“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The American government is banning TikTok so we are looking for an alternative…We are very sorry to interrupt you here. Hope we don’t have to stay here for too long,” a Xiaohongshu user using the name Ryan Martin said in a video posted yesterday seemingly addressing 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 over 24,000 times. “It’s fine, you are not interrupting. When you guys are active, we are sleeping,” reads one of the top comments in Chinese.
There are also dozens of live audio chatrooms 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 chatroom has been listened to by nearly 30,000 users.
While Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that the Supreme Court is currently considering and could result in a US ban on TikTok, the law does stipulate that any “foreign adversary controlled application” may face a similar fate in the future. In other words, there’s no guarantee that Xiaohongshu won’t follow in TikTok’s footsteps in being blocked by the US government as well.
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 operated one of, if not the most, trendy platform in China over the past few years and reportedly generated over $1 billion in annual profits in 2024. To put it simply, it’s the hottest app in China that non-Chinese people have never heard of before.
It also has a sizable following among Chinese-speakers outside of the country, ranging from Chinese students overseas to Taiwanese people to diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist hot spots, and travel companies around the world have started noticing the app because of how many Chinese tourists heavily rely on it for local information and recommendations shared by fellow Chinese people.
The app is starkly different from TikTok in a few major ways. While Xiaohongshu does allow users to post short vertical videos just like TikTok, the majority of the content on the platform is photo slideshows coupled with text, which is why people often view it more as a competitor to Instagram than TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid-shaped feed (referred to as a “masonry grid” in professional tech circles) has been so successful in 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 aside from TikTok, is widely seen as an attempt to emulate Xiaohongshu and its success.
In fact, the app doesn’t even have a good English translation of its own name: Xiaohongshu is the 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 by the same name, it has a different connotation in China, where users interpret it as a source of reliable user-generated recommendations for mundane things, like which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy.
