Concerns over high cost of living, cramped living spaces, and poor air quality have renewed interest in rural life—and smartphone-wielding farmers are riding the wave.
It’s 9 pm in Beijing, and fitness blogger Liu Shaodong is glued to his phone in his cramped 200-square-foot studio apartment.
He’s watching a live feed of a farmer hawk cured beef in Heilongjiang Province, over 800 miles away. With one click, Liu adds 200 grams of salted topside to his shopping cart. Seconds later, the farmer is weighing the order right before Liu’s eyes.
The fitness blogger is not alone. Thousands of others are also tuned into the stream on Taobao Live, a Chinese app that combines live-streaming with online shopping. Feeds like these, where farmers can sell their produce in real time to China’s 800 million urbanites, are a big business.
Between March and May last year, more than 100,000 farmers sold goods on Taobao Live, according to Agricultural Industry Watch, a consulting firm focused on Chinese agriculture. Collectively, they’ve made over $350 million in sales.
(Read more: How live-streaming has helped lift farmers out of poverty)
Their popularity is especially high in China’s big cities, where many residents have grown wary of the hustle and bustle of urban life.
China has urbanized at a breakneck pace in the past few decades. In 1980, just 20% of the population lived in cities. Now, that figure is 80%, according to UN data.
Concerns over high cost of living, cramped living spaces, poor air quality, and long work hours have given rise to a new phrase: chengshibing 城市病, literally “city disease.”
Many people flocked to China’s gleaming metropolises, lured by the promise of better opportunities and upward mobility. But in recent years, this mad dash has slowed, as the harsh realities of urban life have begun to wear away at big-city dreams.
In 2017, the average cost of a flat in Shanghai was about 50 times the median local salary. By comparison, the same figure in New York at the time was 32. In white-collar industries, business leaders have lionized a “996” work schedule, where employees work 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.
(Read more: These photos show how much China’s cities have changed in the past decade)
Concerns over high cost of living, cramped living spaces, poor air quality, and long work hours have given rise to a new phrase: chengshibing 城市病, literally “city disease.”
“When you’ve been living in the city for too long, you crave an alternative, countryside lifestyle” says Liu.
Curing ‘city disease’
For many disenchanted urbanites, the antidote to “city disease” is living vicariously through the live streams of farmers, who often film themselves doing chores in shabby fields and farmyards.
In one video, the host is seen selecting, weighing, and tagging live chickens in a scrappy barn. Later, we see the freshly-plucked and slaughtered products before they are sent to their new buyers.
Viewers of these feeds tend to skew young, predominantly between the ages of 25 and 40, according to Luo Zhenglin, a professor at Nanjing University’s News and Media College.
A majority of them likely grew up in the countryside themselves and feel an attachment to their hometowns. The success of these streams lies in their ability to satisfy city folk’s homesick yearnings and their need for authentic new experiences.
Rural live-streaming also vastly reduces the gap between farmers and their urban customers, showing viewers where their produce comes from and challenging the notion of country life as inherently “backward.”
Countryside dreaming
In recent years, demand for rural content has also given rise to a crop of lifestyle vloggers who present a more sterilized version of countryside life.
Unlike their cruder live-streaming counterparts, these vloggers pay special attention to capturing the beauty of their natural surroundings and the apparent simplicity of rural life. Videos might show time lapses of hosts fishing by babbling brooks before bringing home fresh catches to cook for their amiable grandparents.
Two of the most popular lifestyle vloggers, Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge, have capitalized on countryside nostalgia by selling food products promising authentic local flavors.
Their fan base is not limited to China. Li, for example, has over 25 million followers on the Chinese social media site Weibo and another 11 million on YouTube. Her videos, like many in the genre, depict an ethereal, saturated image of her idyllic rural life in Sichuan Province.
(Read more: Behind the scenes with Li Ziqi, the mysterious Chinese internet celebrity with 58 million fans)
In one video, she plants cotton seeds in order to stitch herself a padded cotton jacket. In another, she harvests honeycomb and ginseng from the verdant mountains beside her rustic homestead to make Chinese herbal honey.
The videos have highlighted the splendor of China’s rural stretches—and the ingenuity of those who live there—for viewers both domestically and abroad. But they’ve also drawn criticism from viewers who find her bucolic depiction of rural life too soft, idyllic, and unrealistic.
One critic even went as far making his own video take-down, dismantling Li’s depiction of rural life piece by piece.
He complains that the well from which Li is often seen drawing water would hold a muddy, turgid slime, not the crystal-clear liquid seen in Li’s videos. Her apparent ability to labor without breaking a sweat has also raised eyebrows.
“The real countryside,” he says in the video, “is a synonym for poverty and backwardness… I urge those looking for the pastoral life not to be fooled by these kinds of videos.”
“Life in the country isn’t that picturesque, but it satisfies city-dweller’s romanticized fantasies.”
These inconsistencies are not lost on urbanites either. As Zhang Manli, a software engineer from Guangzhou, bemoans: “Life in the country isn’t that picturesque, but it satisfies city-dweller’s romanticized fantasies.”
Their concerns are not unfounded. The highly-saturated, filtered depictions of country living often bely a life of hard labor.
In an interview with Goldthread, Li admitted that her upbringing was far from idyllic, explaining how she moved in with her impoverished grandparents to escape an abusive stepmother, before leaving the countryside altogether in pursuit of an easier life in cities at the age of just 14.
And despite urban pining, this pattern is not unfamiliar to many in China, where rural incomes, already significantly lagging behind their urban counterparts, have declined steeply since 2014. By May this year, average urban incomes were at least 2.5 times higher than rural ones.
Reimagining rural life
While some of the scenes depicted in channels like Li’s may be improbable, they do bring long-due attention to the indisputable beauty of China’s hinterland. The live-streaming farmers, in turn, further hone the focus on rural life.
As Rudy Xu, an agent for live-streaming farmers, explains, by filming their produce from farm to shipment, streamers are able to demonstrate the provenance of their wares and “increase trust” between city and farm.
For many, the new wave of interest in rural life is a chance to reinvent what it means to live in the countryside, which has traditionally been scorned as backward and impoverished.
And despite some urban netizens’ concerns about the authenticity of the higher-end vlogs, for those in the country, urban interest in the countryside—be it in the bucolic scenes depicted by Li Ziqi, or in freshly salted beef from Heilongjiang—presents a golden opportunity.
“Before, people only focused on what CCTV depicted of rural life, and so ignored our local area,” says Lan Hai, a journalist from Haifeng County, one of Guangdong Province’s poorest regions, “but now, we can promote videos through so many different channels, we’ll be sure to attract lots of new fans.”
“If the weather is good this Sunday, we’ll go to one of the local towns to scout out some locations.”
