Dubbed China’s Useless Edison, Geng Shuai, since 2017 has racked up more than 2.7 million followers on the Chinese short video app Kuaishou and nearly a million on its Twitter-like Weibo. “The jobs I used to have were extremely boring and uninspiring. It was more or less a case of doing the same thing every day,” said Geng, who spent more than a dozen years in jobs he didn’t enjoy after dropping out of school at 16.