China Celebs
How Chinese Kuaishou Rebel ‘Pangzai’ Became a Twitter King
He’s been called a ‘Twitter king’, but how did the unexpected online fame of this ‘Hebei Pangzai’ start?
He describes himself as the “inventor of tornado beer drinking style” and as an “ordinary peasant from China.” ‘Hebei Pangzai’ only joined Twitter in August of 2019, but he already has a Twitter following of more than 111.6K.
Although his account is temporarily restricted by Twitter at time of writing (“due to suspicious activity”), his popularity is only growing. Some Twitterers, such as the China twitterer Carl Zha (@CarlZha), are even initiating a “#FreePangzai campaign” to restore the account of the “one true King.”
But where and when did the online fame of ‘Hebei Pangzai’ start?
Let’s begin our introduction to Pangzai with one tweet from March of this year, when Twitter user ‘Hunnaban Trenchboss’ posted a video from Chinese short video app Kuaishou (快手) showing a man – ‘Pangzai’ – wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette while preparing an incredible mixed drink.
The man in the video smoothly pops the cap off a bottle of beer with a chopstick, pours some in a large jar, then twirls the bottle and propels the rest of the beer in a tornado of force down his throat.
He follows that up by pouring in more beer, some blue liquor, an egg, some Pepsi, and a hefty glass of baijiu – which he dumps in only after lighting it on fire, igniting his finger, and coolly lighting his cigarette. He then chugs the entire concoction in a matter of seconds.
“How do I become as cool as this guy, The Coolest Guy?”, the tweet said.
The same video was shared again in August by a few Russian accounts, was retweeted by an American account, and then went completely viral, racking up millions of views and tens of thousands of retweets.
That video has now been viewed almost 12 million times on Twitter, and has inspired tens of thousands of fans who herald him as ‘king.’
The man in the video referred to as ‘Pangzai’ (胖仔, ‘chubby dude’) is Liu Shichao (刘世超), a 33-year-old farmer and small-time Chinese internet celebrity from a city called Xingtai in Hebei Province.
According to an interview with Technode, he found out about the video on Twitter when some of his new foreign fans opened Chinese social media accounts to find him and tell him about his overnight online fame.
“One message told me that I was a celebrity now in America,” he told Technode: “So I chatted with the person [who sent the message] for a whole day, with the help of translation software.”
Within two days of his video going viral, Pangzai had figured out how to use a VPN, opened his own Twitter account and started uploading videos.
He even posted a reply on the original viral video to alert everybody to his account.
Liu’s early response to his viral video on Twitter.
Since then, Liu ‘Pangzai’ has amassed over 111,000 followers and has posted many more videos of everything from drinking, to cooking, to exploring his countryside hometown.
But it was the drinking videos specifically that earned him his following, both abroad and in China.
IT STARTED ON KUAISHOU
“Pangzai epitomizes the typical Kuaishou account.”
Liu began his internet career three years ago on Kuaishou, a Chinese short video app massively popular among China’s lower-tier cities and countryside.
In contrast to the polished, celeb-heavy platform Douyin, which is most popular among urban youths, Kuaishou is a platform for the masses. Its users are known for their crazy antics and general disregard for personal safety.
Liu Shichao’s Kuaishou account has 354,000 followers, but the majority of his videos have been removed.
Pangzai epitomizes the typical Kuaishou account. Posting under the handle “Chubby Dude from Hebei” (@河北胖仔), he uploads videos of himself eating and drinking in eye-popping combinations, or sometimes smashing things – from bricks to unopened water bottles – with his bare hands.
Liu’s video of breaking bricks with his hands was also popular on Twitter.
Liu also gained notoriety, and a couple hundred thousand followers, from his mastery of the so-called ‘beer tornado technique’ (小旋风 xiǎo xuànfēng).
According to an interview with the BBC, he peaked at 470,000 followers on Kuaishou and was monetizing his online fame with some 10,000 RMB ($1420) per month.
Liu’s signature beer tornado technique features in the first video he posted to Twitter.
Unfortunately for Liu, China’s Cyberspace Administration announced a crackdown on vulgar and illegal content across multiple social media platforms in spring of 2018, with a focus on Douyin, Kuaishou, and its sister news company Jinri Toutiao. Kuaishou was pulled from app stores until it cleaned up its act.
