Chinese runner and accidental internet celebrity milks fame to attract sponsors, and show another side to beauty
Mao Dou gained a big social media following after photos of her running in marathons were posted online. She’s bucking the ‘white, thin, beautiful’ trend and using her fame to empower woman and show they can have muscles, too
Mao Dou, whose real name is Li Xue, is a runner and a wang hong – a Chinese internet celebrity. She is one of the most followed runners in China on social media – with almost 300,000 following her on microblogging platform Weibo and more than 20,000 on her commercial WeChat social networking account.
Her nickname means “green soybean” in Chinese. A keen Football Club Barcelona fan – “I even named my dog after Messi” – she chose her name because “green soybean is what fans eat at football games in China while drinking beer”.
Mao Dou started running to beat stress after graduating with a degree in Chinese language and literature, and entering the “adult world”. She is no performance athlete, she stresses: “I am very slow; I run for fun.”
She was “discovered” during the 2013 Beijing Marathon, where she ran as a pacer. A fellow runner snapped a photo of her, and then asked on social media who she was. That photo, which showed nothing more than her back and long hair, went viral. Her identity was immediately discovered, and her Weibo gained 10,000 followers in a single day.
“This one photo changed my life,” she says, still with disbelief in her voice. “I was a young girl, working in marketing, selling washing machines and microwaves, and then suddenly I was a running wang hong.”
