On March 24, Darren Watkins Jr., better known as IShowSpeed, a top American influencer with over 37 million YouTube subscribers, kicked off the China leg of his global tour. Over nearly two weeks, he and his team livestreamed from several Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Zhengzhou and Chengdu. Within the first week alone, cumulative global viewership surpassed 100 million.
Darren’s humorous video clips may have popped up on the social media feeds of many Chinese people, but before he arrived in China, few actually saw him as a celebrity. This, however, played to his advantage. With his unedited, immersive, single-take livestreams capturing authentic street scenes and everyday life in China, the spontaneity of his broadcasts had a natural persuasiveness—sharply contrasting with the carefully edited videos from many mainstream Western media…
