The 60-Yuan Bouquet at the Center of China's Biggest Influencer-Family Feud

The post that put the feud back at the top of Weibo came, oddly, from a florist. On October 10, a flower-shop owner wrote about the Mother's Day when Li Leyou — a 25-year-old influencer with more than two million followers — came in, thought a 168-yuan bouquet too expensive, and settled for two small discounted bunches at 60 yuan, delighted at the deal. "At the time I was secretly annoyed," the florist wrote, in a post liked more than 7,000 times. "I thought, what a stingy influencer. I owe her an apology. Perhaps she really doesn't have any money." The detail that sealed its virality: the priciest thing on her, the florist recalled, was an action camera.

Why would the daughter of one of China's best-known influencer families be counting out 60 yuan? That question is the whole story. Li Leyou was the rural child paired with a wealthy city family on the reality show X-Change (变形记) in the 2010s — the format flew country kids into city homes for a semester of contrast — and her twelve years with Cui Jin's family, shown and streamed ever since, had become China's best-loved reality-TV sequel. When the arrangement publicly frayed last month, the site covered the falling-out: allowances cut over her sleep schedule, a noodle shop she had been publicly promised, never handed over, a move into a rented room and a job at a bead shop to pay the rent.

This week brought round two. Cui Jin, the son, publicly accused Leyou of hiring paid trolls to shape the narrative — a claim liked more than 20,000 times — on the stated logic that her money had all gone to "buying a car and opening a shop." He has been privately messaging accounts that post about the family, according to screenshots shared across platforms: "Is this organized or personal? I've already called the police... Where would Li Leyou get the money to buy trolls?" The arithmetic reads differently depending on which post you trust. Widely shared recaps say the two-million-follower account she fronts is registered under Cui Jin's name, its advertising revenue never distributed to her; the family's account of the same arrangement is a household business pooling its income. Her answer, when asked directly about a rupture, has been minimal: "My relationship with Auntie Jin is fine — beyond that I'd rather not discuss it."

Around the main dispute, the fandom war has spilled onto bystanders. Fans dragged merchants into it, swarming their accounts online; an influencer named Liu Linlin who waded in to sneer at them — "your fave must have done something shameful, look at you attacking shops" — then saw brands publicly move to cut her contracts over separate remarks mocking fallen Sichuan Army soldiers ("martyrs are national heroes and will not be sneered at," one brand's statement read), and her Douyin account was then banned. Another influencer in her circle, known as Little Yellow Bean, announced a formal break with her. Meanwhile the family's promotional video featuring Leyou has been taken down, and reports of a quiet reconciliation circulate; her old room, the recaps note, has been kept for her.

The posts arguing hardest are not really about money. They are about what the arrangement was: rescue, adoption, employment, or content. The florist's 60 yuan cuts through it as documentation no statement can — the visible face of a girl who spent her adolescence as a family's most valuable asset now paying her own rent from a bead-shop wage. Her own post when she moved out read, simply, "accepting that things don't go as you wish" (接受一切事与愿违).