbourne's interminably long lockdowns, watching reel after reel of cats cozying up with babies, comical skiing accidents, competitive eating-content that satisfied some base impulse that the algorithm dredged up. Amid all of this, I noticed a video of a Chinese woman with perfectly braided hair calmly picking red chilies and herbs in her garden, and then using the ingredients to make mouthwatering spicy beef jerky. I clicked on a link to Li's YouTube channel, and then proceeded to watch almost every one.
我是在2021年初的Instagram上第一次看到她的视频，那时我正在墨尔本漫长的封锁期间，漫无目的地滚动浏览着，看了一遍又一遍的猫咪和婴儿的温馨画面、滑稽的滑雪事故、竞争激烈的大胃王比赛——这些内容满足了算法挖掘出的某种基本冲动。在这些视频中，我注意到一个中国女性，她有着完美的辫子发型，平静地在花园里采摘红辣椒和香草，然后用这些食材制作令人垂涎的辣牛肉干。我点击了一个链接，跳转到李子柒的YouTube频道，然后几乎看完了她的所有视频。
Around the same time that I started my journey down this YouTube spiral, Li was officially confrmed by Guinness World Records as having the most subscribers for a Chinese-language channel on YouTube--a total of14.1 million. That February, Li was also named Person of the Year at Weibo Night, a kind of Oscars for Chinese Internet celebrities. She wore a modest mint-green dress and told the media that she was thinking about her
grandmother and her vegetables, which had just sprouted, and needed tending.
就在我沉迷于她的YouTube视频的同时，李子柒被吉尼斯世界纪录官方确认为YouTube上订阅者最多的中文频道——总共有1410万订阅者。那年二月，李子柒还被评为微博之夜的年度人物，这相当于是中国互联网名人的奥斯卡奖。她穿着一件朴素的薄荷绿裙子，告诉媒体她正在想念她的祖母和刚刚发芽的蔬菜，这些蔬菜需要她去照料。
Li had ostensibly achieved the impossible, capturing the hearts of a Chinese and a global audience while remaining simpatico with the authority and true to herself. Then, in July of that year, at the height of her influence, Li posted a video titled“Firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea.”In it, she travels to a neighboring village where she helps a man derive salt from salinated well water. This was typical of her recent videos, which had become more didactic--showing urban people how the things they consumed each day were made and where they came from. It was also her last.
李子柒似乎完成了一项看似不可能的任务：她不仅赢得了中国乃至全球观众的喜爱，还与官方保持着和谐的关系，并且忠于自我。然而，就在那一年的7月，当她的影响力达到顶峰时，她发布了一个名为“柴米油盐酱醋茶”的视频。视频中，她前往邻近的村庄，帮助一位村民从盐水井中提取盐分。这与她近期的视频风格相符，这些视频越来越具有教育意义——向城市居民展示他们日常消费的物品是如何制作和来源的。这也是她发布的最后一个视频。
Toward the end of August, with no content uploaded for more than a month, Li Ziqi fans began to complain. Her personal assistant took to Weibo to say that Li needed some time to pay attention to“many real-world
problems.”A few days later, Li posted a photo of herself filing a report at a police station, along with a comment:“Have asked lawyers to keep a record, this is so scary! Capital indeed has its good tricks!”(“Capital”is often
used as a shorthand in China for big business.)
到了8月底，李子柒已经一个多月没有上传新内容，她的粉丝开始表达不满。她的个人助理随后在微博上表示，李子柒需要一些时间来处理“许多现实世界的问题”。几天后，李子柒发布了一张自己在警察局报案的照片，并附上评论：“已经请律师记录，这太可怕了！zi本果然有它的手段！”（在中国，“zi本”经常被用作大企业的代称）。
It was all very vague and out of character, and some of her fans began to speculate that she had somehow run afoul of the authority. Eventually, details began to trickle out through Chinese media. When Li signed with
Weinian back in 2017, they created a joint venture called Sichuan Li Ziqi Culture Communication, of which Weinian owned a majority fifty-one-per-cent stake. Initially, Li seemed happy for the agency to control the commercial side of things while she retained creative control of the content. But now business was overwhelming her original vision. In October, 2021, Li hinted at her discomfort with the hyper-commercialization of her brand in an extensive interview on CCTV. It’s a double-edged sword, she implies. She saw her brand identity foremost as a “new-style farmer” in a socialist country. She wanted to teach Chinese youth about where their food came from, and yet her signature instant snail rice noodles were so popular that the brand announced plans to build its own factories to produce them.
这一切都显得非常含糊，不符合她一贯的风格，因此一些粉丝开始猜测她可能在某些方面触nu了官方。随后，一些细节开始通过中国媒体逐渐浮出水面。2017年，李子柒与微念签约时，双方共同创建了四川子柒文化传播有限公司，微念持有51%的控股权。最初，李子柒似乎很满意让微念来管理商业事务，而她自己则保留对内容的创意控制权。但现在，商业化的压力开始超越了她最初的愿景。2021年10月，李子柒在央视的一次深度采访中暗示了她对品牌过度商业化的不适。她暗示这是一个双刃剑。她将自己定位为社会主义国家中的“新式农民”。她希望教育中国的年轻人了解食物的来源，然而她的标志性产品——即食螺蛳粉——非常受欢迎，以至于品牌宣布计划建立自己的工厂来生产这些产品。
That month, per news reports, Li sued Weinian to regain control of her trademark. It was clever timing. I had recently made several public speeches in which he was directly critical of the country's überwealthy, many of whom made their money through Internet technology.“She came out and gave these interviews where she used all the right buzzwords--common prosperity, cultural heritage, the corrupting influence of big tech,"Ryan said.“It was really savvy. It gave her political cover, which would have helped her in her fight with her agents.”
