David Gulasi


David Gulasi is an Australian social media figure active in China.
Rowan Callick of the Weekend Australian described him as "by far the best-known Australian in the country".

Early biography

He grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney. His family was Turkish Australian. He attended the University of Sydney with a study programme in computers.
He initially worked in sales, and had a career in Mediterranean cuisine. He also previously did standup comedy.

Career

Circa 2011 he moved to Hohhot, and began working at Hohhot No 35 Middle School. The agency he used assigned him to Hohhot even though he was at first to go to Shenyang. Gulasi later established his own training school for adult education, New World Language Training School.
Gulasi had started a social media account with some videos, and before his first major video his follower count was 50. He gained significant social media attention when he posted a video of people making the mistake of using the word "play" to mean to socialize with someone when the word is not natively used in English in this way. Gulasi's follower count was at 5,000 followers at one point, and then to 120,000 24 hours after that. The video with the misuse of "play" was ultimately reblogged 71,100 times and received 29,880 likes and 27,400 comments.
He uses QQ and Sina Weibo, with the latter being his primary point of activity. Millennials are his main audience. He had 5 million followers on the latter by 2017. Later that year his follower count was eight million. By 2019 Gulasi had over 1.7 million followers. Prices for advertising on Gulasi's page reached up to $60,000 U.S. dollars. By 2017 the advertising price was up to $75,000 Australian dollars.
In 2019 Gulasi posted in favor of the swimmer Sun Yang.

Personal life

He married a woman who he met on QQ; they have a daughter.