A cut above the rest

Online series on clothing and manufacturing centers across the country proves to be an unlikely hit, Chen Nan reports. 

Five years ago, when Xu Yajun quit his job as an agent of a talent management company in Beijing, he started taking videos of himself and talking about topics related to clothes.

It's not a foreign territory for the 30-year-old. Xu was born in Jiaozuo, Henan province, and moved to Dongguan, Guangdong province, at the age of 6 with his parents, who worked at a clothing factory.

Xu dropped out of middle school and worked at a clothing factory in Dongguan for four years. He learned about making clothes, especially sorting out different fabrics and knitting, both handmade and by machine.

"I know clothes very well. So when I decided to launch my own social media platform and make short videos, I started with shooting programs that I am good at," Xu says.

"From the feedback of viewers, I learned that many people don't know the process of making clothing and they have no idea what the industry is about, which inspired me to make more videos."

In the beginning he mainly evaluated the quality of different clothing brands in his videos, which built him a fan base on video-sharing and livestreaming platform Bilibili.

In late 2017, he traveled to Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, to take a video of the burgeoning e-commerce business there.

When he visited the city's Sijiqing clothing market－one of the country's largest wholesale and shopping areas for clothing, Xu found many social media fashion influencers went there to shop.

He also visited nearby clothing factories and interviewed many workers and owners.

"Unlike white-collar workers working in bigger cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, who are paid monthly, these workers are paid by the number of clothes they make every day. They would love to work extra hours to make more money," Xu says.

He once interviewed a couple in a clothing factory, who worked 14 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

"Besides the clothes and online influencers, I want the viewers to see more about what's behind the story," he adds.

Xu posted the video on Jan 2,2018, on his Bilibili channel, which has been viewed over 5.7 million times. It also became the first video of his series of videos, titled Made in China, a hit on social media.

In the past three years, Xu has visited over 20 factories across China to take videos and do interviews about the country's manufacturing industry.

Made in China includes about 30 videos, each running from 10 to 30 minutes. Now, Xu has nearly 1 million followers on Bilibili.

"The videos don't look glamorous but are compelling and thought-provoking. They portray things in a simple way, which involves us closely in those workers' daily lives," comments one netizen.