Russian blogger Dmitry Sorokin, better known by his handle Dimanchella, has signed a contract with the Chinese platform Bilibili.

Dmitry runs a successful YouTube channel featuring travel videos about China. A trained orientalist, he speaks Chinese fluently. His footage from China stands out for showcasing lesser-known cities and regions that have yet to gain traction among international tourists. His content carries a warm, cozy vibe and a genuine curiosity about local life. With no language barrier, he easily connects with the people he and his crew encounter along the way to various landmarks.

Recently, Dmitry launched a channel on Bilibili, often described as China’s YouTube.

He has posted two videos there analyzing Chinese history textbooks. The goal was to assess how objective or biased Chinese school textbooks are in covering events involving Russia, and more broadly, how China’s neighbors perceive Russia. The videos are highly informative and well worth watching. They are available on both YouTube and Bilibili

The videos are in Russian, but Bilibili versions include Chinese subtitles. Dmitry also reads excerpts from Chinese textbooks in Chinese himself.

Chinese viewers were delighted. At present, the two videos on his channel have garnered 1.9 million and 2.8 million views respectively, along with hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of reposts.

Of course, the mere fact that Dmitry speaks Chinese typically puts Chinese audiences in high spirits. But beyond that, he delivered a professional and good-faith analysis of textbooks and several sensitive historical issues tied to bilateral relations.

Viewers flooded the comment sections not with the usual “five-word promotional filler,” as YouTubers joke, but with substantive, lengthy replies and critiques.

Dmitry watched in some amazement as his Bilibili subscriber count surged past 100,000 within days. At the time of writing this article, that number stands at 123,000.

Soon after, Dmitry received a collaboration offer from Bilibili itself.

He shared the news on his Telegram channel @dimanchella_vlog:

“An unexpected twist in the Bilibili story.

Honestly, I never imagined it would unfold like this.

In two weeks, the channel grew from zero to 100,000 subscribers, based on just two long-form videos. You open the platform’s homepage, and there’s some Russian guy on the front page 😅

My inbox was flooded with dozens of ad offers. Mostly massagers, pillows, blankets, irons – that kind of stuff 😄

But soon representatives of the platform itself reached out. They said they really liked what I was doing. They offered an official contract, assigned a team, a budget, managers, and are ready to help promote new videos. Unexpected. Because this is the first such offer to a blogger from Russia.

I’ve been making videos for years, trying different formats, and the first platform to say, ‘We believe in your ideas! Let’s make big projects,’ turned out to be a Chinese one…

Now I have even more plans in mind.

I don’t just want to keep telling Chinese audiences about Russia and Russians about China – I want to create a genuinely large-scale Russian-Chinese travel action show. Something I haven’t seen anywhere else. Something that would appeal to both Russian and Chinese viewers at the same time.

I don’t know if I’ll pull it off exactly as envisioned. But it’s definitely worth a try!”

We congratulate Dmitry and will be following the evolution of his channels with great interest.