China’s viral idol: Papi Jiang, a girl next door with attitude
JIANG Yilei is the girl who rants about dieting and parents nagging her about her cluttered apartment. 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 44 million followers, across multiple platforms, with her fast-talking satirical videos.
Even though there is probably some overlap among platforms, that figure outstrips the followings of such popular YouTube celebrities as Ryan Higa (17.8 million) and Jenna Marbles (16.4 million).
Last month, 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.
True, most things in China are on a bigger scale than they are elsewhere. But even by Chinese standards, Jiang, 29, stands out, so much so that Chinese media outlets have taken to calling her the number one online celebrity.
“Papi Jiang is by far the most popular online celebrity,” said Kunkun Yu, CEO of the Beijing-based online community app Linglong. “Many young Chinese people see her as their idol.”
Jiang’s meteoric rise reflects the fastchanging 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 per cent of the country’s 710 million internet users now coming to the web via their phones, according to a report published by the official China Internet Network Information Center. They are using the internet to shop, chat with friends and seek information and entertainment on apps like Weibo, a microblog platform, and Weixin, the messaging app also known as WeChat.
This has led to the growth of what Chinese have taken to calling zimeiti, literally “self-media”, an umbrella term for self-posted content on social media.
Yang Ming, Jiang’s business partner and a former classmate at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, said in an interview, “We saw that self-media was getting pretty big, so we thought, ‘Should we try to do something with this?’” ( Jiang, who rarely speaks to the news media, declined to be interviewed.)
As recently as mid-2015, Yang said, not many people were making short videos in China, whereas in the United States, YouTube celebrities have been common for years. “They weren’t even being called short videos at the time,” he said. “They were just videos.”
Jiang, who had returned to graduate school at the Central Academy of Drama after working in entertainment for several years, including as a stage actor and assistant director, 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 in 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, scared to death,” she said in a June 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 Jiang offers a fresh, urban perspective rarely seen in Chinese comedy.
“Before, you had popular stand-up comedians like Zhao Benshan, but it was often a very rural type of humour, with jokes about things like plowing fields and eating leeks,” said Yu, the online community app executive.
She added: “Papi’s appeal, on the other hand, 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.”
As Jiang’s popularity skyrocketed, internet companies and investors began to notice. In recent years, since the government began cracking down on pirated content and, especially since 2012, imported content, companies have been thirsty for high-quality original material made locally.
Against that background, Jiang’s appeal as someone who writes, shoots and edits her own videos is clear.
In March, she became one of the first viral Chinese stars to attract venture capital, when a group made up of four major institutional investors announced that it was putting $1.8 million into her company.
“In its current form, the market has only seen a succession of short-lived online celebrities,” one of those investors, Luo Zhenyu, founder and host of a popular online talk show, told the Chinese online publication the Paper. “We’re looking at a person who has unlimited potential to transform this market and bring a whole new business logic.”