Death of a 24-Year-Old Mukbang Streamer Exposes the Brutal Economics of China's Eating Broadcasts

Chen Ziyi, the Chinese mukbang streamer known to 1.24 million followers as "Ganfan Ying" — roughly, Ying Who Chows Down — died on August 17. She was 24. Her obituary, posted by her parents on September 4, named no cause, but the reports that have followed her death read her final months as an open ledger of what the job cost her: emergency potassium infusions, hospital stays, and a body she measured publicly at 1.62 meters and 70 jin — 35 kilograms.

The Beijing News's reconstruction, summarized in a post that drew wide attention, traces the arc. Six years in the trade, Chen began as an assistant eater on the channel of a bigger streamer, who introduced her in a 2023 broadcast without blinking: Ying might spend ten-odd hours a day eating, a single meal four hours and more, her stomach holding up to 20 jin of food at a time. When she went solo she built a signature out of escalation — larger plates, taller stacks, oddities like lamb brain and beef marrow — and a speed act that once dispatched a pig's trotter in 23 seconds. Fans who watched closely left comments like "like chewing sand" or "it looks like she'll be sick any second." She kept eating.

What the audience was actually watching, the report argues, was an eating disorder performing as content. Chen's path there began in the art-exam track — a dance student at 16, told by teachers that her body was the one thing she could control, dropping from 140 jin to 82 within months of training, and learning from classmates to purge after meals. By 2019 she had a diagnosis of depressive bulimia. The purging drained her potassium; on a livestream she read out a potassium reading of about 2.3 mmol/L — the normal range is 3.5 to 5.5, and below 2.5 counts as severe, an emergency state that can stop the heart. She laughed it off: "I'll probably be able to stream tomorrow, I'll try to eat less."

Her parents have a phrase for the trade: "trading her life for money" (拿命换钱). The economics around her had grown into a family concern. Her parents appeared as sidekicks, then quarrelled with her on camera — scripted at first, by the family's own account, and increasingly not — before starting a copycat channel of their own; her boyfriend and his mother opened accounts too. After her death the family cleared its old livestreams but kept the storefronts. In the weeks that followed, the phrase "the whole internet's mukbang streamers are taking potassium now" (全网吃播都在补钾) was all over the short-video platforms, and one fellow streamer — who said she had never known Chen — promptly added potassium supplements to her own storefront, among the trade's hottest products.

Her parents told the Beijing News they do not accept the explanation that bulimia-induced potassium loss stopped their daughter's heart — other streamers, they note, have survived worse readings — and an autopsy result is still pending. The report's most quoted details are the small ones: in her last streams she asked viewers, "What if I'm gone someday?", and in her final months her posts were no longer about the trade at all — she shared travel, and ordinary meals, as if she had never been a streamer. She left one line as her account signature: "I never wanted to be some rough girl battling the whole world — but none of you ever treated me as a girl at all" (我并不想做个征战四方的女流氓，可是你们谁也没把我当成个小姑娘).