Streaming success

Online video hosts, especially those addressing cultural differences between China and other countries, are becoming instant celebrities. Chen Nan reports.

'Do you want to marry a Chinese woman? Then, you have to be prepared," Thomas Derksen says, speaking a mix of fluent Mandarin and Shanghai dialect. The German wears wigs, applies makeup and plays the roles of his Shanghainese wife and in-laws in the three-minute video in which he humorously talks about his marriage and being a son-in-law to a Chinese family.

Derksen shot the video in March 2016, after he filmed his first short clip in which he introduces vegetables from his home country.

"After we posted the second video, my wife got sick and I had to bring her to the hospital," Derksen recalls. "While waiting for her to finish her treatment, I checked my phone and saw it was exploding - thousands of messages from Sina Weibo and WeChat. So many people were sharing our video. Then I thought: 'Oh, my god! That's it!'"

His wildly popular weekly videos humorously address everyday life and social topics in excellent Chinese. He has more than 3 million followers on Sina Weibo, and his 66 videos have had more than 180 million views on such streaming platforms as Miaopai, Chinese video site Youku and Facebook. He's better known on social media by his Chinese name, A Fu.

One of his videos about Shanghai's summer heat had about 100 million views across platforms.