‘Funny and kind of sad’: how Clarkson’s Farm has captured Chinese viewers

Jeremy Clarkson (R) with farmer Kaleb Cooper on series three of Clarkson’s Farm. Photograph: Ellis O'Brien

To one Chinese reviewer, Jeremy Clarkson is “a stupid old British man with too much money who farmed for a year without harvesting anything”. To another, he is “the British version of Li Ziqi”, a 33-year-old woman who is one of China’s biggest internet celebrities thanks to videos of herself farming and cooking in the idyllic Sichuanese countryside.

Clarkson’s Farm, the former Top Gear presenter’s beguilingly popular reality television show about his pivot from petrolhead to farmer, has been hugely successful on his home turf, becoming the most watched show on Amazon Prime in the UK. It is also a hit in China.

The show has a 9.6 out of 10 rating on the Chinese review website Douban, where nearly 80,000 people have left their overwhelmingly positive views of the show. It has been watched more than 5m times on the Chinese streaming service BiliBili.

In an early episode, Clarkson makes one of his many gaffes by leaving a shipment of seeds outside a barn, where they sprout and knit themselves – and the bag – into the ground.

One reviewer on Douban said this resonated with her rural childhood. “I often saw adults pulling up a bag of seeds that accidentally germinated early due to rainy weather, and looking at them with regret. Seeds are usually very expensive … When Clarkson’s Farm encountered this kind of problem, wheat production decreased and his income dropped sharply. His face was full of disappointment and distress. Anyone who has lived and worked in the countryside can understand the pain and sweat shed by hard work.”

But for many fans, the appeal of Clarkson’s Farm derives from the fact that, unlike previous generations, the majority of young people who watch it have never farmed a day in their life.

Zoe Mou, a millennial from the northern city of Dalian, discovered the show during Covid lockdown in Beijing. “I was in my apartment, mostly just binge-watching shows, playing video games, being depressed and drinking and video-calling with my friends … Watching [Clarkson’s Farm] took me outside of that little circle … and taught me something about agriculture.”

Mou said the show illustrated “the brutality of country life … it requires a lot of hard work and, I’m sorry, as a city person we’re extremely uneducated about that”.

Mou’s ignorance of – and interest in – country life speaks to a trend of rural nostalgia that is increasingly popular among Chinese urbanites. Another hit show of recent years is Become a Farmer, a reality show in which Generation Z urbanites are sent to a work on a farm. The show has a rating of 9 on Douban.

The popularity of shows about urbanites toiling on the land might be expected to strike a different chord in China, where, during the cultural revolution, around 17 million young people were “sent down” to the countryside for hard labour and a socialist re-education. More recently, there have been calls in official media for young people, who are facing high rates of unemployment, to “roll their sleeves up” and work in the countryside. While the older generation was sent down largely involuntarily, many of today’s young generation “yearn for an imaginary and romanticised version of country life, a bucolic life seen as an escape from the rat race in urban jungle”, according to Ying Zhu, a scholar of Chinese media at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Clarkson’s Farm, however, is not exactly romanticised. In one particularly vivid episode, he tries to coerce a flock of disobedient sheep into copulating, with mixed results. In his first year of running the farm, he ends with £144 in profit. “It’s funny, it’s kind of sad, and it also shows me another side of the UK, which I’d never known,” says Mou. “I’d never seen British people cursing in that way until I watched the show.”

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin