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As a TikTok ban looms, lots of of 1000’s of Individuals casting about for a brand new video-sharing app have migrated to Xiaohongshu, a social media platform that interprets as “Little Crimson E book,” the American nickname for a basic 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 special Chinese language app, one whose title evokes the Chinese language Communist Occasion.
Once I downloaded Xiaohongshu, extensively known 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 cellphone 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 dimensions 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 court docket appearances.
Quickly I began to see movies pitched instantly at me — welcome notes created for the American TikTok person who just lately arrived on RedNote’s shores.
Contained in the world of Xiaohongshu, the Individuals downloading the app en masse have been branded “TikTok refugees.” Its current Chinese language customers have jokingly marketed themselves because the Individuals’ “new Chinese language spies,” began administering Mandarin classes and shaped in-app group chats for “refugees” to get the lay of the land. They’ve warned that they intend to gather a tax from overseas customers (the worth tag: You will need to 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 all the pieces 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 information. As if American-owned platforms like X would by no means juice their algorithms to reward sure political concepts.
However after all, 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 occurring within the again finish.
If the TikTok ban succeeds, and Individuals are on Xiaohongshu to remain, they could come to dominate its tradition, water down its attraction, wreck its vibe. However in the intervening time, they’re guests in a overseas land, struggling to learn Mandarin directions and navigate the app’s unfamiliar pathways.
The platform, which is owned by a Shanghai-based firm known as Xingyin Data Expertise, is aglow with a giddy exchange-program feeling. On Wednesday, I encountered somewhat 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 lovable influencer who posted a video responding to “feedback from TikTok refugees,” most of them trying to flirt with him. (One requested him the right way to say “daddy” in Mandarin.) The cat-meme tax is a pleasant contact, a sign that RedNote customers are keen to speak with Individuals by means of our shared historical web language.
One in all my favourite movies got here from a Chinese language person, a instructor of the English language, who additionally does a good impression of Donald J. Trump — and who’s now educating English audio system the right way 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 provide 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 might come to an finish quickly, but it surely was definitely worth the image of the cat.
