In 2007, a Chinese company launched a product called 金坷垃 Jinkela (literally 'Golden Lumps of Earth' or 'Golden Soil'), a fertilizer supplement promoted as a miraculous boon to crop yields. The company, purportedly based in the USA, was called 美国·圣地亚戈 American·SHENGDIYAGE (a clunky phonetic transcription of ‘San Diego’) and, besides Jinkela, offered products ranging from the 三把火 Sanbahuo ('Three Handfuls of Fire') pesticide to the 金氮丹 Jindandan ('Golden Nitrogen Pellet') fertilizer.
One American·SHENGDIYAGE TV commercial describes the company as a world-class example of pioneering agricultural innovation: crassly hinting at the endorsement of former presidents Bush and Clinton, paired with stock footage of high-tech equipment and nuclear explosions, this commercial presents Jinkela as "America's most powerful secret", a product capable of changing agriculture worldwide. News outlets across China were quick to debunk Jinkela’s claims, quoting experts that condemned the ads as misleading, and warned farmers against trusting falsely advertised products.
A shorter Jinkela commercial takes a different route around international relations and national stereotypes, depicting an American company salesman driving around China and encountering two other foreigners – one African, one Japanese – both comically begging him for Jinkela. After carefully listening to their arguments ("Africa's agriculture is underdeveloped", versus "Japan is short on resources") he decides to provide Jinkela to Africa for purely pragmatic reasons: maintaining Japan's dependence on American exports.
In another ad of the same series, a woman rushes through the fields to dramatically stop her husband from using a competing product, lecturing him about the pseudo-scientific advantages of Jinkela. When it is re-uploaded on Bilibili – a popular Chinese video-sharing platform – viewers augment the video with comments emphasizing the most memorable lines and cursing the low-grade production: "Aren't you a fucking fake countryfolk?", "This is so awkward that I want to die". Others, given the relative antiquity of the original TV commercial, praise the uploader for his contribution to the 考古 kaogu ('archaeology') of online content.
Besides rediscovering and appreciating old TV commercials through commenting practices, Chinese users also produce remixes and video mashups that combine Jinkela ads with other genres of viral content (in this case, the exaggerated laughter of Korean actor Choi Seong-guk) and sync their spoken lines to the autotuned melodies of popular songs. Video-sharing platforms like AcFun and Bilibili host countless versions of these remixes, organizing them by genre and compiling curated selections of the most popular and inventive ones.
Almost ten years after the airing of the original TV commercials, Jinkela is enshrined in the repertoire of Chinese digital folklore. In an article from 2015, a reporter rehashes the product's peculiar history and discovers a new series of scams perpetrated by its creators: "Do you remember Jinkela? This fraudulent gang is back!". Digging deeper into the identity of Earl of William, the mythical Harvard researcher credited with the invention of Jinkela, the report identifies him as a royalty-free stock photo character used across a variety of more recent Chinese advertisements for water heaters, real estate developments and microwave-based myopia treatments.