“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a refugee from TikTok. The US government is banning TikTok so we’re looking for an alternative… We’re really sorry to interrupt here. I hope we don’t have to stay here too long,” a Xiaohongshu user using the name Ryan Martin said in a video. job yesterday, apparently aimed at the app’s Chinese user base. He translated the statement into Chinese and used a robot voice generator to read it in the video, which has since been liked more than 24,000 times. “It’s okay, you don’t interrupt.” When you are active, we sleep,” reads one of the top comments in Chinese.
There are also dozens of live audio chat rooms on the platform where American and Chinese users explain, probably for the first time in many cases, how their respective companies work and clarify common misunderstandings. The most popular chat room was listened to by almost 30,000 users.
Although Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act that the Supreme Court is currently considering and which could lead to a US ban on TikTok, the law states that any “app controlled by a foreign adversary foreign adversary” may suffer a similar fate. in the future. In other words, there’s no guarantee that Xiaohongshu won’t follow in TikTok’s footsteps by also getting blocked by the US government.
TikTok’s ban may have propelled Xiaohongshu to the center of attention in the United States, but the app has long enjoyed success in China. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has operated one, if not THE the most trendy platform in China in recent years and which would have generated over a billion dollars in annual profits in 2024. To put it simply, it is the most popular app in China that non-Chinese people have never heard of before.
It also has a large following among overseas Chinese speakers, ranging from overseas Chinese students to Taiwanese to diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist hotspots and travel agencies around the world have started to notice the app due to the number of Chinese tourists who rely heavily on it for local information and recommendations shared by their fellow Chinese.
The app is very different from TikTok in several important ways. Although Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos, just like TikTok, the majority of the platform’s content is photo slideshows coupled with text, which is why people often view it more as a competitor from Instagram than from TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid-like feed (called a “masonry grid” in professional tech circles) has been so successful in driving engagement that larger social media companies like Tencent and ByteDance have copied the design into their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance apart from TikTok, is widely seen as an attempt to imitate Xiaohongshu and its success.
In fact, the app doesn’t even have a good English translation of its own name: Xiaohongshu is just the phonetic translation of its Chinese name. 小红书. While the literal translation “little red book” may remind English-speaking users of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s collection of speeches and propaganda slogans of the same name, it has a different connotation in China, where users interpret it as a reliable source of information. -generated recommendations for mundane things, like which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy.
