Simple life is recipe of success for online couple

CHENGDU — Sitting in front of a wooden table laden with steaming freshly-cooked dishes, with ingredients just picked from their vegetable plot, Xu Yan and her husband, Zhou Xiaolong, savor the delicacies and chat casually in front of a camera.

Also captured in the background are flowers swaying in the air, and their pet dog chasing chickens in the yard.

Hours later, they edited the clips and clicked the “upload” button on the video-sharing platform Xigua, wondering what replies and how many “likes” they would receive from their 3 million followers.

The scenes have made up the everyday life of Xu and Zhou, two vloggers, over the past two years.

The videos usually center on their daily life in Baihua township in the city of Yibin, Southwest China’s Sichuan province.

Xu, 28, depended on her grandmother for survival since her childhood and left home to make a living in her teens. Over the years, Xu worked in factories, sold clothes, barbecued and worked as a hairdresser.

In 2017, Xu, who sold seafood in Qingdao, a port city in East China’s Shandong province, met Zhou on the internet, who was then a customer service staff. Sharing similar experiences, the two began to chat daily.

“Zhou has been dreaming to start up his own business with years of experience in e-commerce and become a vlogger focusing on rural life and people,” Xu recalls, saying that back then, she was not familiar with the concept of video blogger and unwilling to go back to the countryside.

Her will for a settled life, however, drove her to follow Zhou to his hometown of Baihua.

In 2018, they renovated an old house left by Zhou’s late father, hoed a field and started to learn to make short videos.

They found it financially difficult to support themselves two months later, so they went to the city of Neijiang to make some money working in an e-commerce company to back up their career as vloggers.

As their fans increased, they realized that countryside videos got more comments and views than those shot in the city. Their followers also left messages hoping that they could shoot more countryside videos.

The couple decided to go back to Baihua.

After quarrels and reflections, they agreed that video recording was not merely a task. Only when they lived a happy life could their audiences enjoy their videos.

They recorded the countryside life as it is. Also, Xu stopped speaking Mandarin and began speaking the Sichuan dialect, her native dialect, in front of the camera. Things started to turn around. They won some 3 million followers on Xigua within two years. Their followers live “virtually” with the couple by watching two videos they upload each day, coming along with them to dig wild vegetables or fetch mountain spring water and interacting with them in the comment section on the video platform.

Xu and Zhou got married last year. They shared their happiness by sending wedding sweets to some fans across China.

Instead of depending on making short videos as their mainstay, they plan to break new ground this year.

The couple, together with a partner, will jointly run a food processing factory near their house to process local specialties, including honey, sausage and preserved meat into standardized products and plan to sell these products via e-commerce platforms, thus helping more of their townsfolk prosper.

China’s rural vitalization strategy is helping revamp the countryside.

The strategy aims to achieve the basic modernization of agriculture and rural areas by 2035, and the grand goal of a strong agricultural industry, beautiful countryside and well-off farmers by 2050.

Under such circumstances, the rural areas in China are rapidly transforming, with agriculture developing fast, rural tourism booming and migrant workers returning home from coastal areas to make a living.

Nowadays, an increasing number of farmers in China are choosing short video recording as their new career, as they embrace greater convenience with broader network coverage and upgraded infrastructure.

As of March, the size of internet users in China’s rural areas had reached 255 million or 28.2 percent of the total netizen population, up 33.08 million from the end of 2018, according to the latest report released by China Internet Network Information Center in April.

“The cost of starting a business in rural areas is low, and the business environment has become much better, but there is a shortage of talent,” Zhou says.

“Now if there are good opportunities, young people would be willing to come back, just like us.”