Jiafei

2021viral characterclassic

Jiafei is a TikTok meme from May 2021 built around Chinese bot accounts that flooded the app with bizarre product ads featuring a photoshopped Asian woman's face and broken-English captions selling 'sexy products.' The account name, the recognizable face, and the running joke about bots kidnapping users through IP-grabbing bio links spawned a wave of parody accounts, remixed screams, and Stan Twitter inside jokes.

Overview

Jiafei is a TikTok meme built around a wave of Chinese bot accounts that showed up on the app in mid-2021, reposting videos from Douyin with absurd product ads and links to buy things like 'sexy products' from the account bios1. The bots almost all used variations of the name 'Jiafei' and the same photoshopped face of an Asian woman, which everyone assumed was two K-pop stars mashed together until the real woman came forward two years later2.

The format is easy to spot: low-quality repurposed clips, weirdly upbeat sounds, mangled English captions calling everyone 'bestie,' and a hard sell to click the bio link3. Once the bots started liking random comments and flooding For You pages, users on Stan Twitter and TikTok turned the whole thing into a running bit, complete with a signature scream, a kidnapping subplot, and dedicated parody accounts that outlasted the original bots4.

How It Spread

By mid-2021, the bots were hitting For You pages often enough that parody accounts started popping up. TikToker jiafei7 posted its first parody on July 3, 2021 and went viral eleven days later with a clip that hit around 39,600 plays4. Bigger accounts followed: on September 9, 2021, jiafei.queen posted a Jiafei riff that pulled roughly 2.9 million plays and 314,100 likes over ten months4. The parody scene leaned hard into the 'sexy products' bit and the bots' habit of calling everyone 'bestie'5.

A separate strand of the meme was the 'Jiafei Scream,' pulled from a May 11, 2021 TikTok in which a woman cooks under an umbrella and screams when fire jumps from the pan to her face4. Jiafei accounts remixed the scream into sped-up sound edits through late 2021, and it became a stock audio for reaction videos across the format. Users also spun up a satirical kidnapping storyline, joking that anyone who clicked the bio links would get their IP address traced and be abducted, which parody accounts then acted out with pull-through-a-window skits4. Around the same time, Jiafei edits started crossing over with Skinny Girl Walking Sideways clips, tying it into a wider mid-2021 cluster of surreal TikTok memes4.

Dai's 2023 reveal gave the meme a second wind. Her English-captioned follow-up, posted on October 26, 2023 from the account @jiafei.dai, pulled over 971,000 plays and 97,000 likes in two weeks and confirmed she only learned about the meme in June 2023 after a friend told her6. By that point the #jiafei hashtag had reached 610 million views on TikTok, and her face had been superimposed onto a remixed version of Ariana Grande's 'Focus' with 44,000 views on YouTube3.

How to Use This Meme

Making a Jiafei video usually means copying the bot template as literally as possible: reposted footage of an attractive woman doing something ordinary, an unrelated Douyin sound, a caption pitching 'sexy products' in broken English, and a bio-link call to action. Parody accounts often add the 'bestie' verbal tic, drop the Jiafei Scream sound over a small mishap, or work in the kidnapping bit where the viewer gets 'IP-address tracked' for clicking the link5. The joke lands on how off the whole thing feels compared to normal TikTok content, so the more obviously fake and low-effort the ad, the better it plays.

Frequently Asked Questions