It is unclear just how many videos and accounts have been removed as a result of the cleanup. We can get a rough idea from an announcement by Kuaishou earlier this year that in March of 2019 alone, it removed an average of over 11,000 videos and blocked almost 1,000 accounts every day.
The result for Liu was that his account was suspended for four months and the majority of his most popular videos, including the one that went viral abroad, were removed for promoting ‘unhealthy drinking habits.’
When you look at his Kuaishou account today, you won’t see many videos focused solely on baijiu and beer chugging.
The videos that remain on his account do include drinking (and his signature tornado move) but it is always accompanied by eating food or some other activity (such as sitting deep in a field of corn, munching on roast duck and dribbling baijiu down a corn leaf into a glass.)
In a video posted to Kuaishou, Liu pours baijiu into a glass from a corn leaf, before then lighting it on fire and chugging it.
Liu still has 354,000 followers on Kuaishou. His Chinese fans, like his foreign ones, marvel at his cool and collected manner as he eats and drinks all sorts of disgusting things.
Canned herring features heavily in his most popular recent videos, where he can be seen sipping the juice directly from the can.
In one of his videos on Kuaishou, Liu eating herring directly from the can, to the disgust of his fans.
“This has to be the most unaffected anyone has ever been by eating canned herring,” says one fan. “The flavor is disgusting! 99.9% of people who try this would vomit,” another online commenter replies.
AN UNEXPECTED TWITTER KING
“Liu is like many young men from the countryside of Northern China: open, friendly, humble, and genuinely excited to share his life.”
This year, Liu seems to have embraced his newfound international stardom with grace and savvy.
He uses Twitter’s in-app translation to help him communicate with fans and has been highly interactive on the platform.
Liu ‘Pangzai’ was also quick to open up a Paypal account and share it with followers, and has recently made YouTube and Instagram accounts to prevent scams pretending to be him. He has also collaborated with a Twitter fan to sell T-shirts online in America.
Many online fans have dubbed him ‘king’, perhaps the highest praise one can receive on the internet today.
But in contrast to the sunglasses and chill demeanor of his videos, Liu does not appear to be an internet celebrity overly obsessed with being cool.
Instead, he is like many young men from the countryside of Northern China: open, friendly, humble, and genuinely excited to share his life (and drinking habits) with the rest of the world.
Liu began using translation software to communicate with fans soon after joining Twitter.
After reposting all of his old drinking videos from Kuaishou, Liu started asking Twitter fans what they would like to see from him. Many responded that they wanted more about his life in rural China.
He has since followed up with videos showing him fixing a pipe with his friends, exploring his local market, cooking sweet potatoes, and, of course, a tutorial on how to master the ‘tornado beer’ technique.
Liu explaining on Twitter how to perform the tornado beer technique that helped make him famous.
Many have expressed concern for his health in light of his drinking habits, but he has assured everybody that everything he does is “within his ability” and that he doesn’t drink like that very often.
Liu is grateful for all the support and praise he has received from abroad. “It’s crazy to have all of these foreign friends all of a sudden,” he recently said in an interview with Deadspin: “I really have to thank them a lot. If I have a chance I will find them and we can drink together.”
Seemingly to that end, Liu has recently organized a party to be held near his hometown in China, exciting fans all over the world and spurring many to apply for passports and visas.
Once Liu began inviting people to his party, he changed the date and location in order to accommodate more attendees.
The date is set for December 14, 2019 in Zhuamadian City, Hebei Province; too soon for many to make it, but he promises another party in the spring. There is talk also of organizing a visit for Liu ‘Pangzai’ to go to America.
WINDOW INTO CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA
“Liu’s growing notoriety abroad seems to have flown completely under the radar of the Chinese internet.”
Although there are many vloggers like Pangzai in China, he stands out on Twitter as some sort of window into Chinese social media, especially because this online world is usually so separate from the Western realms of social media.
The recent explosive growth of Chinese social media apps such as TikTok has not done much to facilitate this kind of cultural interaction between China and the West.
