REDnote and the TikTok Refugees

On Saturday, TikTok finally went dark in America, a development that seemed to bring a seven-year drama to a close. But within hours, the app was lighting up again—a fitting postscript to the most chaotic of careers. Such twists and turns have been a feature of TikTok’s existence since 2020, when fears first emerged that the video-hosting service was in fact a Chinese Communist Party propaganda tool; one of the so-called “magic weapons,” wielded by the CCP for global influence.

In 2020, Donald Trump announced that the app would be banned unless it parted ways with its Chinese owner, ByteDance. This prompted howls of protest about free speech from some unlikely quarters. ByteDance announced a sale, paused the sale, cancelled the sale, and then Joe Biden revoked Trump’s ban in June 2021. But national-security concerns continued to mount, and some Democratic senators admitted that Trump had been right. In April 2024, Biden signed a new bill to ban TikTok. But Trump had already changed his mind: “If you get rid of TikTok,” he explained in a Truth Social post last March, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business.” (Washington Post journalist Josh Rogin has suggested that the president is now beholden to Republican megadonor and ByteDance stakeholder Jeff Yass.)

After spending millions of US dollars lobbying against the legislation, ByteDance made a final legal bid in recent days, hoping that the proposed ban might constitute a violation of TikTok’s First Amendment rights. But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, time ran out, and TikTok finally went offline, before abruptly returning. Following a phone call with Xi Jinping, during which TikTok was apparently discussed, Trump has directed the Department of Justice not to enforce the ban for 75 days.

In the meantime, odd things have been happening. Hundreds of thousands of self-styled “TikTok refugees” have fled to the Chinese lifestyle-app Xiaohongshu, propelling it to the top of iPhone’s download charts. Xiaohongshu translates as Little Red Book, an obvious reference to Mao Zedong’s infamous collection of quotations. (A surreal detail: the app’s founder is called Charlwin Mao, which sounds like a mangled approximation of “Chairman Mao.” But the Financial Times solemnly assures us that any link between Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and Charlwin Mao’s Little Red Book is a “conspiracy theory.”)

Whenever Xiaohongshu is mentioned, I immediately recall old photos of the chairman’s demonic Red Guards waving copies of his book in the air, broad grins on their faces and madness in their eyes. Perhaps it was fear of associations with Mao’s Cultural Revolution that led to the app’s hasty rebranding as “REDnote” for Anglophone users. But those worries were probably misplaced—even Chinese users expressed shock when I pointed out the connection between the two Little Red Books. They had simply never considered the similarity before. Western users are even less likely to have noticed, due to epic levels of historical ignorance.

And TikTokers are remarkably easy to fool. Having arrived like a grateful boatload of migrants on a foreign shore, some of them are now posting about how impressed they are with the China they find on REDnote. A TikTok refugee rants, “I grew up fed propaganda that China is evil and that they treat their citizens like shit. I mean, I was raised by MAGA which is the main reason I feel so radicalized. American culture—American society—is toxic, gross, poisonous. They poison our food, they jack the prices up of everything, we don’t get healthcare, we don’t get good public transportation, even though we’re all on the same fucking continent. We destroy the planet for money, power, and control.”

The irony of these accusations was apparently lost on this TikTok refugee. For those prepared to do some research, China’s recent history contains no end of horror stories about industrial chemicals in baby milk and rats’ heads in school meals, while the country continues to pump out greenhouse gasses at a rate that dwarfs all competitors (12.6 gigatonnes in 2023, or 35 percent of the global total). Those ignorant of realities on the ground in China have proven to be especially susceptible to Party propaganda.

But perhaps we should expect nothing less, considering what TikTok has been doing to its users’ brains. All that rapid scrolling is just the 21st-century version of slot-machine gambling. It activates the same cortical centres and leads to the same addiction problems. Depression and anxiety are spiking. Zoomer attention spans were already in peril prior to the TikTok phenomenon; they’re unlikely to have been improved by several years of gorging on an endless feast of twenty-second videos. Sure enough, fifty percent of TikTok users now find it “stressful” to watch videos lasting longer than a minute.

It’s likely, then, that the TikTok refugees will quickly tire of REDnote, especially considering the platform’s lack of English content. Meanwhile, CCP propagandists will need to weigh the comparative benefits of (a) brainwashing American youth with pro-China content and (b) shielding Chinese youth from liberal ideas. In their nervousness, they are leaning towards the latter. Officials have warned the app’s government-relations team that Chinese users should not be able to view posts from users in the US, and Xiaohongshu is scrambling to update its content-moderation controls.

The situation is unpredictable and fast-changing, which is anathema to the twitchy control freaks in Beijing. We can guess at their panic. They have worked hard in recent years to keep citizens sheltered and ignorant by shrinking the Chinese internet and preventing many people from travelling overseas. The last thing they want is for a new door to swing open and expose the Chinese public to ideas from outside.

In reality, all free exchange of ideas is to be welcomed, even with so much nationalist propaganda flying around. This means that the fears of Communist Party leaders are rather more well-founded than those of their Western counterparts. Four years ago, when Clubhouse audio chatrooms exposed Chinese citizens to Uyghur accounts of the Xinjiang concentration camps, the CCP authorities banned the app. But users had already begun posting about their loss of faith in the Party.

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TikTok refugees present a real danger for the CCP. Any source of information that is not Party-controlled is a comparative good, and yes, that even includes an army of gender-confused Zoomers suffering from extreme attention-deficit disorder. REDnote’s cross-cultural exchanges have, thus far, been characterised by a surprising degree of goodwill, and this may help to undermine Chinese netizens’ view of the unique evil of Americans, carefully inculcated over many years by the authorities. Meanwhile, if the TikTok refugees manage to stay on REDnote long enough, they will surely begin to notice that all is not as it seems in modern China. This particular Potemkin village is as flimsy as they come. It might be naïvely optimistic, but I suspect that a situation directed by neither the Chinese nor the American government is the healthiest of situations.

The old TikTok arrangement suited the CCP nicely. For five long years, the app could have found a new owner, but it failed to do so, despite the existence of countless candidates. This is probably because it never was a normal for-profit company. It turns out that ByteDance has its own Communist Party committee, the job of which is to ensure that all algorithmic decisions are in line with Xi Jinping Thought. The company has signed a strategic-cooperation agreement with the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security (counterintelligence), and the Party’s cyber-police are integrated into its platforms for the purpose of censorship. CCP propagandists sit on ByteDance’s Chinese subsidiary. So, of course there was no sale.

TikTok was a Trojan horse. The app was used to collect data, spy on journalists, and poison the minds of millions of Americans by promoting a worldview aligned with Party interests. In China, meanwhile, it was safely banned. (Chinese users have always had their own separate version—Douyin—via which they can be poisoned with alternate toxins specially adapted to the Chinese psyche.)

Now, Trump’s executive order will delay implementation of the ban for a crucial 75 days. With the United States newly ascendant and China mired in existential problems, that unlikely sale may occur after all. Bloomberg reports that Chinese officials are discussing terms with Elon Musk. The app’s 170 million users “could bolster X’s efforts to attract advertisers,” while Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, “could benefit from the huge amounts of data generated from TikTok.” Musk himself has hinted at a more complicated deal: “The current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced.” More chaos is coming. Perhaps the surreal REDnote episode was just a foretaste of looming turmoil rather than an anomaly.