Dianxi Xiaoge

Dianxi Xiaoge (; born 1990) is a Chinese food vlogger and YouTuber from Yunnan. Dianxi Xiaoge, along with Ms Yeah and Li Ziqi, are the only Chinese Internet celebrities who have reached international prominence, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily in 2019. Her actual name is Dong Meihua , and she goes by the nicknames Penji and Apenjie .

Dianxi Xiaoge lives on a family farm at the foot of a small mountain in the town of , Shidian County, Baoshan, west-central Yunnan, southwest China. It was challenging for her parents to make a living farming in the village, which led her to seek schooling and employment outside her province. Dianxi Xiaoge studied to become a police officer at though upon graduation in 2012 chose to join an Internet startup company in the marketing department. She planned to eventually buy a house in Chongqing and move her parents in so they would all have a better life. But she returned to her village in 2016 after her father had a heart attack. To make a living in Yunnan, Dianxi Xiaoge began selling local specialities online before capitalizing on the rise in 2016 of short videos when she started posting her own. She created her YouTube channel in 2018 and first went viral internationally after releasing a video where she made hamburgers for her grandparents who had never eaten them before.

Scholars have called her a cottagecore content creator and an example of the rural living segment of the Wanghong economy. Dianxi Xiaoge's videos showcase the calm, idyllic village life and feature her making videos of Yunnan cuisine using produce that she planted, harvested, and raised herself. Her male Alaskan Malamute named Dawang follows her around in many videos. She ends her videos with a family meal of what she cooked. Urban dwellers have viewed her videos as a temporary refuge from the bustling, stressful city life. Coda Media's Isobel Cockerell said Dianxi Xiaoge's presence and popularity on YouTube despite the censorship of YouTube in China indicates she has implicit government support. In 2020, she had roughly 16 million subscribers on all her platforms including Sina Weibo, YouTube, Douyin, and Facebook, and her videos each were receiving roughly 20 million views. Her Weibo was among the 10 most subscribed independent accounts that year. Her village in which 140 families live is about a one-hour bus ride from Baoshan Yunrui Airport. She lives about a 30-minute drive from the town in the remote mountains where houses including hers are constructed along the hillside. Succulent plants and other kinds of flowers and plants fill up the entire courtyard. whose actual name is Dong Meihua , was born in 1990 in Shidian County in Baoshan, a prefecture-level city in west-central Yunnan province, an area that borders Myanmar. In Chinese, "Dian" is for short for Yunnan and "Xi" means "west". She has had Dianxi Xiaoge as her online name since around 2016. mimicking her younger brother , Xiaohao, who calls her Apenjie in the videos. Her father is Dong Chaoyu. She has a younger sister named Axia (阿霞) and a younger brother named Xiaohao (小豪), both of whom sometimes appear in her videos. When she had not yet entered primary school, Dianxi Xiaoge's mother had to wake up early in the morning to hike to the bottom of the mountain to bring back several buckets of springwater since their village did not have running water yet. Throughout her four years of college, she did not request funds from her family for her expenses since they were covered by her monetary awards. Within two to three years, she became a full-time video creator after viewership rose and she was making substantial profit, while those other creators she had envied were no longer making videos. Dianxi Xiaoge started her YouTube channel in 2018 and within three months had grown her subscriber base from zero to onemillion in November 2018. Her video about her making hamburgers for her grandparents went viral in China and outside the country which brought her a lot of attention. Having lived their entire lives in the village, her grandparents had not previously eaten hamburgers which they viewed as a Western dish. The South China Morning Post listed her as among "9 Chinese women who made a big difference in 2020", overcoming the impediments the COVID-19 pandemic had wreaked on women. Her videos depict the entire process of how food gets from the fields to her dinner table. Some of her videos depict Yunnan dishes she has previously consumed but not cooked. That dog was being walked by a girl which created feelings of envy in Dianxi Xiaoge who told her sister her goal of having a large dog too. Dianxi Xiaoge uploaded a video around November 2020 of her consuming a lettuce wrap containing chili pepper, garlic, and meat. Korean commenters shared unfavorable feedback since she uploaded the video with "I'll continue to share my life and Yunnan-styled food in my uploads" in the description, but the commenters thought her dish was made in the same way as ssam, a Korean food.

