As a TikTok ban looms, hundreds of thousands of Americans looking for a new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that translates as “The Little Red Book,” the American nickname for a classic compilation of quotes from the Chairman. Mao. . It’s all played out like a global practical joke for the US government: Threatened with exile from TikTok over concerns of Chinese interference, its users have simply moved on to another Chinese app whose name evokes the Chinese Communist Party.
When I downloaded Xiaohongshu, popularly called RedNote, it was ranked first among free apps in Apple’s US App Store. (The second was Lemon8, another Chinese TikTok alternative owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.) I submitted my phone number, reported my gender, and noted some of my interests: babysitting, calligraphy, snacks. Then I absorbed a selection of the app’s algorithmically selected videos: A girl in a lace veil eating an ice cube the size of her head; a woman preparing dinner in the back seat of a minicar dressed in stuffed animals; an exciting fan edit of Luigi Mangione’s court appearances.
Soon I began to see videos directed directly by me – welcome notes created for the American TikTok user who recently arrived on the shores of RedNote.
Within Xiaohongshu’s world, Americans who download the app en masse have been called “TikTok refugees.” Its existing Chinese users have jokingly advertised themselves as America’s “new Chinese spies,” started administering Mandarin lessons and created in-app group chats for “refugees” to get a foothold. They have warned that they intend to collect a tax from foreign users (the price tag: You have to share a photo of a cat).
All of this is a bitter commentary on the US government’s crackdown on TikTok and the relative ease with which users can simply recreate a similar experience on any other Chinese platform. Together, Chinese power users and American upstarts are spontaneously performing a mocking burlesque of national security policy.
For TikTok users, the decision to specifically banish TikTok from US phones may seem silly. Over the past several years, lawmakers have faulted the app for everything from failing to uphold “American values” to promoting pro-Palestinian content among young Americans. As if US-owned social media companies like Meta never sought to mine and exploit sensitive data. As if US-owned platforms like X would never use their algorithms to reward certain political ideas.
But of course, it’s the nature of social media to make an impersonal technological product feel intimate, while its hidden costs (and threats) remain distant and unimaginable. It makes it hard to be sure what is really going on in the end.
If the ban on TikTok succeeds and the Americans are in Xiaohongshu to stay, they may succeed in dominating its culture, softening its appeal, disrupting its atmosphere. But for now, they’re visitors in a foreign land, struggling to read Mandarin directions and navigate the app’s unfamiliar paths.
The platform, which is owned by a Shanghai-based company called Xingyin Information Technology, is ablaze with a dizzying exchange program feel. On Wednesday, I encountered a little boy in a fuzzy pink sweater explaining (and modeling) a rack of traditional Chinese clothing and a brother in a sweatshirt warning us not to show our bottoms or say anything racist, and an adorable influencer who posted a video responding to “comments from TikTok refugees,” most of them trying to flirt with her. (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 ancient common Internet language.
One of my favorite videos came from a Chinese user, an English teacher who also does a good impression of Donald J. Trump — and who is now teaching English speakers how to say “America” in Mandarin with a Trumpian voice. The video pokes fun at Trump’s consistently odd pronunciation of “China” and implies that maybe it’s time to give America the same treatment.
Xiaohongshu has offered a rare glimpse of a Chinese perspective on America, generously translated and packaged for American consumption. The glow of our digital vacation may be over soon, but the cat photo was worth it.
