How the Tiktok Ban Brought Americans and Chinese Closer

The Washington Post / Youyou Zhou

12:41 JST, January 27, 2025

Last week, as TikTok went briefly dark, hundreds of thousands of users flocked to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book” in English and has been dubbed “RedNote” by American users. Their migration was a way to protest the TikTok ban, but it had an unexpected side effect: It brought Chinese people and Americans closer together.

More than 700,000 new users joined RedNote, according to Reuters. In the United States, it was the most downloaded app in the Apple store for a week. TikTok, meanwhile, faces an uncertain future as President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order gave the app 75 days to find an American buyer.

The newcomers made a splash. An American guitarist got more than 130,000 RedNote followers in less than a week. Another user shared with Chinese users what an American school lunch looks like.

RedNote users in China greeted these arrivals in creative ways, too, and often in English: A comedian taught newcomers how to use popular memes on RedNote. Another user introduced Shanghai slang.

Started as an e-commerce platform in 2013, RedNote has grown into one of the most popular social media apps in China, serving about 300 million users. Women (almost 80 percent) predominate, and users are highly educated. Despite having a name making reference to a Mao Zedong-era pamphlet, RedNote is largely apolitical.

I have loved the app since joining in 2021. It’s easy to navigate and has a friendly vibe, thanks to its user base and an algorithm that’s good at curating posts reflecting my interests. Until last week, I mainly used it to find information: recipes, new items at Trader Joe’s, books and personal finance advice – all supplied in Chinese.

Then the English posts started appearing. New users identified themselves as TikTok refugees and spoke directly to the Chinese. One explained her motivation: “Our government is out of their mind if they think we are gonna stand for this TikTok ban. We are just gonna go to a new Chinese app, and here we are.”

The tone of these exchanges has been friendly and curious. Users in America asked about such things as how Chinese pay property taxes, what the average income is in China and how Chinese people think about Elon Musk (largely positively), and many more:

Users in China also shared their curiosity.

Scrolling around, you won’t find mention of human rights issues, Taiwan’s sovereignty, censorship or other topics frowned upon by the Chinese government. The app, as critics have hastened to point out, is censored. That’s one reason there’s so little politics. Like all Chinese social media apps, the platform reviews posts before releasing them. What users see is highly curated: The RedNote algorithm is superb at promoting content that generates positive conversations.

Ironically, users from both sides appear to love the experience. Last week, I saw American users describe the atmosphere on RedNote as “chill,” while Chinese ones embraced an opportunity to converse beyond China’s Great Firewall and practice their English. Even though the algorithm might be favoring posts praising the app, the urge for users to understand each other is clearly real. Consider: The popular language app Duolingo saw a 216 percent increase in U.S.-based users learning Mandarin last week compared to a year ago.

In the comments section of one post, a user in America talked about his lifestyle and salary as a construction worker, and a user in China expressed surprise at the amount, along with regret that unions don’t exist in China. In another post, people compared medical bills under the two systems.

China and the United States have never seemed further apart since China opened up its market to the world more than two decades ago. Direct flights between the two countries are at about a quarter of pre-pandemic volume. Fewer Chinese students are coming to the United States. As the Chinese government slashed the visa quota for foreign journalists, reporting on the ground in China became difficult.

As a result, Americans are seeing fewer human stories and more media narratives driven by geopolitical tensions. Ordinary Americans have lost touch with ordinary Chinese.

TikTok has returned, for now, but some American users said they would keep using RedNote. But I’m not too optimistic that these friendly RedNote exchanges can last: American users could tire of explaining everything to strangers. And the national security concerns that led to the TikTok ban could also apply to RedNote. As for the Chinese side, the initial influx of TikTok users caught RedNote by surprise. The platform scrambled to hire English-speaking moderators – a sign that more censorship and curation will follow. Given the state of the world, it’s mostly a fantasy to imagine people from the two competing powers talking openly to each other in any public forum.

But even just temporarily, in their zeal to act on their perceived national interests, the U.S. government and the Chinese censors have accidentally brought their two peoples closer together. This has made for a surreal feel-good moment for millions of American and Chinese users.