Last year's net gains

Ranging from the absurd to the serious, online personalities presented some precious moments, Xing Wen reports.

Chinese Lunar New Year is around the corner. A time to reflect, reminisce and consider what has gone. The last 12 months saw an increasing number of wanghong, or "internet celebrities" of all shapes and sizes, young and old, male and female, go viral as they attracted followers with their charisma, unique content, outlook and personal style. The following are 10 internet celebrities that hit the headlines, for various reasons, last year.

Literary wanderer

Clips of a tramp brightened our March days. But appearances can be deceptive. This was a tramp who knew his literature. With his matted hair and ragged clothes, he went viral on Douyin, or TikTok, a short-video platform in China. The tramp, named Shen Wei, talks about current affairs using proverbs and allusions from Chinese classic books, including Zuo Zhuan (Chronicles of Zuo) and Shang Shu (the Book of Documents).

Viewers were surprised that he could be so articulate and obviously well-read. Soon, in a bid to meet him, visitors began to arrive in their droves at the street－near a subway station in Shanghai's Pudong district－where Shen often films his soliloquies.

They asked about Shen's reflections on The Analects of Confucius, Thomas More's Utopia, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and other renowned books. Dozens of phones and cameras were held aloft, ready to record his thoughts.

As the mysterious man attracted wider publicity and more attention from the media, his past was gradually revealed.

The 52-year-old Shanghai native was once a civil servant at the Xuhui district audit office. However, due to his"abnormal behavior", including collecting waste paper from rubbish bins and trash cans in the office building and sorting recyclable garbage, he was shunned by colleagues and was asked to retire early in 1993. He was sent to a mental hospital twice by his family. They later broke off contact with him. Shen then became a homeless man who used his meager income to buy books as he is a voracious reader, and has been since childhood.

After being dubbed the Vagrant Master, he was persuaded to, literally, clean up his act. The restorative powers of a shower, haircut and mustache trim, coupled with some clean clothes, became evident. He even opened his own channel on short-video platform Kuaishou which has garnered more than 1.4 million followers.

Over the past several months, he has toured many historical sites across the country, sponsored mainly by his fans, and vividly illustrated the background stories of these attractions via livestreaming sessions.

Fairy tales

Seven Dong women from Gaibao village in the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong autonomous prefecture in Guizhou province became online sensations after promoting their ethnic culture and agricultural products via livestreaming and short videos.

Their media work reportedly yielded a profit of at least 1 million yuan($145,000) for the village.

Wu Yusheng, Party secretary of Gaibao village, suggested the idea in 2018, in a bid to connect the remote village with the outside world.

"The culture of the Dong ethnic group is well preserved here. I found all these online video platforms could publicize us very well at a very low cost," says Wu, who then organized a group of young women to open a channel titled Seven Dong Fairies on Kuaishou.

Wearing traditional garments of the ethnic group, these Dong women showed how to fish in the river, design embroidery, make a type of sticky rice cake called ciba, and other details of a Dong villager's life, all of which helped earn more than 300,000 followers on the platform and attract attention from mainstream media.

The beautiful scenery of Gaibao village, with green mountains, clear water, and traditional Dong-style stilted architecture, is also displayed in the videos, attracting many tourists to travel to the area for a taste of its unique culture.

Tumbling beauty

In November, the video clips of a 23-year-old woman tumbling like a roly-poly toy in Xi'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi province, attracted more than 1 billion viewers on Douyin.

Dressed in Tang Dynasty-style clothing, the performer, Feng Jiachen, rotates freely on a round iron base in the shape of a bowl. She appears to defy gravity while greeting audiences with movements so elegant that they seem effortless. However, they are far from it.

Feng's lower body is tied with a T-shaped frame fixed to the bottom of the bowl. Her weight－no more than 50 kilograms－ensures she always ends upright.

She has to control the base using lower-body strength, and her knees are always bruised after each performance.

Feng started to learn dance when she was 4 years old.

Two years ago, the preschool education and teaching major joined a cast that stage theatrical plays at the Great Tang All Day Mall in Xi'an, Shaanxi province.

In July, she auditioned for the rolypoly role, beating 100 other candidates with her skill and technique.

