ZHEJIANG, East China — Wearing a tight black tank top revealing his well-defined chest and arms, Lin Yangduo tucks a ripe persimmon from the orchard behind him snugly between a massive bicep and forearm. “Babe, do you want to eat persimmons?” he asks the camera.
“You can eat them standing up,” he says, taking a bite out of the fruit, dripping with juice, “sitting down,” — another wet bite — “or against a tree” — a bite again. “Bring the whole family to Jingshan Village.” The video garnered over 160,000 likes on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and over 100,000 on Xiaohongshu, known internationally as RedNote.
A former national canoeing athlete from southern China’s Guangdong province, Lin retired at 18 and later became a fitness coach. Now, with his creative partner He Geping, he makes short videos promoting Xinchang County in Zhejiang province.
They market village tourism, local specialties, and agricultural products — often with Lin’s physique doing as much of the selling as the scenery.
Over the past year, the pair has built a following of more than 800,000 across platforms, part of a wider boom in “rural support,” or zhunong, content, in which creators market village life and local products to China’s vast short-video audience.
