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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to

journalists, experts and long-time China

watches about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering of history

to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see

these issues? In the last episode, I discussed Chinese rural lives with Professor Scott Roselle.

One point he made, which particularly stuck with me, was the dying out of farming as an occupation.

I mean, 35-year-old rural individuals and below, 85, 90% of them have never farmed one day in their

life. They don't want to farm, right?

They don't know how to farm.

So that got me thinking, what do they do instead?

In this episode, I'll be looking at one very high-profile kind of alternative, vlogging.

I've noticed through my hours of scrolling through Chinese social media, research, of course,

that there's a huge

amount of rural pastoral content. I personally like to use a platform called Xiaohongshu or Little

Red Book, which is a bit like Instagram. This is an interesting phenomenon, both for what it says

about the rural population today, as well as what it reveals about the often urban viewers on the other

end.

So today I'm joined by Yiling Liu, a writer on Chinese society who has had bylines of the New Yorker, Harpers magazine and Wired.

...