After her video clips went viral online, visitors from across the country came to the square where Feng performs, in the hope of catching a glimpse of her graceful technique.

"I will stay grounded and keep improving the quality of my performance," she says.

"My hometown is a city steeped in history and full of cultural treasure. I hope our performance will draw public attention to the city and traditional Chinese culture."

A rural idol

Li Ziqi, 29, became one of the most popular Chinese vloggers on video-sharing platform YouTube, with more than 8 million users subscribing to her channel by the end of last year.

It was in 2016 that she first decided to film videos to record her idyllic rural life and portray traditional Chinese aesthetics. In her videos, Li, wearing traditional dress, shows the charm of Chinese cuisine and folk craftsmanship by doing everything from scratch, and displaying each step clearly, one after another.

In the videos, she uses natural ingredients to cook various dishes, harvests grapes to dye cloth, embroiders flowers and creatures on cloth, and makes furniture with planks and bamboo. She has also spent two years making paper from tree barks, brushes out of rabbit hair and crafting other stationery from natural materials.

The picturesque countryside scenery displayed in the videos and Li's ability to live a self-sufficient and slow-paced lifestyle have impressed a large number of domestic and international viewers.

Flights of fancy

In October 2018, a 26-year-old female IT engineer won the jackpot in a lottery launched by Alipay on China's major social media platform Sina Weibo. She became an overnight web sensation.

The prizes included shoes, clothes, phones and cosmetic products, as well as free luxury accommodation and flight tickets to countries in Asia, North America, Africa and Europe, most of which would be invalid if not claimed within a year.

The official account of Alipay released a Sina Weibo post to announce the prize list and all online users who reposted the post had a chance to win.

This resulted in it being reposted by more than 3 million participants. The winner, known online as Xinxiaodai, was the lucky one in late 2018.

Her excitement was evident in a post after being named as the winner."Should I stop going to work for the rest of my life?" Her post attracted many hundreds of thousands of fellow users to comment.

She quickly decided to quit her job at a State-owned enterprise and claimed as many prizes as she could within the year.

Before that, she had never been abroad. She soon made up for it as she visited Japan, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand and recorded her experiences via video blogs, which drew more than 1.3 million followers on Sina Weibo.

However, she only managed to claim half of the travel-related prizes and she spent a lot of her own savings on the foreign trips. She also found out the intensive itinerary was exhausting, had taken a toll on her health, and public interest in her posts was waning. What could she do after a year of jet-setting? Her life has changed but to what extent, we are yet to see.

Rustic style

In March, Lu Kaigang, a 20-year-old villager from Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region's Nanning city posted a video on Douyin, in which he struts like a model wearing a dress made from fishnets.

He then filmed dozens of similar videos showing how he channels his "inner diva", moving in tempo under a stone bridge, across a narrow alley, in a derelict factory, down mossy steps and through the ridges and furrows of fields.

He turned the countryside into his runway and made fashionable outfits and accessories from readily available materials, including bamboo sticks, reeds and plastic bags.

Although he never had professional training, Lu Xianren, as he is also known, nailed the supermodel walk from studying models as a child, by watching fashion shows on TV.

His countryside homage to the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show gained him more than 3 million followers on Douyin.

Lu, a former employee at a local food manufacturer, used to ask his co-workers to help him film videos after work. Now he has talent agents to support him to plan for a future career as a rising model. He started to pose for magazines, meet media outlets and grace real runways alongside professional models at domestic and overseas fashion shows.

On Dec 18, he was invited to the 16th Esquire Man at His Best Award ceremony held by Esquire magazine in Beijing. He says one of the most exciting parts of attending the event was that he got to meet his idol He Sui, a renowned Chinese supermodel.

'Useless Edison'

On Dec 31, 2019, Geng Shuai, better known as Shougonggeng, posted a clip on Kuaishou which shows him converting a diesel engine into a stylish stereo that also functions as a humidifier. It received more than 114,500 likes from viewers.

In his small workshop in Hebei province's Yangcun village, the 31-year-old handicraft expert has created hundreds of quirky contraptions over the past two years, including a sword-shaped skateboard, a hollow steel hammer which can be used as a bag, a soybean grinder rotated by riding a stationary exercise bicycle, an automatic hair-washing machine which requires the user to hang upside down by their feet, and an earthquake-proof noodle bowl that allows the diner to continue munching through a seismic shock.

