China’s Viral Sensation, A Girl With Attitude
BEIJING — Jiang Yilei is the girl next door who rants about dieting and nagging parents in the living room of her cluttered apartment here. She has bangs, wears minimal makeup and keeps two cats.
She is also one of China’s most sudden and popular online celebrities, better known as Papi Jiang. In less than a year, her business partners say, she has accumulated about 44 million followers, across multiple platforms, with her fasttalking satirical videos.
In July, Ms. Jiang’s first live broadcast — a rambling, unscripted 90-minute video — was watched more than 74 million times in one day. That was more views than Taylor Swift’s latest music video, “New Romantics,” received on YouTube in four months.
Ms. Jiang, 29, stands out, so much so that Chinese media outlets have taken to calling her the Number 1 online celebrity of 2016.
“Papi Jiang is by far the most popular online celebrity,” said Kunkun Yu, chief executive of the online community app Linglong. “Many young Chinese people see her as their idol.”
Ms. Jiang’s meteoric rise reflects the fast- changing nature of the Chinese internet and, in particular, its insatiable demand for content.
China’s web has become increasingly mobile driven, with more than 92 percent of the country’s 710 million internet users now coming to the web via their mobile phones, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. They are using the internet to seek information and entertainment on apps like Weibo, a microblog platform, and Weixin, the social messaging app also known as WeChat.
Ms. Jiang, who had returned to graduate school at the Central Academy of Drama after working in entertainment, started to experiment, playing with elements that would become part of her signature style: a digitally altered voice, rapid-fire delivery and jump cuts.
Slowly, she began building a following, until one day last November when a video she made, poking fun at Shanghai women and their tendency to drop English words into conversation, went viral.
“I was shocked,” she said in an interview with the Chinese website Sina. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ I couldn’t even eat anything.”
For her audience, made up mostly of 20- to 30-somethings in coastal cities, the Shanghai- born Ms. Jiang offers a fresh, urban perspective rarely seen in China.
The appeal of the videos, Ms. Yu said, “is with the white- collar workers who want to talk about how they’re 39 years old and not married yet, and what should they do.”
In March, Ms. Jiang became one of the first viral Chinese stars to attract venture capital, when investors announced plans to put $1.8 million into her company.
Ms. Jiang has made about 60 videos, focusing on subjects familiar to educated young urbanites, like cheating boyfriends, celebrity culture and regional dialects. In one, she sounds off on how she hates it when people in love constantly talk about their partners. In another, she takes on the issue of gender stereotyping in China.
“Things you have definitely heard at some point,” she announces to the camera. “This job is too tiring. It’s not suited for women.” Jump cut. “Playing basketball? Women are better off at home.” Jump cut. “A male nurse? Ew.”
She signs off in the two-minute video with what has become her catchphrase: “I’m Papi Jiang, a woman possessing both beauty and talent.”