小红书 (Rednote) and “TikTok refugees”

As a Canadian and a non-TikTok user, I was not exactly affected by the recent US TikTok ban. I do, however, occasionally use Xiaohongshu, which I try to avoid for the same reason as I do Instagram (it’s still social media app, after all i.e. massive time sink). This last week however, there was a huge influx of foreigners into the app which led to a lot of interesting and wholesome interactions (and a few not-so wholesome ones).

Breaking Down Language Barriers

It was definitely weird for both sides because of the language barrier. For some some Americans, being thrown into an app targeted for Chinese users with little to no localization felt like a Chinese language crash course. It also gave Chinese users a chance to use English outside of school and an opportunity to learn about American Internet slang (mostly TikTok slang since I didn’t even know what some of the words meant).

Americans would usually comment this sticker on posts with pretty girls:

¹

They did however roll out an auto-translation feature today which makes it easier for both sides to communicate. This meant that users didn’t have to keep going back and forth between Xiaohongshu and translation apps (although Huawei phones can record and auto-translate text in real-time, which is good for videos without Chinese subtitles).

Clearing Out Misconceptions

Having an actual channel for communication means that people can ask questions to each other freely without their respective governments as the middle man (of course, the app is still subject to Chinese laws, so none of the typical Chinese no-nos).

The most interesting one for me was how Chinese people originally perceived the average American. They assumed that since the US is the richest country in the world, that the average American must also be rich. They see the Americans' monthly income converted to RMB and think that it’s a lot of money². They did not know that most Americans don’t have savings and are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Americans are also shocked at how cheap daily necessities are in China. Even though Chinese people make less, they often have more money left over to save. Maybe cultural difference is still a huge factor, where most people in America live beyond their means (850 USD/month for a monthly phone bill is crazy!!), while saving is a big part of Chinese culture.

People now realize that we are all mostly the same. This exchange probably changed the minds of some Chinese people who wanted to immigrate to America, and made some Americans want to immigrate to China (of course, Chinese users shoot that idea down; life is still hard in China).

The US government’s attempt to ban TikTok has unironically brought Americans closer to Chinese people (at least on TikTok, they weren’t interacting with Chinese people), which they most likely did not intend and are now trying to reverse.

TikTok is “brought back”. What now?

Sometime around today, the ban was lifted from TikTok³. Lots of speculations are going around, with most people speculating that Meta has bought TikTok⁴ because of the “new features” just after it went dark, like linking your TikTok account to Instagram (it’s been around for a while, actually, so this definitely isn’t related to the US service being restored). People’s perception of TikTok will most like not be the same (or, just like most issues, they will forget this ever happened and go back to consuming and producing brainrot 🤷).

I do think TikTok being unbanned in the US is still a good thing for Xiaohongshu. TikTok content creators still need to make money, after all 😉. This means that everyone who was just looking for more traffic and not specifically Chinese people will now leave, and those who are actually willing to stay and communicate with Chinese people will be the only ones remaining.

The hype has also died down a bit because Chinese people have become sleep-deprived from welcoming foreigners to the app. Most of them are also going back home and are busy with the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). Hopefully, we would see more activity next week once people are back.

Overall, this is definitely a historic moment for the Internet, and the start of a new cultural exchange. I wish the best to both the US and Chinese netizens.

EDIT: AOC’s take on the mention of “President” Trump on the welcome page: