Why are rural social media stars so popular?

Shortly before I moved to China in early 2020, a friend sent me a link to an Instagram video account and told me that I absolutely had to have a look.

"They're more like mini-movies," he raved, "daily life in some small Chinese village somewhere. I watch them all the time."

Later that day, I followed his suggestion and was hooked. Though longer than most short videos, the clips were exquisitely produced. Their star, the winsome Li Ziqi, who currently has 16.4 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, might have been doing the chopping, hewing, sewing, boiling, baking, growing and dyeing all by herself (though you did sometimes wonder), but it was evident they were shot by a team of skilled videographers. Interestingly, although the sophistication of the clips was at odds with the simplicity Li sought to convey, this did not detract from the pleasure of watching them.

I wouldn't say that I developed an interest in videos of rural life－I love the countryside, but I'm very much an urban boy－but gradually, I came across more. There were Fan Deduo and Peng Xiaoying, the young couple from Zhejiang province and their heartwarming interpretations of the shuffle dance (which I thought had died in the '80s) shot on their farm; Tenzin, the Tibetan Horse Prince and his videos of pony racing up on the Qinghai Plateau and more recently, Fellow Zhang, a 30-something from Liaoning province, who has racked up millions of likes for his seemingly unsophisticated smartphone videos of village life, which nevertheless betray a professionalism in their shooting and editing. And these are just the most famous examples.

Loving depictions of rural life is not limited to China. It's a hot trend on social media worldwide. In the United Kingdom for example, Instagrammers like the Red Shepherdess, a former townie-turned-sheep farmer in Cumbria, and Ben Andrews, an organic farmer from Herefordshire, are surprisingly popular given that their fairly specialized videos are about lifestyles few of their followers will have experienced.

I was intrigued. Was their popularity, as people.cn suggested about Fellow Zhang, derived from its therapeutic effect on stressed urbanites seeking distraction from hectic modern life－in effect, the visual equivalent of autonomous sensory meridian response, better known as ASMR, or those 9-hour soundtracks of rain falling in bamboo forests which can now be found all over YouTube?

That made some sense. I arrived in China on the first day quarantine became mandatory, so spending half an hour immersed in Li Ziqi's meditative videos each day made my hotel room feel much less confined.

So was this simple escapism? Or was there something deeper? After all, these accounts, at least in China, have millions of followers. I wondered if like hanfu, it could be a contemporary manifestation of fugu, the Confucian ideal of the "return to old ways", although that wouldn't explain the trend's popularity abroad. Or could it be a more acceptable version of tangping－the controversial trend of choosing to do nothing among Chinese youth－a 2020 take on the "stop the world, I want to get off" sentiment emblazoned on so many T-shirts in the 1970s? The more I thought on it, there more explanations I found.

In the end, the current fascination with all things rural may well prove passing. In which case, this is just another social media fad. But perhaps it won't, in which case, it might be as much about rising global concerns over modern farming, where our food comes from and how it is produced. If so, the genre's popularity might be as much about environmental awareness, as it is about vicariously experiencing "simplicity" at the end of another stressful day.