Faced with TikTok ban, users flee to Chinese app ‘Red Note’

“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The US government bans TikTok so we are looking for an alternative… We are very sorry to interrupt you here. Hopefully we don’t have to stay here long either,” Xiaohongshu user Ryan Martin said in a video published yesterday, ostensibly targeting 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, don’t interrupt me. When you are active, we sleep,” reads one of the top comments in Chinese.

The platform also features dozens of live audio chat rooms where American and Chinese users explain to each other, possibly for the first time in many cases, how their respective societies work and clear up common misunderstandings. The most popular chat room is listened to by nearly 30,000 users.

Although Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Enemies Act, which the Supreme Court is currently considering and could lead to a U.S. ban on TikTok, the law stipulates that any “app controlled by foreign enemies ‘ may face a similar fate in the future. In other words, there is no guarantee that Xiaohongshu will not follow in TikTok’s footsteps and be blocked by the US government as well.

TikTok’s ban may have catapulted Xiaohongshu into the US spotlight, but the app has long been successful in China. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has run one of, if not the on the most advanced platform in China in the past few years and reportedly generated over $1 billion in annual profits in 2024 Simply put, it’s the hottest app in China that non-Chinese people have never heard of before.

It also has a significant following among Chinese speakers outside the country, ranging from overseas Chinese students to Taiwanese to diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist hotspots and travel companies all over the world began to notice the app because of how many Chinese tourists heavily rely on it for local information and recommendations shared by other Chinese.

The app is starkly different from TikTok in a few key ways. Although Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos just like TikTok, most of the content on the platform is a photo slideshow combined with text, which is why people often see it more as a competitor to Instagram than TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid channel (referred to as the “brick grid” in professional tech circles) has been so successful at driving engagement that larger 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 besides 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 source of reliable user-generated recommendations for simple things like which restaurant to go to or which beauty product to buy.