Although Tiktok is, in fact, a Chinese app (called Douyin 抖音 in China), there are actually two different versions of the same app in mainland China and abroad, meaning that the other ‘Pangzais’ of the Chinese internet still remain within the social media spheres of the PRC, rarely gaining fame outside of the Great Firewall.
In China, aside from his fans on Kuaishou, Liu’s growing notoriety abroad seems to have flown completely under the radar of the Chinese internet. He is mentioned only one or two times across Weibo, and searches for his name and handle on WeChat, Baidu, and various Chinese tech news sites bring up nothing.
Liu is a rare example of genuine soft power coming out of China. A pure, grassroots man of the people with strong cultural appeal who sincerely enjoys sharing his life and his culture with the rest of the world. His tweets are full of affection and appreciation for his fans, as well as frequent prompts for followers to share their own lives and customs of their home countries.
To watch his introduction to Twitter and rise to fame is to see the best of the internet: cultural interaction, genuinely shared delight, and mutual admiration inspired by hilarious antics caught on camera.
His Twitter fans express their hope that Twitter Support will soon lift the temporary ban on their ‘Twitter king.’ To them, it’s perfectly clear: this online king is nowhere near dead, long live Pangzai!
Follow the #FreePangzai hashtag on Twitter.
Update: Panghaizi is out of Twitter jail!
Want to read more about unexpected online celebrities from China? Also see:
The Story of Two Farmers Who Became Internet Celebrities;
The “Vagrant Shanghai Professor”;
From Farmgirl to Fashionista: Weibo Celebrity Fairy Wang.
By Jessica Colwell
Follow @whatsonweibo
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🗞️ QUICK SCROLLS
📈 Is China’s AI price war over? After a period of offering as much as possible to users at relatively low prices, Chinese AI (LLM) companies are now raising their prices. Last week, DeepSeek – known as the cheapest LLM model around – announced a raise in its API prices, showing that LLM models in China, like food delivery platforms, follow a clear strategy of first attracting users and subsidizing growth, then monetizing once users are locked in.
🐸 “Antibiotic bullfrogs” are a new cause for concern. Bullfrogs sold through e-commerce channels, popularly used in various dishes (like bullfrog hotpot), have been found to contain excessive antibiotic residues after being tested by an independent Shanghai investigation team. Antibiotics are widely used in bullfrog farming.
🌾 A 67-year-old farmer from Anhui ruined 25 acres of crops after following a chatbot’s advice on which pesticides to use. The AI tool recommended a strategy including fomesafen, which killed the farmer’s entire sesame plant crop. Chinese state media highlighted the story as a warning to the growing number of senior citizens who are relying on AI a bit too much.
👁️ A Chinese ad campaign for contact lenses has been taken offline because it starred an AI actress who doesn’t actually have eyes. Last week, I reported on the success of this AI actress, Fang Taozi (方桃子), in the AI micro drama “Laid-Off Girl” (被裁掉的女孩). After a Chinese cosmetic contact-lens brand paid a large sum to feature the actress in its commercial, regulators flagged it because the virtual actress claimed the contact lenses were “comfortable.” Because she doesn’t physically have eyes, this suggests false advertising, and the company could face an additional fine.
🎭 The famous Chinese actor Qin Yan (秦焰) has passed away at the age of 72. The veteran actor was a familiar face on Chinese TV since 1991 and was known for his many roles in TV series like Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace, The Knockout, and Joy of Life 2. While fans and colleagues are posting tributes online, the actor’s Baidu (Baike) page has turned black-and-white to mourn his death. The actor suffered from an illness that hasn’t been specified.
Images via Weibo, showing Qin Yan’s press photo on the left and on the right him portraying the role of Eunuch Dai, the corrupt director of the vegetable and food supply department in the popular historical drama series Joy of Life Season 2 (2024).
🏆 China’s animated film Ne Zha 2 was the biggest winner at the 38th Hundred Flower Awards, China’s most prestigious film awards. The movie grossed 15.9 billion yuan ($2.35 billion) and currently ranks as the world’s fifth highest-grossing film, right in between Titanic and Star Wars. Notably, director Jiaozi (real name Yang Yu 杨宇, b. 1980) was absent from the ceremony, as he always is. The director has a strong dislike for pointless socializing. 😂
🕯️ Remembered as a “Communist Warrior” (共产主义战士), the passing of former Chinese Premier and electrical engineer Zhu Rongji (朱镕基) became a top trending topic on Wednesday after an official obituary announced his death. Zhu is mostly remembered for his efforts to help transition from a planned economy to a socialist market economy, including his tax reform implementations, restructuring of state-owned enterprises, and creation of the mass home-ownership market. Zhu died of an illness in Beijing. He was 98 years old.
👁️ ZOOMING IN
1. Typhoon Baihaitun Brings Record Rainfall to Shanghai
Image via Weibo user @粗茶大白饭
Typhoon Baihaitun (白海豚 “White Dolphin”) has been one of the biggest keywords dominating Chinese social media this week as severe weather affected eastern China.
In Shanghai and surrounding areas, the typhoon caused major disruptions on August 9–10 due to strong winds and extreme rainfall. In Xujiahui, nearly 316 mm of rain fell within 24 hours, the highest amount recorded in Shanghai since observations began over 150 years ago. (The highest total was recorded at Lantian Station in Linhai, Taizhou, where rainfall surpassed a staggering 630 mm; that’s like buckets of water simply being poured down from the sky.)
Many roads, homes, and entire parking lots were completely flooded (video on X / Bluesky). Thousands of people were evacuated, flights were canceled, and metro lines were suspended. In some neighborhoods, residents reported that the water had reached all the way up the stairs.
The typhoon coincided with the Monday morning rush. Despite official guidance encouraging working from home, online complaints made it clear that many companies still expected their employees to show up at the office.
Shanghai Disneyland also remained open despite the severe weather. Videos show park visitors riding attractions in the pouring rain, and cast members in costumes needing help to navigate the rain and wind. The happiest place on earth has never looked so sad (see various videos in my thread here on X / Bluesky).
The impact of the typhoon is expected to last until at least Sunday.
2. Streisand Effect: Huawei Gets Bugged by Bamboo Cicada Toy
If the past week had one soundbite, it would be the rasping, buzzing cicada-like sound you get by spinning the traditional handmade “bamboo cicada” (竹知了 zhúzhīliǎo) wooden toy.
It became a viral sensation after netizens used its sounds to accompany videos of a Huawei event where Chairman Richard Yu (余承东) announced a new car. He described the AITO M9 as “the best SUV under 10 million yuan” (一千万以内最好，没有之一), prompting “wawaa” sounds and cheers from the audience. Soon, a meme was born in which social media users mixed the footage with the toy’s sound – not just because of the audience, but also because of Yu’s distinctive way of speaking.
That cicada toy meme would never have become as big if Huawei’s legal department hadn’t intervened. The company submitted complaints to social media platforms, and videos were removed. But this triggered a chain reaction – when people found the sound was being censored, it blew up in popularity. By now, not only is the sound used everywhere, but the toy itself has become a summer must-have (even though its origins are contested – some say it’s traditionally Japanese and not Chinese at all).
The American term “Streisand Effect” (in Chinese: 史翠珊效应 Shǐcuìshān xiàoyìng) has been used online to describe how Huawei’s reaction backfired.
The response by Huawei – or, more precisely, HIMA, the company’s smart-vehicle alliance brand – was criticized not only by netizens but also by official voices. The official account of Zhejiang Province was among many posting critiques, saying that “the stronger a company is, the greater its capacity to accept discussion” – in other words, calling Huawei weak for its reaction.
This makes it one of those rare moments when, especially when it’s about censorship, official and grassroots voices seem to agree, for once, on the limits of the kind of content that should and should not be controlled. In this way, the cicada sound has come to represent something much more than mocking Huawei, with netizens protecting their rights to criticize & ridicule China’s most powerful business players.
3. Japanese K-Pop Fan’s Death Shows Dark Side of Fan Culture
Miki Chan on the right, posing together with ENHYPEN group member NI-KI. Image via Weibo.
A tragic suicide livestreamed on TikTok became a trending topic across Chinese platforms over the past week, sparking discussions about toxic fan cultures and online bullying.
The 26-year-old Japanese K-pop influencer Mina Chan experienced an acute mental health crisis while livestreaming from her home in Seoul on August 5. This happened after she suffered weeks of severe online bullying stemming from an incident at the US concert of her favorite pop group, the boy band ENHYPEN.
During the concert, Mina tried to give sunflowers to her favorite singer, Nishimura Riki, better known as NI-KI, by throwing them onto the stage. When another group member picked them up instead, she appeared upset. When NI-KI later criticized fans for seeking personal attention rather than enjoying the concert, many fans felt he was referring to Mina.
In the following weeks, Mina received so much online harassment, doxxing, and hate that she first apologized on X and withdrew from the fan club before eventually broadcasting her final livestream, in which she died by hanging. Mean comments continued throughout the livestream.
Online discussions in China have largely framed the incident in terms of online aggression (网暴, wǎngbào) and problematic fan circles (饭圈, fànquān). Although Mina was a Japanese fan of a South Korean band, K-pop fandom is also enormous in China.
Both online aggression and toxic fan culture have been repeatedly targeted by Chinese cyberspace authorities in recent years, undoubtedly contributing to greater public awareness of these problems. Against this backdrop, Mina’s death has prompted widespread calls to end online bullying, while thousands of Chinese netizens have expressed their sorrow over the young woman’s death.
Notably, just one day before Mina’s livestream, American celebrity blogger Perez Hilton became a global trending topic after self-harming during a TikTok livestream that remained online for approximately fifteen minutes, allowing a large audience to watch the disturbing events unfold – similar to what happened with Mina’s livestream. In the United States, the incident sparked further discussion about platform moderation and TikTok’s failure to end livestreams quickly when signs of self-harm or an acute mental health crisis emerge.
📱ON MY FEED
This post reads:
“China Southern, what on earth are you doing? I gulped it all down, only to realize it wasn’t grape juice, it was prune juice!!! This is the first time I’ve seen such a long, never-ending line of people waiting to use the restroom on a plane; the prize pool just kept growing.
Do you have any idea how much I suffered? #InFlightMeal #ChinaSouthern #PruneJuice”
After passengers on a China Southern Airlines flight from Wuhan to Urumqi were served prune juice with their meal, the queues for the plane’s only two toilets kept growing as dozens of passengers felt the high urge to go.
One other review said:
“What were you thinking, serving prune juice? China Southern, please answer me. You nearly made me shit myself.”
🔗 SEEN ELSEWHERE
🔹 “Grandma Economy” (“姥姥经济”) fills a void for urban Chinese Gen Z and millennial consumers who are increasingly projecting their nostalgia for the warmth of grandmothers onto the brands they buy, the content they consume, and the creators they follow. Read at Baiguan / by Amber Zhang.
🔹 Toddler twins are at the center of a very messy custody case involving a surrogate mother from Florida and a Chinese father who might never be allowed to enter the US. Born in November 2024, the twins are biologically not connected to the surrogate mother, but after the Chinese legal father never came to collect them, she and her husband want to adopt them. A new Florida law has now placed the case at the center of conservative outrage over Chinese parents allegedly exploiting the state’s lax surrogacy rules. Read at Wall Street Journal / by Katherine Long.
🔹 A Chinese state media correspondent has been accused of being a spy by the Czech Security Information Service, which identified Yang as an operative of China’s Ministry of State Security, alleging he used his cover as a journalist to collect compromising information on Czech politicians, particularly those supportive of closer ties with Taiwan. Read at Reporters Without Borders.
🔹 “What I feared to be my lifelong search has unexpectedly come to an end. Yesterday, I got a message from my family searcher in China on WeChat that I have a positive DNA match with my biological parents.” In late 2024, I wrote about how the Dutch adoptee Fengli Bottema had come to China in search of her biological family after she was left in front of an Anhui police station as a baby back in 2001. There’s now an update to her story, which echoes that of thousands of Chinese girls adopted abroad. Her search has finally come to an end. Read Fengli’s Instagram post here.
Thanks to Miranda Barnes for helping me curate topics for this edition.
China Celebs
Quiet Nationalism, Loud Statements, and Nanjing Memorial Day
From war memory to viral eggs, salty cakes, an unfortunate dinner party and farewell to an iconic actress.
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John
January 2, 2020 at 9:47 am
thank you, just discover this guy. And I like his post and video haha.
I guess he can be a social KOL superstar in the world. 😉