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Meet China’s new live-streaming e-commerce star: an English-language tutor who lost his off-campus teaching job

  • Former off-campus English-language tutor Dong Yuhui has become China’s hottest live-streaming e-commerce host, as stars Viya and Austin Li Jiaqi fade away
  • Dong’s success has prompted employer New Oriental Education & Technology Group to hire more bilingual live-streamers

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Teacher-turned-salesman Dong Huyui has found online fame as a live-streaming e-commerce star for New Oriental Education & Technology Group. Photo: Weibo
Tracy Qu
Forget hotshot Chinese online influencers like Viya or Austin Li Jiaqi.
China’s unlikely new live-streaming e-commerce star is 29-year-old Dong Yuhui, an erudite, former off-campus English-language tutor who now pitches a range of goods online, from books and cooking pans to steaks, shrimp and everyday groceries.
Dong’s live-streaming sessions on ByteDance-owned short-video platform Douyin have been attracting a large online audience since last week, according to local media reports. These shows are seen via the Dongfang Zhenxuan live-streaming account of New Oriental Education & Technology Group, which employed Dong before as one of its off-campus English tutors, and has now put him front and centre of its bilingual live-streaming e-commerce programmes.

What separates Dong from the vast number of live-streaming hosts in the country is his shtick: he uses quotations from various poems, relevant English phrases and even musical accompaniment to describe the goods he sells and his point of view about the world. That somehow gives his audience a sense of being transported back to high school, where their thirst for knowledge is nurtured by teachers – the difference in this case is that they can just buy the goods that Dong discusses by clicking an on-screen button.

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“From appearance to background, I’m a very normal person,” Dong said in a video interview with Chinese media GQ Lab. “But being a teacher means I can help to change [the lives of] young people.”

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