As Beijing gets tough on celebrity gossip and gaming, online content providers pin their hopes on ‘knowledge’
- Knowledge videos have become a safe bet for China’s tech giants amid on ongoing campaign by Beijing to clamp down on unsavoury content
- Popularity of free-for-all online classes has been a shot in the arm for platforms amid censorship drive
Sixty-five-year-old Dai Jianye, with a shock of white hair and speaking in a broad Hubei accent, stands in front of the camera, looking slightly uncomfortable and wondering where to look.
“All my classes have been delivered in the classroom and this is the first time for me to record online lectures,” the retired professor from Central China Normal University, who specialises in Chinese classical literature, says in the opening lines of his online lecture series.
Despite this initial uneasiness, Dai has now become an unlikely China internet star. “Don’t call me grandpa, I also want to become younger on Bilibili,” he writes in his personal bio on the video-streaming platform, where he currently has 2.6 million followers.
Dai has become known for using his passionate, down-to-earth teaching of ancient Chinese literature. When explaining a verse written by famous Chinese poet Su Shi about his deceased wife, he could not help breaking into tears, winning him a legion of online fans.
Videos of his online classes have been widely shared on Chinese platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok operated by ByteDance, as well as the increasingly popular short video channel of Tencent Holdings’ super-app WeChat.