据报道，那个月份李子柒起诉了微念公司，意图夺回对自己商标的控制权。这个时机选择得很巧妙。最近，她在几次公开演讲中直接批评了国内的超级富豪，这些富豪很多是通过互联网技术积累了财富。“她站出来接受采访，使用了所有正确的流行词汇——共同富裕、文化遗产、大型科技的fu蚀性影响，”瑞安说。“这真的很精明。这给了她zz上的掩护，这在她与代理商的斗争中对她是有帮助的。”
But Weinian still sued her in turn, and then throughout2021 and 2022 the two parties countersued each other a total of five times, until finally they reached a settlement under mediation. Li's shareholding in Sichuan Ziqi Culture Communication increased to ninety-nine per cent. That was in December of last year. Li still has not posted.
但微念公司也反过来起诉了她，然后在2021年和2022年，双方总共互相起诉了五次，直到最终在调解下达成和解。李子柒在四川子柒文化传播有限公司的持股比例增加到了99%。那是去年12月份的事情。从那以后，李子柒还没有发布新的内容。
If she did, she would now be competing with the many Li Ziqi facsimiles who have popped up in her absence. Most are harmless ripoffs-young women trying to cash in on the Zeitgeist. Others, like Guli Abdushukur, a young wwe woman who posts videos to YouTube about her idyllic life in xj are far more contrived. According to a study published last year, co-authored by Ryan, of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Abdushukur is one of many so-called frontier influencers who have received at least tacit support from the authority for depicting lives that hew closely to government narratives about the troubled
regions of xj, xz, and nmg.
如果她现在发布新内容，她将不得不与许多在她缺席期间涌现的模仿者竞争。大多数模仿者是无害的——年轻女性试图利用时代精神来赚钱。而其他人，比如古丽阿卜杜舒库尔，一个在YouTube上发布关于她在zj田园生活的年轻wwe女性——则更加刻意。根据去年发表的一项研究，由澳大利亚战略政策研究所的瑞安共同撰写，阿卜杜舒库尔是许多所谓的边jiang影响者之一，他们至少得到了中国官方的默许支持，因为他们描绘的生活与zz关于zj、xz和nmg这些多事之秋地区的叙述非常接近。
There is something distinctly spammy and crass about the so-called frontier infuencers. Indeed, many of these accounts pop up, pump out videos with a political agenda, and then shutter shortly after, having served their function. Li's videos, by comparison, hold up as objets d'art. As far as life-style vlogging goes, they are masterpieces of the form.
所谓的边jiang影响者带有一种过于无意义和粗糙的特点。实际上，许多这样的账户突然出现，发布了一些带有zz意图的视频，然后很快消失，完成了它们的任务。相比之下，李子柒的视频则像是精心制作的艺术品。在生活方式视频博客领域，它们是该类型的杰作。
There is one that I like to rewatch where Li prepares taro rice, a dish that her grandfather taught her how to make. In one shot, around two minutes in, she stokes the fire underneath a large cast-iron wok. Every detail in the shot feels perfectly in its place: a bunch of celery and a squash in the wicker basket, red onions on the windowsill. A terrier watches Li attentively, as light streams in from a window, casting shadows on her face. The scene is at once obviously staged and entirely natural, evoking Vermeer's “Milkmaid.”
我特别喜欢重温李子柒制作芋头饭的那个视频，这是她祖父教她做的一道菜。在大约两分钟的镜头中，她正在一个大铁锅下添柴生火。镜头中的每一个细节都恰到好处：柳条篮里放着芹菜和南瓜，窗台上摆着红洋葱。一只小猎犬专注地注视着李子柒，光线从窗户洒进来，在她脸上投下阴影。这个场景显然是经过精心设计的，却又显得非常自然，让人想起维米尔的《倒牛奶的女佣》。
Pastoral art and poetry have always relied on concealing the rough realities and ever-present sufferings of rural life to transform the quotidian into a sublime ideal. Li is part of this tradition. Her videos are not portals into her real life in the Sichuanese hills. Instead, they are-like so much portraiture, particularly self-portraiture- fastidiously manufactured fantasies. “The life-style depicted in the videos is also the life-style I'm longing for,” Li told Freeman in the Hemispheres interview.
田园艺术和诗歌总是依赖于掩饰农村生活的艰辛现实和无处不在的苦难，将日常琐事转化为崇高的理想。李子柒正是这一传统的继承者。她的视频并不是她四川山区真实生活的直接反映。相反，它们更像是许多肖像画，尤其是自画像——精心构建的幻想。“视频中所描绘的生活方式也是我所向往的，”李子柒在《Hemispheres》杂志的采访中对弗里曼说。
It's pleasant to imagine that Li is now free to till the fields, harvest her vegetables, and share some rice wine with her grandmother. I like to think that she has disappeared into her carefully constructed world like Wu Daozi, a Chinese artist fabled to have painted a mural so lifelike that one day he walked right into it, never to return. But, of course, this is just a myth.
想象一下，李子柒现在可以自在地耕作田地，采摘蔬菜，与她的祖母一起品尝米酒，这是多么惬意的画面。我乐于想象她已经隐入她精心打造的世界，就像传说中的中国画家吴道子一样，他画的壁画如此逼真，以至于有一天他走进了自己的画中，再也没有回来。但当然了，这只是一个传说。
