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As a TikTok ban looms, hundreds of thousands of Americans casting about for a new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that translates as “Little Red Book,” the American nickname for a classic compendium of quotations from Chairman Mao. It has all played out like a global practical joke on the American government: Threatened with exile from TikTok over concerns of Chinese interference, its users have simply scrolled to a different Chinese app, one whose name evokes the Chinese Communist Party.
When I downloaded Xiaohongshu, widely called RedNote, it was ranked first among free apps in Apple’s U.S. App Store. (The second was Lemon8, another Chinese TikTok alternative owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.) I surrendered my phone number, reported my gender and ticked off some of my interests: baby care, calligraphy, snacks. Then I absorbed a selection of the app’s algorithmically selected videos: A girl in a lace veil eating an ice pop the size of her head; a woman preparing dinner in the back seat of a minicar lined with animal plushies; a stirring fan edit of Luigi Mangione court appearances.
Soon I started to see videos pitched directly at me — welcome notes created for the American TikTok user who recently arrived on RedNote’s shores.
Inside the world of Xiaohongshu, the Americans downloading the app en masse have been branded “TikTok refugees.” Its existing Chinese users have jokingly advertised themselves as the Americans’ “new Chinese spies,” started administering Mandarin lessons and formed in-app group chats for “refugees” to get the lay of the land. They have warned that they intend to collect a tax from foreign users (the price tag: You must share a picture of a cat).
It’s all a wry commentary on the U.S. government’s crackdown on TikTok, and the relative ease with which users can simply regenerate a similar experience on some other Chinese platform. Together, Chinese power users and American newbies are spontaneously performing a mocking burlesque of national security policy.
For TikTok users, the decision to banish TikTok specifically from American phones can seem silly. Over the past several years, lawmakers have blamed the app for everything from failing to uphold “American values” to promoting pro-Palestinian content among American youth. As if American-owned social media companies like Meta have never sought to mine and exploit sensitive data. As if American-owned platforms like X would never juice their algorithms to reward certain political ideas.
But of course, it is the nature of social media to make an impersonal tech product feel intimate, while its hidden costs (and threats) remain remote and unimaginable. It makes it hard to be sure what’s really going on in the back end.
If the TikTok ban succeeds, and Americans are on Xiaohongshu to stay, they may come to dominate its culture, water down its appeal, ruin its vibe. But for the time being, they are visitors in a foreign land, struggling to read Mandarin instructions and navigate the app’s unfamiliar pathways.
The platform, which is owned by a Shanghai-based company called Xingyin Information Technology, is aglow with a giddy exchange-program feeling. On Wednesday, I encountered a little boy in a fuzzy pink sweater explaining (and modeling) a rack of Chinese traditional clothing, and a sweatshirt-wearing bro warning us not to show our butts or say anything racist, and an adorable influencer who posted a video responding to “comments from TikTok refugees,” most of them attempting to flirt with him. (One asked him how to say “daddy” in Mandarin.) The cat-meme tax is a nice touch, a signal that RedNote users are eager to communicate with Americans through our shared ancient internet language.
One of my favorite videos came from a Chinese user, a teacher of the English language, who also does a decent impression of Donald J. Trump — and who is now teaching English speakers how to say “America” in Mandarin in a Trumpian voice. The video pokes fun at Trump’s consistently bizarre pronunciation of “China” and implies that perhaps it’s time to give America the same treatment.
Xiaohongshu has provided a rare glimpse of a Chinese perspective on America, generously translated and packaged for American consumption. The glow of our digital vacation may come to an end soon, but it was worth the picture of the cat.
