The Myth of the Perfect Countryside: Liziqi, Rural Life, and the Reality Behind the Aesthetic

Liziqi’s pastoral dream enchants millions, but the realities of rural China tell a far grittier story.

There is a stillness to the first moments of a Liziqi (李子柒) video. The frame is flooded with soft, mist-wrapped mountains, ancient stone courtyards, and the practised grace of a young woman in flowing robes plucking persimmons from a laden tree. She moves like a figure from an ink-brushed scroll, weaving poetry from every day: kneading dough, carving wood, dyeing cloth with the deep indigo of homegrown plants. It is an intoxicating vision, a dreamscape of agrarian China, unspoiled by modernity, untouched by hardship.

Liziqi, whose real name is Li Jiajia (李佳佳), was born in Sichuan province and rose to fame through meticulously crafted videos that depict an idyllic, self-sufficient rural existence. Her YouTube channel has amassed over 17 million subscribers, and she enjoys an even larger following on Chinese platforms like Weibo and Bilibili. She rarely speaks in her videos, allowing nature’s visuals and ambient sounds—crackling fires, the rustle of silk, the rhythmic pounding of dough—to immerse viewers in her tranquil world. Her work has been widely praised for showcasing traditional Chinese craftsmanship, food culture, and agricultural practices, yet it has also sparked controversy.

Some of her videos border on the fantastical, elevating rural labour into an almost fairytale-like aesthetic. In one episode, she constructs an elaborate dressing room large enough to store seemingly hundreds of outfits, apparently assembling it from scratch (we see her using a screwdriver at some point). In another, she transforms a pile of grapes into an extravagant feast complete with handmade wine and delicate sweets, as though rural life is an endless series of artistic projects rather than a daily struggle to make ends meet. In yet another, she crafts an entire bamboo furniture set by hand, seamlessly transitioning from cutting raw stalks in a misty forest to assembling a flawless, polished living space without a hint of sweat or struggle. These cinematic portrayals create an illusion of a countryside untouched by economic hardship, migration issues, or government policies affecting rural communities.

The internet has devoured Liziqi’s world. She has become a rural icon for a generation alienated from the land, her videos offering an aesthetic salve, a balm for the digitally overwhelmed. She represents a longing—particularly among urban Chinese—for a reconnection with a mythical, pastoral past. It is a potent fantasy. But, like all fantasies, it tells only part of the story.

The Theatre of the Agrarian Dream

Liziqi’s rural universe is a curated masterpiece. Every sweeping drone shot and perfectly plated meal is the product of meticulous editing. The realities of rural life—its fatigue, uncertainty, and economic struggles—are notably absent. The labour behind the scenes, whether from family or production crews, is hidden. What remains is a distilled, cinematic version of agrarian China, far removed from the harshness of farming in the 21st century.

This romanticised vision of rural life is not merely a product of online aesthetics; it aligns with a broader state narrative. The Chinese government has actively promoted the revitalisation of the countryside through initiatives like the 乡村振兴战略 (Rural Revitalization Strategy), launched in 2017, which seeks to modernise agriculture, improve rural infrastructure and encourage young people to return to their ancestral villages. The slogan 绿水青山就是金山银山 (“Green mountains and clear waters are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver”), popularised by Xi Jinping, underpins policies that frame rural China as both a cultural heritage site and an economic asset.

State media and local governments have embraced influencers like Liziqi as symbols of a thriving, picturesque countryside, using them to bolster the image of a harmonious rural revival. This vision, however, is carefully manicured. While some villages have seen investment in agritourism and rural entrepreneurship, many remain impoverished, with young people continuing to leave for urban jobs despite government incentives. The countryside, for many, is not an Instagram-worthy sanctuary but a place of economic precarity and social stagnation.

Life is not a sequence of misty mornings and handwoven baskets for rural Chinese communities. Villages across the country have faced decades of depopulation as young people abandon farming for factory work in coastal cities. Those who remain contend with ageing populations, collapsing infrastructures, and the often fickle rewards of small-scale agriculture. Land disputes, environmental degradation, and economic hardship are daily realities. The countryside is neither an unbroken idyll nor a place of picturesque solitude—it is, simply, home to millions who work, adapt, and survive.

