American TikTok users and Beijing found their common villain---the United States

TikTok users who flocked to Chinese social media as a gesture of protesting the TikTok ban say they had been fooled by anti-China propaganda, a narrative Beijing quickly amplified.

When Christine Lu, a 48-year-old mother from Los Angeles with a Gen Z son, learned on Monday that Chinese social media app REDnote had suddenly exploded in popularity among young Americans, she went ahead and created an account for herself.

The Taiwanese American has decades of China experience under her belt. She studied and lived there between mid 1990s and 2000s and had regularly travelled back and forth until 2017 for business.

And she’s no stranger to China’s notorious internet censorship.

“Everyone there knows that mentioning anything about the 3 T’s (Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan) will get you flagged,” she told me in a text interview for my VOA story. “And in the case of my Chinese friends, they can get in serious trouble.”

Right after making an account on REDnote, a photo and video-based lifestyle app popular among young and affluent Chinese, Lu published three posts exactly about the three tabooed topics.

First post was an artistic rendition of the famous Tankman photo from the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in 1989. Second was a photo of a handbag with a Tibetan flag on it. Third was a jacket from the American movie Top Gun with Taiwan’s flag on the back.

“I actually wanted to test how posts that are normal and tame in countries like ours with free speech are banned for people on Chinese apps,” she told me.

And she was right. The Tiananmen artwork she posted was deemed a violation of community rules; the Tibetan bag was put under review and couldn’t be seen by the public; and not long after posting the Taiwan flag jacket, Lu’s account got permanently banned.

She told me that she and her friends who had worked and lived in China in the decades after China opened up to the world in the 1980s are well aware of the censorship problem.

But the young Americans who have hopped on the REDnote train “don’t have an understanding of any of this,” she wrote to me.

What has transpired on REDnote this week proved that they don’t. And even if they do, they don’t seem to care.

American TikTok users, facing a national security ban that will cut off their access to TikTok, have flocked to REDnote (or Xiaohongshu), a China-based social media app, as a gesture of protest and mockery.

“Our government is out of their mind if they think we are going to stand for this TikTok ban,” American user Heather Roberts said in a video posted on REDnote. “We are just going to a new Chinese app and here we are.”

Reuters reported, citing a source close to the company, that over 700,000 new users have joined REDnote in just two days.

REDnote was created in 2013 to offer Chinese consumers tips on how to shop in Hong Kong. Today the app has become what some call China’s Instagram, where users, many young and affluent, post about shopping, travel, makeup, and workout.

The company’s own data say that it has over 300 million users, 70% of whom were born after 1989.

The platform does not offer built-in translation services. But that did not stop American newcomers from wanting to communicate with their Chinese hosts. Over the past couple of days, netizens from the two countries asked each other about their everyday life, traded memes, and even worked together on homework, a rare scene against the backdrop of Beijing’s decades long effort to segregate its domestic internet from the rest of the world.

“It’s so amazing to have you here,” Chinese user Abe said in English in a video that has received over 160,000 likes. “For so long we haven’t really been able to connect or talk to each other like this.”

“This is such a real chance for us to really get to know each other,” he added. “You are not just welcomed here. I really really hope you will stay.”

The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on January 19. Unless the Singapore-headquartered TikTok is divested from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, the app will be removed from US stores, impacting its 170 million American users.

TikTok supporters and critics of the ban say that singling out TikTok for national security reasons does not address the root problems of data safety and user privacy that exist in many major tech companies, including those in the US.

On REDnote, the ban has become a subject matter that united the Chinese and American netizens, who post jokes like “I’m your Chinese spy” and “give me your data”.

Not every exchange has been pleasant. Some American users were told to not “impose” transgender issues to others and that “LGBTQ superior-ism” is not welcomed on REDnote.

Chinese users have also left warnings under American users’ posts, reminding them not to talk about drugs, politics and religions and that they should abide by the One China policy, which claims that Taiwan, the self-ruled island democracy, is part of the People’s Republic of China.

Some American users, seemingly overwhelmed by the warm welcome and antagonized by Washington’s intrusion into their social media life, posted on REDnote as well as other social platforms that exchanges with their Chinese counterparts have helped dispel years of anti-China propaganda they say they have been fed by the US.

Brandy Manderfield, one of the self-described “TikTok refugees”, berated the US in a popular REDnote video.

“I’m pretty sure the United States have lied to us about who China is,” she said solemnly, tears in eyes, “They’ve always told us very mean things about you guys and about your country.”

“Just my experience on here so far, I have seen and heard such grace and such welcome,” she said.

Manderfield is far from alone. On other Western social media apps, similar comments have received support.

Erika Wilkinson, a travel agent, wrote on Bluesky that American users who joined REDnote have been exposed to what she described as the real China.

“The US gov't has spent 30 years telling us how horrible China is, but....their groceries are cheap, high quality, and plentiful,” she wrote in a thread that got tens of thousands of likes in total. “I am watching 30 years of propaganda melt away at first contact with actual Chinese folks.”

Beijing, who has for years propagated similar narratives that blamed the US for the two countries’ strenuous relationship, wasted no time picking up the anti-US sentiment among American TikTok refugees and turned it into another jab at Washington’s increasingly hawkish attitude on China.

On Weibo, a state media account created a hashtag called “TikTok refugees flocking to REDnote exposed America’s fake propaganda”. A video of an American user appearing shocked by the quality of everyday meals in China has been liked over 8,000 times. In the video, the user gushed over the low cost of Chinese breakfast and how frequently they have seafood on their dinner table.

“US government, you’ve got some explaining to do,” the user said in the video. “Because we are seeing videos. Their life is looking so much better than ours.”

On China’s strictly regulated internet, some of the most shared exchanges between American and Chinese REDnote users showed Americans complaining about the high cost of ambulance and medical care in their country and explaining that they have to work multiple jobs to make a living.

In one widely shared screenshot on Weibo, an American user said they “go to work 4am, work till 9 pm, sleep wake up work and that’s 6 days a week mate” to describe their work life.

Hu Xijin, commentator and former editor in chief at China’s nationalist state newspaper Global Times, opined in a post that comments from the TikTok refugees “vastly amended and corrected many Chinese netizens’ past impression that ‘Americans were living a much better life than Chinese’.”

It’s unclear if REDnote’s overnight popularity among Americans will survive in the long run.

Last year, there was also an influx of foreign users, albeit much smaller, on REDnote. They mostly asked for style advice from Chinese users.

Back then I asked Mark Witzke, now a non-residential scholar at UC San Diego and a China analyst, if REDnote could draw more international users and he gave a negative assessment, citing the dominance of similar Western apps in the market and the pressure TikTok was facing.

For my reporting on the recent REDnote migration, I asked him again and he stood by his views.

“It’s unlikely that this will be a very sustained phenomenon,” he wrote to me . “Xiaohongshu doesn’t have the same addictive quality as TikTok’s algorithm for videos and it’s not intended for Western audience.”

Observing what’s happening on REDnote, many experts, including Witzke, pointed out that one of the biggest problems for REDnote to maintain an international user base lies within itself: censorship.

REDnote is one of the most censored mainstream Chinese social media apps. A leaked document from 2022 shows that REDnote censors targeted a wide range of content it deemed sensitive, including public protests, severe natural disasters, and public safety incidents.

A 2020 internal moderation record shows that the app had deleted a high volume of “Hong Kong independence” comments. Between February and May that year, censors identified and included in their database over 500 nicknames for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, including phrases and sentences that would, to an outsider, seem utterly innocuous, such as “I am a soccer fan”, which was used to make fun of Xi’s comment that he loved soccer.

A moderation system this strict was designed to quell Chinese dissent. Chinese social media users, having endured it for years, also learned how to self-censor to avoid punishment from the platform.

But applying it to the Western youths who do not possess such knowledge, have no idea what’s sensitive and what’s not and don’t even post in Chinese, is a big challenge for REDnote.

Eric Liu, a former censor at Weibo who now works at China Digital Times documenting and analyzing Chinese censorship, wrote in a Bluesky post that the influx of American users has likely put REDnote in a bind.

On the one hand, if the platform uses the same set of rules to censor Americans as it does Chinese, the Americans could start to complain about it on other social media, which constitutes negative publicity for Beijing.

But if the platform loosens the restrictions on speech, content China doesn’t want on its domestic internet could start to flow in.

However, he told me for the VOA story, that getting censored actually means very different things to American users than to Chinese users.

“Anyone who’s not inside China’s internet sovereignty has not much to fear,” he wrote. “The worst consequence (for foreigners) is getting banned. But to the people in China, they might face police detention and loss of employment.”

Lu, the Los Angeles resident who lived in China for years, detailed on her X account how her REDnote accounts got removed after posting political sensitive content.

She wrote that she supports Chinese and Americans having conversations without being filtered by their governments, but REDnote is not the right place for that.

“if you’d like to genuinely make friends with Chinese people and understand why it’s possible to criticize a country’s government while wanting the best for its people then you’re not going to be able to do that on a platform where Chinese people need to self-censor and are blocked from seeing content we can otherwise freely share elsewhere,” she wrote in an X post.