In one video he made a cage, the bottom of which is a wide treadmill belt for people to walk or run on. But there's a catch. Only when users reach the exercise target they set beforehand can they get out from the cage, otherwise they will be locked in. Geng says that the cage treadmill will force people to run and keep fit.

Online users found his not-so-practical inventions hilarious and started to dub him as"a useless Edison".

The former welder became a social media star who boasts nearly 3.5 million fans on Kuaishou and 1.8 million followers on Sina Weibo, and has started to get an income from holding livestreaming shows, selling his handicrafts online and cooperating with enterprises for advertising revenue.

Being"internet famous" means he has to come up with a new invention every week, and his father and brother, former migrant workers, have now come back home to support his work.

A woman's routine

Yu Zhaohe, a 27-year-old male vlogger, has been tickling funny bones with clips he posted on Douyin. Yu portrays in vivid and humorous detail the everyday lives and challenges of young women in Guiyang, Guizhou province.

Yu usually dons an orange wig and garish dress to play a female persona, Maomaojie, in his video. Speaking Mandarin with the accent of Guiyang and using dramatic body language, he comically shows how women think and act when facing situations such as blind dating, shopping, dieting, meeting friends and breaking up with a boyfriend.

Yu used to observe people around him and dig out the funny parts of their daily behavior.

"I would crack up at the many trivial details in everyday life, especially when I went shopping with my mother or some female friends," says Yu.

In one video, Maomaojie is determined to buy an eyebrow pencil. Nothing more, nothing less. However, she actually brings back a bag full of makeup products, because of flattery from the salesmen and labels claiming "limited edition". Millions of online users could relate to it.

His ability to accurately capture the private emotions shared by women and use his sense of humor to carry out a performance interpretation of feminine experiences has made him one of the most popular crossdressers on Douyin. By the end of 2019, subscribers to Yu's channel, titled Duoyu and Maomaojie, passed 33 million.

Yu, who once worked for a local newspaper in Guiyang, is now an online influencer, attending cultural and commercial events at home and abroad, and appearing at entertainment events with other big-name celebrities.

The lip-service man

Li Jiaqi was arguably the most sensational livestreaming anchorman in China last year.

The 27-year-old, hailed as the No 1 lipstick salesman, once sold 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes during a one-on-one selling competition where he faced off against Alibaba founder Jack Ma during a Singles Day shopping gala in 2018.

Li, once a salesman at an offline makeup store, has taken his sales prowess far beyond the realm of cosmetic products to almost all aspects of people's daily lives.

On Nov 11, 2019, the salesman attracted more than 37 million consumers to his livestreaming show and reportedly captured product sales totaling 1 billion yuan.

Like all good performers he has a catchphrase:"Oh my God, ladies, buy it, buy it, buy it".

However, he also became a controversial figure after he recommended and tested a nonstick pan. One small problem, the eggs stuck to the pan during a demonstration. A month later, he was accused of misrepresenting the origin of crabs he promoted.

A violence reaction

He Yuhong, better known as Yuya, is a vlogger who used to impress viewers with her uncanny step-by-step transformation into celebrities, including Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr. and Lily Collins.

On Nov 25, a video she posted on Sina Weibo was widely discussed by online users. However, this time, the focus was not on her consummate makeup skills, but on her courage in revealing the fact that she was a victim of domestic violence.

In the video, she recounts how her boyfriend allegedly abused her, with tears streaming down her cheeks. The accused abuser once, allegedly, punched her face so violently that she could not even wear makeup, vital for her online work, for a whole week.

A clip recorded by the security camera shows the man grasping her foot to drag her off an elevator in their apartment building. The man's two ex-wives, who allegedly also suffered violent abuse, are interviewed in the video. The video has gained more than 400,000 reposts.

Shortly afterward, the alleged abuser was detained by the police.

The three women hope that their speaking out will encourage other victims, or potential victims, of domestic violence to tell someone, seek help and protect themselves from physical and mental harm.

Contact the writer at xingwen@chinadaily.com.cn