Tens of thousands of "TikTok refugees" in the United States have flooded into Little Red Books

TikTok is facing a possible ban in the United States, where tens of thousands of users calling themselves "TikTok refugees" have flocked to the Chinese social platform XiaoHongshu to express their dissatisfaction with Washington's decision. Xiaohongshu has jumped 10 places overnight to top the Apple App Store charts in the US.

According to the scholars surveyed, the behavior of American users reflects their dissatisfaction with over-regulation of social platforms and political interference in self-expression.

The Chinese tech giant's TikTok has been accused by the US of being controlled by the Chinese government and posing a potential threat to US national security. Both Beijing and ByteDance deny the allegations.

The US Supreme Court last week heard TikTok's appeal against the "sell or ban" law, indicating that it is inclined to uphold the ban, meaning that if TikTok does not find a new owner by January 19, the platform will face a ban in the United States.

So far, ByteDance has not indicated its intention to sell TikTok.

Tens of thousands of TikTok users in the United States have flocked to XiaoHongshu over the past two days in search of an alternative platform as the effective date of the ban approaches. These users generally refer to themselves as "TikTok refugees" in their posts.

As of 8pm on Tuesday, the hashtag #TikTokrefugee had amassed more than 120,000 notes and nearly 100 million views.

Many US users said they chose to turn to XiaoHongshu instead of other US social platforms to protest the US government's ban on TikTok. "The US government is worried about TikTok stealing our data, so we will take the initiative to come here and send the data to our door," an American netizen said sarcastically.

Founded in Shanghai in 2013, XiaoHongshu is a social and e-commerce platform that has attracted a large number of young consumers and brands through user-generated content and social recommendations.

Gan Liyi, assistant professor at the National Defense and Strategic Studies Institute of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, pointed out in an interview with Lianhe Zaobao that Little Red Book is easy to operate and can meet the basic needs of users in sharing, business and self-expression, so it has great appeal to multinational users.

"On the one hand, you could see [users fleeing TikTok to Little Red Book] as a political act," she said. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as an apolitical act. They want to use digital tools to make their voices heard. It's a very grassroots response in the digital space that goes beyond the zero-sum logic we see in the current U.S.-China relationship."

Xiaohongshu ranked 11th on Apple's App Store in the United States on Sunday, but jumped 10 places in a day to top Apple's free app list, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile app data analysis company.

The unexpected popularity of the little red book in the US market has promoted the collective rise of Chinese technology, e-commerce, fashion and other related concept stocks. Including telemetry technology, gravitation media, One network one creation, love shares and many other stocks quickly sealed the limit.

Many Chinese Xiaohongshu users posted on the platform, marveling that their familiar apps had changed dramatically after waking up, and the screen was occupied by a large number of new users from the United States in English.

However, most Chinese users welcomed the addition of new users and pointed out that given the time difference between China and the United States, resources do not conflict, XiaoHongshu will usher in A new era of "early C (Chinese) late A (American)".

Unlike Tiktok, which is limited to Chinese users, XiaoHongshu has an international version, but the content of the Chinese version and the international version is interoperable, and foreign users can also share content and interact with Chinese users on the same platform.

This makes the Little Red Book stage a large-scale cross-border cultural interaction between China and the West. Users of the two places communicate in stilted words through artificial intelligence translation, sharing Xiaohongshu using tips, recipes and travel recommendations.

Gan Liyi believes that American users see Xiaored Book as a way to explore culture, change their stereotypes about China through the content of the platform, and contact and understand Chinese culture from a new perspective.

Over time, however, the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories can make it difficult for users to distinguish between true and false, causing contradictions and conflicts.

"Multinational users may form alliances or campaigns," she says. Due to differences in ideas and values among countries, these bottom-up forces may conflict with China's national interests and may even challenge the country's security interests, making regulation more complicated."