A 92-Year-Old Chengdu Street Vendor Is Being 'Camera Bullied' by Short-Video Creators

For more than two decades, a woman known across Chengdu only as Grandma Xue has stood behind a small metal cart selling egg pancakes. She is 92 years old, she starts work around midday and has said she sometimes stays until one or two in the morning, and the steel plate in her leg from an old injury has never been removed. For years she was a local sight. Then, in 2019, she went viral — and a street vendor's daily routine turned into a content farm.

That viral fame has now hardened into something uglier. This week, two Weibo topics put the same scene up for public judgment: her story, and what users are calling "camera bullying." Short-video creators have been crowding her stall, filming her without buying anything, holding phones close to her face and deliberately needling her until she snaps — all while recording, because an angry ninety-something vendor is exactly the clip that wins views. One widely liked post captured the mood: if you dislike her temper or her hygiene, just don't buy it; there is no reason to surround an old woman, goad her, and film the result.

The viral economy cuts both ways. Her high prices — most pancakes sell for well above the street average — and her brusque manner had already made her a controversial online fixture long before this week's topics. Critics called her pancakes overpriced and questioned her hygiene; fans saw an elderly woman who had earned the right to sell on her own terms. Both readings are true at once, which is precisely why so many creators find her a reliable subject. She has said she does not play with her phone and barely registers what people say about her online, so she cannot see the apparatus assembled around her.

What is newly visible, thanks to the backlash, is the biography underneath the persona. Media reports that resurfaced this week note that Grandma Xue's son fell ill and died years ago, and that his treatment left the family in debt. It was after his death, to support the household and pay down what was owed, that she took to the street with her cart. At her busiest she has said she could earn twenty or thirty thousand yuan a month — a figure that once drew envy rather than sympathy, framed as proof that the old woman was doing fine. The fuller picture is less comfortable: a nonagenarian working a fifteen-hour shift on an injured leg because she decided not to depend on anyone else.

That context has shifted the conversation. Where earlier debate centered on whether customers were being cheated, the current discussion treats the creators as the problem. A post liked more than 20,000 times dismissed the whole practice: you cannot stand her temper, fine — walking away is the answer, not circling her to provoke a reaction. Another commentary put the anger in harsher terms, describing her as surrounded by a hunt in which the audience was complicit. Even users who blame her for impatience now argue that deliberately straining a ninety-year-old's temper, on camera, is its own kind of cruelty.

The episode sits inside a longer-running tension about how China's short-video platforms reward encounter journalism. Creators chase "real people" moments — the irritable vendor, the guard who won't let you film, the neighbor who lost it on the steps — because authenticity is the one thing a script cannot supply. The economics punish restraint: a calm conversation does not travel. Grandma Xue is only the latest subject to be mined that way, and the question her case raises is whether the people holding the phones owe their subjects anything more than the view count they generate. The answer this week, from hundreds of thousands of Weibo users, is yes.