While many live-streaming stars, such as Papi Jiang, an irreverent comic from Shanghai, are culled from the ranks of China’s top arts schools, Mr. Li is unpolished, raw and agitated. He considers himself a champion of the working class and regularly rails against what he sees as elitism in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Conscious of his fan base, Mr. Li has taken his image as a man of the people to an extreme.

He eats bananas because “they are easy to get for ordinary people, not some fancy fruit.” He keeps his earnings in the bank account of his mother, a restaurant owner. And he is fond of quoting Mao, another populist figure, often saying, for example, that small villages can band together to rival the influence of big cities.

Mr. Li is particularly popular among young women, who admire his humility, his devotion to his parents and his traditional views on marriage and gender.

“His fans are people born after 1990 who are brave and say whatever we believe without anything to hide,” said Liu Chenfan, a 19-year-old from the northeastern province of Liaoning who will start college this fall. “He’s a real man, ready to protect women.”

Zhang He, 25, a cashier who makes about $450 a month at a spa in Dalian, about half the median income in Beijing, said Mr. Li understood the plight of workers struggling to make a living outside China’s big cities.

“Each time I watch him, I laugh so hard that I forget things that bother me in real life, like work and relationship issues,” she said. “He never spends money wildly, although he is so rich now.”