Dilraba's Father Sold 7,000 Orders of Aksu Apples in 20 Minutes of Livestreaming — for Free

The livestream was set up like any other. A man in a black leather jacket and white shirt sat behind a table of apples in an orchard, with red apples hanging on the trees behind him and a shopping red-envelope giveaway banner in the corner of the frame. He cut an apple open to show the yellow flesh — the sugar-heart pattern that makes Aksu apples, grown in Xinjiang's far northwest, famous across China. His name on the Douyin account is "Director Dili, Helping Farmers," and the account has 418,000 followers. He is also the father of Dilraba, one of China's most famous actresses.

The invitation was formal. The Aksu Prefecture Commerce Bureau's letter, photographed and circulated on Weibo, invited Dilimulati Aibaila — Dilraba's father — to participate in a livestream e-commerce event promoting Xinjiang's agricultural products. In 20 minutes, he sold 7,000 orders. The arrangement's terms are the part Chinese readers are praising: no fee, no commission, no advertising, a pure public-interest account run by a state-owned enterprise, and the star's father describing himself as a "literary worker" with a duty to promote his hometown.

The genre is the context. The celebrity-assisted agricultural livestream has become a fixture of China's rural e-commerce push, in which a famous face is brought in to sell a region's fruit or tea to national buyers, usually with a local government's commerce bureau arranging the invitation. The genre's big names are the models: a livestream by a top star can move a season's harvest in an afternoon, and the local commerce bureau's role is to guarantee the supply and the authenticity. The genre's critics are its scammers — the ones who sell the "assistance" without the agriculture — and the genre's best moments, like this one, are the ones where the arrangement is transparent.

The apple's story is the part the international reader should know. Aksu, in Xinjiang, is China's sugar-heart apple capital — a fruit grown in a high-altitude oasis with a high day-night temperature difference that produces the translucent sugar ring that gives the apple its name. The region's fruit trade is the backbone of the local economy, and the livestream's 7,000 orders in 20 minutes is the kind of number that, for a single orchard, can turn a season's harvest into a national event.

One comment on the trending topic, liked more than 10,000 times, put the mood plainly: "A very down-to-earth public-interest activity, invited directly by the commerce bureau, no tricks, just helping his hometown's apples."