Shenyang, China: 41°44' 55" N, 123°28' 12" E
Dong Yaoxu is 22 years old, looks a hygienic 17, but often feels like a life-weary veteran of gladiatorial warfare. Which is to say, he’s a KOL, or a Key Opinion Leader: an alpha toiler among the legions of Chinese live-streaming celebrities whose online survival balances on the fleeting attention span of the world’s largest click economy.
Filming himself inside his toy-filled apartment in Shenyang, an industrial city in northeast China that has seen better decades, Dong has spent years perfecting a glamorous on-camera avatar of material success, ranging from his meticulous K-pop coiffure down to his blinding white Beatle boots—an influencer persona that helps move the stream of beauty products and accessories that he endorses, for an advertising fee, to his mostly female digital followers. Dong once lured up to five million pairs of eyeballs to his regular fashion broadcasts. Nowadays, his audience has shrunk to just a million. This downsizing, he insists, is all according to plan. He’s had it with KOL stress and burnout. He’s saving his soul. He’s going actual.
“I’m not that ambitious anymore,” sighs Dong, sprawled against the stuffed-animal leopard that presides over a twee ecosystem of Teletubby dolls and Madonna memorabilia displayed in his airy, high-rise living room that doubles as his studio. “I don't want to work that hard, like before. If you chase money too much, it will come back as a negative force, like eating too much.”
Dong’s goal: Record bubbly selfie sessions about his daily grooming habits and workouts at the gym, interspersed with product pitches, for three more years. Then he’ll have banked enough e-commerce to build a brick-and mortar dance club in Shenyang. And finally, he hopes, he’ll have the rewards of offline life, like actual friends rather than fans.
Dong Yaoxu, who entertains a million followers with beauty tips, displays self-designed clothing at his apartment studio.
Paul Salopek
Some 10 million influencers with at least 10,000 social media followers now crowd China’s vast and booming online content creator community—a furiously competitive cosmos where endless distraction awaits at the swipe of a thumb, fame crowns lucky unknowns, and the truly hardcore can wring alternative careers from an influencer marketing economy worth 100 billion yuan ($13.7 billion) a year.
Grassroots performers have proliferated for years, of course, on huge Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin. Harsh COVID-19 lockdowns and rising youth unemployment in China have only supercharged that influencer phenomenon. The country’s censorship firewalls may obscure its internet buskers from most of the world. But the biggest names are millionaires.
Among the most popular is Zhāng Qìngyáng, a young comedian whose slapstick pranks have hooked a loyal following—more than 116 million—that almost matches the population of Japan. Another superstar, Li Ziqi, amassed an audience nearly as large until she broke with her influencer management company. Li taps into the rural fantasies of China’s stressed urbanites. She posts highly produced videos of herself doing chores at her family farm in Sichuan. A recent segment featured Li planting cotton by hand as her bemused grandmother looked on. (“The harvest was modest, but enough to fluff her a new comforter!”)
This burgeoning influencer frontier provides an imaginative escape valve for many young Chinese in an otherwise tightly controlled media space. But digital carnivals have their well-known dark side too. The struggle for attention is relentless. Copycats abound. And the pressure to outperform competitors can even turn lethal.
One early pioneer, a climbing daredevil named Wu Yongning, filmed his own accidental plunge from a skyscraper in 2017. Earlier this month, a competitive eating star named Pan Xiaoting died during a live stream while consuming kilos of food. More regulation seems to be looming over the tiny stages of China’s millions of phone screens. Lately, the government is even cracking down on live-streamers for unpaid taxes.
Dong Yaoxu hugs one benefit of his grueling online influencer work in Shenyang: his cocker spaniel, Cooper.
Paul Salopek
Dong, the young fashionista from Shenyang, is a relatively modest sun in this constellation of content generators.
Born to poor parents in the country’s rusting, post-industrial northeast, he was raised by a grandparent after his jobless father emptied himself into a bottle of baiju, the workingman’s gin, and died of alcoholism. Dong dropped out of middle school. Like many residents of his chilly region, he migrated to China’s more bustling south and worked odd jobs: dishwasher at a pizzeria, variety store clerk. At age 16, he discovered a flair for salesmanship. Deploying his wholesome looks and hard-knocks savvy, he began advising women shoppers online about buying makeup and jewelry. An influencer agency took note. And by 19, he was earning $10,000 a month from brand endorsements. He bought a MINI Cooper. And a purebred cocker spaniel. He named the dog Cooper. But it wasn’t enough. Or rather, it was too much.
“I was only 20, and people admired my career,” Dong says. “But I became tired of all these brands. I was tired of always being on camera. So superficial. So I really cut back.”
Dong thinks the go-go influencer world in China appears to be maturing too.
“I used to give advice about success to fans,” he says, waving a hand over a closet stuffed with expensive clothing samples. “I don’t do that anymore. I think young people are tired of being lectured by influencers. I just say, do whatever makes you happy.”
Dong’s weary epiphany made me think of the young influencer I met walking a highway verge in the mountains of Sichuan.
She was pushing a cart to distant Tibet. In passing, I tried warning her of the danger of a high-speed tunnel that lay ahead. But she wasn’t listening. She smiled, and continued plodding on, talking animatedly to her followers on a phone wired to the cart’s handles.
