Performing the digital pastoral: Environmental narrative, cultural nostalgia and commodified rurality in Li Ziqi’s videos

This study takes Li Ziqi’s YouTube videos as a central case to explore how Li Ziqi reconstructs images of digital pastoral through performative strategies. Employing multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study examines three key dimensions: environmental narrative, cultural nostalgia, and commodified rurality. The global emotional resonance of the digital pastoral lies in its aestheticized and algorithmically curated recoding of nature, tradition, and the rural into consumable spectacles. Between media esthetics and ecological longing, natural landscapes are affectively orchestrated into visual narratives of healing and slow living, reflecting platforms’ capacity to capture emotional responses. Between cultural memory and diasporic fantasy, nostalgia is translated, visualized, and globalized as a cross-contextual yearnings. And between the tensions of authenticity and performance, the viewing value of rural imagery is continuously amplified by platform capitalism, while risking the erasure of underlying issues such as social inequality and gender imbalance. Li Ziqi’s videos thus constitute a digital pastoral, a product of modern anxieties, cultural identification, and platform-driven capital, illuminating the cultural negotiations of nature, memory, and rurality in the digital age.