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.
Life and career Home 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. 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. In her courtyard, she has a pigpen where she raises pigs and a cowshed where she raises cows. A stone bridge with water flowing downwards is at the right of the courtyard. Succulent plants and other kinds of flowers and plants fill up the entire courtyard. The house beams are made of old-style wooden frames. Inside the house, the walls are covered in several old photos, while the floor is made of wood. The farmhouse has a wood-fired stove. The house's second story has a section where her family stores corn. Her younger male cousin lives in the house next door and in 2019 purchased 300 baby chickens using funds from jobs he did outside the province.
Early life Dianxi Xiaoge (), 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 included the phrase as part of her online name since she lives in the western part of Yunnan. In Chinese, "Xiaoge" means "little brother". Despite being a woman, she calls herself this since she had been a tomboy as a child. She found "Xiaomei" () to be too cute, whereas she liked "Xiaoge" for coming across as more playful and carefree. She has had Dianxi Xiaoge as her online name since around 2016. Dianxi Xiaoge also has the nickname Penji (), and her viewers call her Apenjie (), mimicking her younger brother (), Xiaohao, who calls her Apenjie in the videos. Her village's tradition is that when a baby is born, the mother's family will visit. The newborn will be named by whatever the family brings. Dianxi Xiaoge's maternal grandmother brought a bucket for cleansing and a chicken, which is why she was given the nickname "Penji" or "Bucket Chicken".
Dianxi Xiaoge is of Han ethnicity. 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. Although her mother was adept at making all kinds of food, Dianxi Xiaoge was the most excited to eat the laba congee, which they would purchase from the county seat only a few times a year. It was too challenging for her family to subsist on only farming since the mountains were steep and the land was thin. Her parents worked at construction sites in various cities. In her pre-university days, whenever she was not in school, Dianxi Xiaoge would spend time with her parents and her younger sister at the sites. They would see each other during a hastily eaten lunch at the site. Her mother enjoyed cooking and stressed to Dianxi Xiaoge that village girls should know how to cook, so Dianxi Xiaoge and her sister cooked a lot of food from a young age. Her parents raised her and her sister in a traditional household to prepare them to perform household chores when they have their own families.
As a youth who grew up in the mountains, Dianxi Xiaoge had a deep desire to leave her hometown for a city where she would buy property and forge a better life for her family. When filling out her university preferences for the gaokao, she did not choose a single university in Yunnan. Dianxi Xiaoge attended the . She participated in rescue efforts during the August 14, 2010, landslide in Yingxiu. The public security bureau of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture awarded her with a third-class Meritorious Service Medal for her rescue work. Dianxi Xiaoge was riding a bus in 2011 when it suddenly burst into flames. After she helped rescue people on the bus, the gave her a second-class Meritorious Service Medal. The Luzhou city government in 2012 gave her the "Luzhou City acting bravely for a just cause warrior" award and the "Luzhou City Jiangyang District acting bravely for a just cause citizen" award. That year, the gave her the "Outstanding Communist Youth League Member of Sichuan Province" award. While in college, she received monetary awards from the commendations for her actions during two rescue operations. 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.
Career Dianxi Xiaoge graduated from Sichuan Police College in 2012, after which she sent her resume to provinces other than Yunnan since she had no interest in going home. Although her major was in becoming a police officer, she did not do any police work after graduation. She instead secured a marketing role at an Internet startup company, where she worked for over four years, and worked various jobs afterwards. Her goal was to buy a house in Chongqing and move her parents into the house to be with her. Her plans changed after her father had a heart attack in 2016 and needed to undergo an operation to insert a coronary stent. He would have to continue taking medicine for the rest of his life after the operation and could no longer do arduous work. After she learned that her father had become ill, Dianxi Xiaoge realized that she had too few memories of her parents. Keen to not have any regrets and treasuring being with family the most above all else, Dianxi Xiaoge returned in 2016 to Shidian County to the mountain she had left to be with her family after having been away for eight years for schooling and work.
Once home, she was initially perplexed about what to do to make a living as she had observed her parents' struggles. She started selling local specialties online such as fruits harvested from the mountain and Yunnan brown sugar. Dianxi Xiaoge received ridicule for her efforts and found that sales were weak even after she posted ads on the Moments feature of WeChat. Seeking a way to increase sales, she capitalized on the rise in 2016 of short videos and began posting her own. She was particularly influenced by people who had achieved success on the Internet, including Papi Jiang, a comedian. Dianxi Xiaoge had always enjoyed cooking so to start from a domain she was comfortable in, she began making cooking videos. She started uploading her videos to Xigua Video in 2016 and at the time had no prior filming and editing experience. The first video she uploaded was filmed using her cell phone and depicted her running into a bamboo forest. She showed viewers how to hack bamboo and find bamboo worms which she later fried. The 25 viewer comments Dianxi Xiaoge received were critical about her "eating bugs", and she encountered difficulties at the beginning of her video-making career. She used all of her savings and went into credit card debt to purchase materials to make videos. Her initial work resulted in low viewership and no profits, causing her to be disheartened when comparing herself to other creators. According to The Paper, whereas Dianxi Xiaoge put a lot of effort into making high-quality videos, the other creators focused on producing a large number of videos of lesser quality such as harvesting and then cooking sweet potatoes. She persisted in making videos, emphasizing a peaceful, pastoral way of living. In one year, she had grown her subscriber base to 100,000.
Dianxi Xiaoge signed an agreement in 2017 to be represented by the multi-channel network Papitube established by Papi Jiang. 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. She had not initially planned to have non-Chinese audiences view her 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. After initially using the camera from her phone to film videos, she switched to using a Sony α7 camera. She spends her time in the village on most days rather than going into the town. Her day is occupied with filming and editing videos of her cooking.