Dianxi Xiaoge: Yunnan Flavours, Cultural Ecology and the Digital Archiving of Rural Community

Representing the life of a particular cultural community and their inhabited countryside can mean portraying generational family members, neighbours and their immediate surroundings. This chapter discusses the international recognition of the vlog channel of Dianxi Xaoge, a young Chinese female vlogger named Dong Meihua, who has been posting videos on Sina Weibo, YouTube and Facebook about traditional home-cooking, craftsmanship, vegetable growing and foraging from her family farm in a small western mountain of Youwang, Shidian County in Baoshan, Yunnan. This essay looks at Dong’s country life vlog on YouTube as operating within the frameworks of cultural ecology and the digital archiving of rural communities as her paradoxical strategy to both resist and sustain the production of information in the attention economy, and how her family, culture and community influence her exploration and life-writing practice on YouTube. I specifically focus on how Dong’s homespun tone of Yunnan rural community and ecological landscape can add to the sense of a “complete picture” of her culture and community, which creates an even stronger bedrock for her digital life-writing project.