When it seemed unlikely the federal TikTok ban would be overturned, thousands of people in the U.S. flocked to its rival Xiaohongshu (also known as “RedNote”).
This sparked an unprecedented exchange of cultural relations between Americans and mainland Chinese, two nations whose political relationship has long remained tense.
Existing RedNote users welcomed Americans, dubbed “TikTok refugees,” to the short-form video platform by offering insights into their culture, including language lessons and etiquette guides for using the app. On the flip side, Americans marveled at the new knowledge they were gaining about life in China, while some even warned their fellow countrymen to behave respectfully in their newfound social media refuge.
“It is currently hard for netizens from China and the U.S. to connect with each other due to the Great Firewall,” Oscar Zhou, a media studies lecturer at the University of Kent in England, told Newsweek. “While there are plenty of Chinese using U.S. social media apps through the use of VPNs… the average American sees very little of mainland Chinese culture.”
Photo Illustration by Newsweek
Newsweek contacted RedNote’s offices by email for comment.
TikTok users flocked to RedNote in early January, following the U.S. government passing a law in 2023 that called for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to part ways with its Chinese owners or face a permanent ban. The government cited national security concerns and the potential for Chinese operatives to negatively influence Americans through TikTok as a reason for the law.
ByteDance launched a hearty legal battle against the ban, but the Supreme Court ultimately upheld to law and TikTok went dark in the U.S. on January 19. The ban, however, was short-lived, and hours later, incoming President Donald Trump overturned it, giving TikTok a temporary reprieve—but its future still remains uncertain.
The move to RedNote “was surprising… instead of migrating to other apps more conducive to use by English speakers, such as Instagram [and its] reels,” said Meghan Murphy, a Schwarzman Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. She also explained the cultural exchange was unprecedented because “TikTok is not available to users in mainland China.”
“What many U.S. netizens shared was that it was a deliberate pushback against the U.S. government; saying ‘You are banning an app due to connections to the Chinese government, so we’re going to an app that is even more Chinese,'” Murphy told Newsweek. Plenty of users also “expressed frustration with Meta’s newly announced ‘free speech’ content policies, and thus the adoption of RedNote has been a way to both protest the TikTok ban and boycott Meta.”
Regardless of TikTok’s future, the cultural exchange between Chinese and Americans has certainly been a phenomenon.
“Many of the interactions on RedNote have indicated that Chinese and American citizens alike desperately wish to understand more about the other, and we are seeing for the first time in decades a casual people-to-people connection between the U.S. and China on the internet—the first opening of the Great Firewall,” Murphy said.
Even Zhou himself was offered an opportunity to help bridge the gap between LGBTQ+ people in the two countries.
“I was recently invited to help a friend who is a queer Chinese influencer with 200,000 followers translate his self-promotional video into English to welcome LGBTQ TikTok ‘refugees,'” he said. “I do believe this online movement led by young people could help two nations understand each other better culturally, because of individual shared interests and new opportunities for personal connections, regardless of politics.”
But does the flow of new communication between Chinese and Americans have the ability to soften relations between the two countries?
“It is a major issue that citizens of the world’s largest powers do not regularly interact, especially because the number of Americans studying and living in China has remained very low since the pandemic. This lack of understanding certainly contributes to hostilities many Americans have to the Chinese people,” Zhou said.
He added: “I do believe this online movement led by young people could help two nations understand each other better culturally, because of individual shared interests and new opportunities for personal connections, regardless of politics.”
RedNote may not have “the power to create lasting change,” for a number of reasons, according to Murphy. For one, if TikTok remains active in the U.S. people will likely remain on that platform. But RedNote is just as vulnerable to government intervention as TikTok because of “more concerns about data privacy” and security, meaning its days might also be numbered.
While there have been jovial interactions between U.S. and Chinese citizens on RedNote, there are still concerns about censorship by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which has tight control over the country’s media. Some RedNote users have alleged the company has created separate IP addresses to keep mainland Chinese separate from seeing American content and vice versa.
The influx of American users to RedNote is a “double-edged sword” for the CCP because Chinese companies such as Xingyin Information Technology which owns RedNote, stand to profit greatly from an increase in users. There is also the belief that RedNote could “contribute to a cultural narrative victory for the Chinese,” according to Murphy.
“For example, many Americans are being exposed to narratives like the so-called ‘debunking’ of the Chinese social credit system or Uyghur human rights abuses,” Murphy said, adding that Americans may take these narratives at face value.
The CCP could also benefit from U.S. users describing societal ills in their country, such as limited access to healthcare and gun crime. This helps peddle a narrative to Chinese citizens that the “U.S. is dysfunctional… while China is a utopia.”
But the CCP could also be “worried about the potential influx of U.S. propaganda,” Murphy said, but said for now RedNote’s “censorship algorithms” seem to be “working well to shut down political content.”
In the short term, RedNote may have opened communications that previously did not exist, but it is unlikely to create a big dent in U.S-China relations, especially if TikTok remains active in the U.S. Regardless, of what the future may hold, the phenomenon witnessed on RedNote may have opened the floodgates on cultural curiosity between citizens of the two superpowers.
“I do hope that this cultural moment encourages more Americans to learn more about China, to study Mandarin, and to pursue authentic people-to-people connections with Chinese citizens when possible,” Murphy concluded.
“However, RedNote is not and should not be the permanent solution, and I don’t encourage Americans to use the app given the very real concerns about data privacy and security. Ultimately, the onus is on the CCP to lower the Great Firewall to allow for this connection to flourish, which is incredibly unlikely.”