She does not have professional camera operators or film editors. while also filming a peaceful and simple life in the country that her viewers crave but are unable to experience themselves, The Paper found. Her videos "show the pastoral style of nature, the poetic and artistic charm of harmonious coexistence between man and nature", according to Voice of America. People's Daily praised Dianxi Xiaoge, saying that during the COVID-19 pandemic, urban dwellers who watched her videos felt "an escape from the reality of life".

Dianxi Xiaoge said that there were three broad categories for short videos. In the first, viewers learn how to do something such as cook a dish. In the second, viewers are made to laugh. In the third, viewers learn about the fine cuisine of a particular culture and the social customs and local conditions of a place. Her initial videos were in the first category of teaching people to cook a dish but the style was unsuccessful since Yunnan's unique ingredients made it challenging for viewers to follow her videos to make the same dish. She could make instructional cooking videos of dishes that did not need Yunnan's unique ingredients but that would make her indistinguishable from other video makers. Dianxi Xiaoge said her videos belonged to the third category as with numerous food ingredients and over 50 ethnic groups, Yunnan has much for her to examine and show. She did not include subtitles in her videos since her aim was not to teach people to cook dishes but to show her village's way of living. Dianxi Xiaoge speaks with her family in the Baoshan dialect of Southwestern Mandarin which leads to some Weibo commenters saying they are unable to comprehend what she is saying.

Xinhua News Agency and the 2021 book The Future of Global Retail compared Dianxi Xiaoge to fellow food vlogger Li Ziqi. Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor Jennifer deWinter said of Dianxi Xiaoge's videos, "It's a complete brain break: pleasant sounds and pleasant visuals and a kind of Chinese cottagecore aesthetic."

Videos like Dianxi Xiaoge's combat the perception of villages being a trend. The Chinese government did not introduce any restrictions on Dianxi Xiaoge, despite her being very popular on YouTube, which the scholar Li Han found "very telling". Dianxi Xiaoge and fellow vlogger Li Ziqi have a high-profile presence on YouTube, which the Chinese government has blocked. Isobel Cockerell of Coda Media said, "Given their visibility and large followings, it is likely that their work has at least the tacit approval of the state. After all, the vision of life they present is a useful one." Xinhua News Agency's Julia Pierrepont III said that Dianxi Xiaoge makes a large amount of money while "capitalizing on the return to the global simpler life movement" and "help[ing] promote the development of rural China". The City University of Hong Kong called her one of the "important participants in China's current cultural export" in showing the pastoral lifestyle of villages and Yunnan culture and cuisine. Her content coincides with the Chinese government's focus on elevated "cultural confidence" in which Chinese people enjoy and exult in Chinese culture and identity. Han Li wrote in the International Journal of Communication that by creating a "hyperreality of Yunnan countryside life", "this ostensibly peaceful pastoral life, rather than a truthful representation of rural life, is more of simulacrum constructed according to a normative idyllic dream". Dianxi Xiaoge said in 2019 that she left the city to return to her village not only because her father had gotten ill, but also to escape the difficult living situation in the city where she had a strenuous work schedule, expensive cost of living, and feelings of instability.

Coda Media's Isobel Cockerell said Dianxi Xiaoge has been criticized for creating content that helps the Chinese Communist Party with their aims. In July 2020, she traveled to Yunnan's Tibetan autonomous prefecture to show what it was like to live there. As she consumed yak butter tea and made Tibetan-style pots on film, her video captured the architecture, people, and food of the mountainous populace. Cockerell concluded, "Any thoughts of China's decades of repressive policies towards Tibetans are gently spirited away." Linda Qian, a University of Oxford doctoral candidate whose research is focused on "Chinese rural nostalgia" observed of Dianxi Xiaoge's Tibet video, "People get to see a different side of China that they didn't know. And they can be like, 'Oh it can actually be pretty beautiful. Oh, it's not just the oppressive CCP with surveillance everywhere. All this is actually a fairytale.'"