The Rural Reality: Unseen and Unromantic

Travel deep into Sichuan’s mountains or wander the backroads of Guizhou, and you will find another rural China—one that exists beyond the YouTube frame. Here, farmers rise before dawn to tend rice paddies that yield shrinking profits. Elders sit in the doorways of emptying villages, watching as the last of their grandchildren depart for distant cities. Many rural families are caught in the limbo of China’s breakneck urbanisation, neither thoroughly modern nor traditionally agrarian, navigating a new and uneasy in-between.

China’s rural population has steadily declined over the decades. In 1978, over 80% of the country’s population lived in rural areas; today, that number has fallen to around 36%. Urban migration continues despite government attempts to stem the tide, with tens of millions of rural residents moving to cities for better wages, education, and healthcare. This depopulation has left behind a “hollow village” phenomenon (空心村), where only the elderly and very young remain, relying on remittances from relatives working in distant urban centres.

Ageing is one of the most significant challenges facing rural China. By 2022, over 23% of rural residents were aged 60 or older, compared to just 16% in urban areas. The elderly left behind often struggle with access to medical care, social services, and financial support. Meanwhile, younger generations, raised with city aspirations, see little appeal in the physically demanding, low-margin life of small-scale farming.

The economic disparity between rural and urban China is stark. Despite years of targeted poverty alleviation programs, the average rural household income remains less than 40% of urban household income. Smallholder farmers face unstable crop prices, unpredictable weather patterns, and competition from industrial-scale agribusiness. Unlike the whimsical, self-sufficient paradise depicted in Liziqi’s videos, real rural China is deeply entwined with global supply chains and economic pressures.

Yet, despite the hardships, rural China endures. Families continue planting and harvesting, cooking and preserving, celebrating and mourning. Their lives are not a performance but a constant negotiation with time, economy, and environment. It is this endurance—not the manicured fantasy of an internet phenomenon—that tells the real story of China’s countryside.

Between Myth and Modernity

Li Ziqi’s videos are not deceitful, but they are a performance—a careful composition where nostalgia is amplified and hardship fades into the background. They strike a chord with an audience disillusioned by the churn of modern life, those who dream of a lost world they never truly knew. For urban Chinese suffocating under factory schedules and tower-block skylines, for Western viewers seeking an untouched ‘elsewhere,’ she offers an alluring escape: a pastoral fantasy, impossibly pure.

Yet, to understand rural China, one must look beyond the artfully arranged baskets of peaches and the impossibly perfect swirls of hand-pulled noodles. The real countryside is not a slow-motion dream sequence; it is raw, relentless, and utterly unsentimental. It is dawn labour and evening exhaustion, mud-caked boots and uncertain harvests. It is not the delicately framed stillness of a YouTube video but the unfiltered rhythm of those who truly live it.

The irony, of course, is that even as Li Ziqi presents an idealised vision of rural life, many of those she represents are desperate to leave it behind. In villages across China, young people are not watching their parents ferment soy sauce by hand—they are scrolling through job listings in Shenzhen, eyes fixed on a future of stability and salaried certainty. The lure of the city, with its fluorescent promise of financial freedom, is stronger than the romance of an agrarian existence that demands unrelenting labour for unpredictable rewards.

The Chinese government, well aware of this mass migration, has poured resources into reviving village economies through e-commerce schemes, rural tourism, and infrastructure projects. Some places have flourished; others remain trapped in a cycle of stagnation, their future uncertain as the fading traditions they are urged to preserve.

Li Ziqi’s videos capture something profoundly human: a yearning for simplicity, rootedness, and a sense of belonging in an accelerating world. But in distilling the countryside into something so exquisitely rarefied, she creates a world that is, paradoxically, almost unrecognisable to those who still call it home.

So, where does this leave rural China? It remains a land of contradictions: breathtaking beauty, economic struggle, cultural pride, and generational change. It is neither a paradise nor a wasteland but something far more complex.

For travellers seeking the ‘real’ countryside, the answer is not in the polished vignettes of YouTube stardom but in the unfiltered experience of rural life—conversations with farmers, the clang of works in smoky kitchens, the quiet resilience of those who stay. The countryside is not a performance, nor is it frozen in time. It is dynamic, complex, and undeniably real.