A viral video of a fashion blogger in China being proposed to in Paris which attracted a staggering 60 million views on social media has placed her life under the spotlight. Xu Yan, better known as Teacher Xu, was once a humble newspaper intern, but she now has about 20 million followers on mainland social media platforms. On July 13, her boyfriend, also a blogger with three million fans whose alias is Hangzai, proposed to her in Paris and she accepted, the news outlet Net Ease reported.
Hangzai did not tell Xu about his proposal plan. Instead, he asked her assistant to tell her she was meeting a business partner in a luxury hotel near the Eiffel Tower. As Xu walked onto the hotel’s balcony, which was decorated with flowers, she saw her boyfriend dressed in a white suit and holding a bunch of roses.
“A long time ago, I told Hangzai that I had never seen the Eiffel Tower on a starry night. Today, when the Eiffel Tower lights up, I become a fiancée,” Xu wrote on Weibo. The proposal footage attracted 1.
3 million likes on Douyin alone – with nearly 60 million views in total across platforms that included Weibo and Bilibili – demonstrating Xu’s popularity online in China. But a decade ago, the now 32-year-old was just an intern at a newspaper earning 800 yuan (US$110) a month. She had graduated from Jinan University in Guangzhou in southern China’s Guangdong province, with a major in Chinese literature.
In the newsroom, Xu was assigned to edit articles before publi.