As a TikTok ban looms, a whole bunch of hundreds of People casting about for a brand new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that interprets as “Little Pink E-book,” the American nickname for a traditional compendium of quotations from Chairman Mao. It has all performed out like a world sensible joke on the American authorities: Threatened with exile from TikTok over issues of Chinese language interference, its customers have merely scrolled to a unique Chinese language app, one whose title evokes the Chinese language Communist Celebration.
After I downloaded Xiaohongshu, broadly referred to as RedNote, it was ranked first amongst free apps in Apple’s U.S. App Retailer. (The second was Lemon8, one other Chinese language TikTok different owned by TikTok’s mother or father firm, ByteDance.) I surrendered my telephone quantity, reported my gender and ticked off a few of my pursuits: child care, calligraphy, snacks. Then I absorbed a number of the app’s algorithmically chosen movies: A lady in a lace veil consuming an ice pop the scale of her head; a girl getting ready dinner within the again seat of a minicar lined with animal plushies; a stirring fan edit of Luigi Mangione courtroom appearances.
Quickly I began to see movies pitched straight at me — welcome notes created for the American TikTok person who not too long ago arrived on RedNote’s shores.
Contained in the world of Xiaohongshu, the People downloading the app en masse have been branded “TikTok refugees.” Its current Chinese language customers have jokingly marketed themselves because the People’ “new Chinese language spies,” began administering Mandarin classes and fashioned in-app group chats for “refugees” to get the lay of the land. They’ve warned that they intend to gather a tax from international customers (the worth tag: You should share an image of a cat).
It’s all a wry commentary on the U.S. authorities’s crackdown on TikTok, and the relative ease with which customers can merely regenerate an analogous expertise on another Chinese language platform. Collectively, Chinese language energy customers and American newbies are spontaneously performing a mocking burlesque of nationwide safety coverage.
For TikTok customers, the choice to banish TikTok particularly from American telephones can appear foolish. Over the previous a number of years, lawmakers have blamed the app for the whole lot from failing to uphold “American values” to selling pro-Palestinian content material amongst American youth. As if American-owned social media firms like Meta have by no means sought to mine and exploit delicate knowledge. As if American-owned platforms like X would by no means juice their algorithms to reward sure political concepts.
However in fact, it’s the nature of social media to make an impersonal tech product really feel intimate, whereas its hidden prices (and threats) stay distant and unimaginable. It makes it laborious to make certain what’s actually happening within the again finish.
If the TikTok ban succeeds, and People are on Xiaohongshu to remain, they might come to dominate its tradition, water down its enchantment, break its vibe. However in the intervening time, they’re guests in a international land, struggling to learn Mandarin directions and navigate the app’s unfamiliar pathways.
The platform, which is owned by a Shanghai-based firm referred to as Xingyin Data Know-how, is aglow with a giddy exchange-program feeling. On Wednesday, I encountered slightly boy in a fuzzy pink sweater explaining (and modeling) a rack of Chinese language conventional clothes, and a sweatshirt-wearing bro warning us to not present our butts or say something racist, and an cute influencer who posted a video responding to “feedback from TikTok refugees,” most of them making an attempt to flirt with him. (One requested him methods to say “daddy” in Mandarin.) The cat-meme tax is a pleasant contact, a sign that RedNote customers are keen to speak with People by means of our shared historical web language.
One in all my favourite movies got here from a Chinese language person, a trainer of the English language, who additionally does a good impression of Donald J. Trump — and who’s now instructing English audio system methods to say “America” in Mandarin in a Trumpian voice. The video pokes enjoyable at Trump’s persistently weird pronunciation of “China” and implies that maybe it’s time to offer America the identical remedy.
Xiaohongshu has offered a uncommon glimpse of a Chinese language perspective on America, generously translated and packaged for American consumption. The glow of our digital trip could come to an finish quickly, but it surely was well worth the image of the cat.
