With TikTok ban looming, users flee to Chinese app ‘Red Note’

“Hi everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The US government bans TikTok so we’re looking for an alternative…We’re very sorry to interrupt you here. Hope we don’t have to stay here for way too long. long,” said a Xiaohongshu user who goes by the name Ryan Martin in a video submitted yesterday apparently addressed 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 since been liked more than 24,000 times. “It’s fine, you don’t interrupt. When you are active, we sleep,” reads one of the best comments in Chinese.

There are also dozens of live audio chat rooms on the platform where American and Chinese users explained to each other, probably for the first time in many cases, how their respective societies work and clarified common misunderstandings. The most popular chat room has been listened to by almost 30,000 users.

While Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protection of Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which the Supreme Court is currently considering and could result in a US ban on TikTok, the law stipulates that any “foreign adversary controlled application” could face a similar fate in the future. In other words, there’s no guarantee that Xiaohongshu won’t follow in TikTok’s footsteps by also being blocked by the US government.

The TikTok ban might have catapulted Xiaohongshu to the center of attention in the US, but the app has been successful for a long time in China. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has run one of, if not the most, trendy platform in China over the last few years and allegedly generated over $1 billion in annual profits in 2024. To put it simply, it’s the hottest app in China that non-Chinese have never heard of before.

It also has a significant following among Chinese speakers outside the country, from Chinese students abroad to Taiwanese people to diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist hot spots and travel companies around the world has started to take notice of the app because of how many Chinese tourists rely heavily on it for local information and recommendations shared by other Chinese.

The app differs significantly from TikTok in a few key ways. While Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos just like TikTok, the majority of content on the platform is photo slideshows combined with text, which is why people often see it more as a competitor to Instagram than TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid-shaped feed (referred to as a “murnet” in professional tech circles) has been so successful in driving engagement that major social media companies like Tencent and ByteDance have copied the design in their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance apart from TikTok, is broadly 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 source of trusted user-generated recommendations for mundane things like which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy.