What Chinese People Think about RedNote – or How Many Chinese Users Think ‘Is My Favorite Place to Go?’
But many TikTokers are equally curious about RedNote users in China, too. “Chinese friends, post pictures of your meal or snacks for today! One person writes that they are curious to see what they typically eat. Another asks if he is American. Do y’all like us? We know that y’all are not the enemy. Can we all be friends?
That’s got many of the viral video app’s 170 million U.S.-based users preemptively looking for somewhere else to go. And RedNote seems to be the platform of choice.
What to Know about RedNote, the Chinese App that TikTokkers are Flooding: Why Americans Are Failing to Live in China, or What to Do About China?
Over the years it grew steadily and took on the name Xiaohongshu, which translates to “Little Red Book.” The phrase refers to a collection of quotations from Mao.
Did the U.S. government forget to implement our founding principles? We are a nation built on spite,” user @thesleepydm posted on TikTok, where they have over 200,000 followers. “We’re giving our information directly to the Chinese government now. The communists just have our information directly because of … what you did.”
The Supreme Court appears unlikely to block a law that requires TikTok to either be divested from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. The law was enacted because of concerns that the Chinese government could access Americans’ data.
The app says that there has been a 216% increase in the number of people learning mandarin in the US.
Even though the app’s content is in Mandarin, Americans who are interested in learning the language are posting translations of popular slang phrases with Chinese commenters.
Those include some 546 derogatory nicknames for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as well as discussion of events such as labor strikes, geographic discrimination, student suicides and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
RedNote’s new American users are confronting the potentially taboo topics of privacy and censorship head-on. Users from both countries are laughing about meeting their ” Chinese spies” and handing over data.
“Welcome, but don’t say anything about the gay community.” Thank you!” wrote a user in Beijing, in one example reported by Newsweek. The Advocate reported that some American users have had their content removed or accounts suspended, including one woman who was banned for wearing a low-cut top in one video and mentioning “trans plight” in another.
The New York Times reports that in a group chat this week viewed more than 30,000 times, “participants discussed censorship and shared tips in the comments on how to avoid being banned from the platform for bringing up politically sensitive topics.”
Source: What to know about RedNote, the Chinese app that American TikTokkers are flooding
The U.S. App Revenue of RedNote’s “Hong Kong Shopping Guide” Grows Rapidly Over the Last Seven Days
RedNote says that more than a fifth of their total app downloads this month have come from the U.S., up from 2% in the same period in the previous year.
The app’s downloads in the U.S. rose by more than 20 times over the seven day period, and are up by 30 times compared to the same period last year.
The start of this week saw a dramatic uptick in Google searches and social media posts about RedNote, as well as its surge to the top spot of the “free apps” chart on Apple’s app store. RedNote is the top- ranked social app in the Play store according to Sensor Tower, up from #162 last year.
It was originally called “Hong Kong Shopping Guide” and it was intended for Chinese tourists.
“For so long we really haven’t been able to connect or talk with each other like this, but now we finally can, and it feels so special,” one Chinese user, who identified himself as Abe, said in a now-viral post. It’s a chance for us to get to know each other, and maybe make something great together. You are not just welcome here, I really, really hope you will stay.”
