“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I am a TikTok refugee. The US government is banning TikTok so we are looking for an alternative…We are very sorry to bother you here. Hello hope we don't have to be here for too long,” a Xiaohongshu user using the name Ryan Martin said in the video posted yesterday appeared to address the app's Chinese user base. He translated the statement into Chinese and used a robotic voice generator to read it in the video, which has been liked more than 24,000 times. “It's okay, you won't bother. While you guys are active, we are sleeping,” one of the top comments in Chinese wrote.
There are also dozens of live audio chat rooms on the platform where American and Chinese users explain to each other, perhaps for the first in many cases, how their respective societies work and clears up common misunderstandings. One of the most popular chat rooms has been listened to by nearly 30,000 users.
Although Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, which the Supreme Court is currently considering and could lead to a US ban on TikTok, but the law stipulates that any “application controlled by a foreign adversary” could face a similar fate. in the future. In other words, there is no guarantee that Xiaohongshu will not follow TikTok's lead when blocked by the US government.
The TikTok ban may have thrust Xiaohongshu into the spotlight in the US, but the app has long been successful in China. Established in 2013, this Shanghai-based company has operated one of the female The trendiest platform in China over the past few years and is said to have created More than 1 billion USD in annual profits by 2024. Simply put, it is the hottest app in China that non-Chinese have never heard of before.
It also has a sizable following among Chinese speakers abroad, from Chinese students abroad to Taiwanese to the diaspora in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist attractions and travel companies worldwide have started paying attention to the app because so many Chinese tourists rely on it for local information and recommendations shared by fellow Chinese.
This application is completely different from TikTok in some key ways. Although Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos much like TikTok, the majority of content on the platform is photo slideshows combined with text, which is why people often see it as a competitor. competes with Instagram more than TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid feed (known as “grid building” in tech geek circles) has been successful in driving engagement to the level of larger social media companies. like Tencent and ByteDance have copied this design in their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance apart from TikTok, is was seen by many as an attempt to imitate the Xiaohongshu and its success.
In fact, the app doesn't even have an exact English translation for its own name: Xiaohongshu is just a phonetic translation of its Chinese name. 小红书. Although the literal translation “little red book” may remind English-speaking users of the collection of speeches and propaganda slogans of the same name by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, it has a different meaning in China, where users understand it as a “trusted” source of information. – make recommendations for trivial things, such as which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy.