TikTok has been granted a stay by incoming President Trump who gave it 75 more days to find a buyer and get itself into compliance with U.S. law, though the U.S. Supreme Court has not reversed its view, and erstwhile Trump supporters such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Marco Rubio are still saying that TikTok has to go.
Or, to use Rubio’s catchy soundbite: “Communist China is on the clock.”
While the mainstream media has rightly mocked the idea of Americans who know nothing about China flocking to a site under Beijing’s state control merely because U.S. policy has taken away one of their favorite toys, it is wrong to dismiss the impulse as ignorant.
It’s a kind of thrashing in the dark, the first few baby steps in a new direction, a transformative new way of looking at things. Simply put, Americans don’t like being told what to do. From its inception, the nation has had a contrarian streak with a “don’t tread on me” attitude.
Understood in the context of the times, it’s as American in essence as the tossing of bales of tea into Boston Harbor, and not without some of the same revolutionary overtones.
So, the usual complaints about national security might not get the last word on this. Something’s happening out there and it’s worth paying attention to, even if the Xiaohongshu craze is doomed to fade or gets thwarted by censorship.
It’s not entirely stupid for America’s “dumb” young people and the detritus of the broken middle class to look to China which has long been proficient in the rhetoric of revolution.
Whether it be questions of worker exploitation, capitalist greed, poverty elimination, roundly combating drugs and homelessness, or even class war, China’s been there, done that.
And make no mistake, there is a whiff of class war in the air as American gilded oligarchs gather around convicted criminal Donald Trump for another round of “draining the swamp” only this time the swamp is America itself, and it’s the rich doing the draining.
Luigi Mangione, a lone activist who struck dead the CEO of a big insurance firm on the streets of New York City late last year has emerged as an internet folk hero of sorts to a swath of disaffected young people who claimed to understand his angst, if not his brutal methods. One surprise to American visitors to Xiaohongshu is the discovery that Luigi Mangione already has a Chinese fanbase, his dark act and dark good looks an emblem of rebellion, Che Guevara-style, (or Mao poster-style) to a generation willing to wave provocative banners for the sake of being provocative.
To those truly seeking revolution, China will disappoint as surely as it entices, a lesson America’s self-styled revolutionaries of an early generation learned the hard way, but hope, even misguided hope, springs eternal.
More generally, but not without significance, young people are serving notice to their guardians on both sides of the divide by breaking from the straitjackets of conventional thinking. The future, which ultimately will be theirs, is up for grabs.
The gleeful celebration of all things China going on in Xiaohongshu’s small corner of the internet is itself worth acknowledging, if not celebrating. Not because China is in a position to deliver that which the restive youth of America seek, but because young people are striving to take agency in their own lives and stridently rejecting the status quo in doing so.
Youth tend to be attracted to the notion of being hip, aloof, ironic and cool, which is why this moment is for Xiaohongshu to win and for TikTok to lose. Xiaohongshu’s co-founder, the American-educated Charlwin Mao Wenchao painted his app red, not out of allegiance to communism but to celebrate the school colors of Stanford. When he came up with the name Xiaohongshu, also called Red Note, it was a playful reference, with echoes of the “Little Red Book” in English, but not Maozhuxi Yulu which is what the Mao quote book is called in Chinese. A hip name for a generation that likes its meta-messages, but in fact it’s a Chinese translation of an unofficial English nickname given to a very serious book of Mao quotes that nobody reads anymore.
But even with today’s whimsical span, there’s something catchy about reading confessions by strangers.
To cite one example, an American woman, apparently distraught by the utter frustration of middle class life in a broken America, posted a tearful video that reached hundreds of thousands, including the attention of a random young man who came across this message in a bottle from a foreign shore.
“XHS is now filled with American stories,” he posted in response, moved by the specifics of her case. He went on to apologize for judging Americans too harshly, being too hard on the homeless and drug addicts. He sadly notes that people can do the right thing, work hard all their lives, and still fall into poverty. “China isn’t without its flaws,” he adds. “We have our fair share of problems, but seeing decent and honest American working class suffer makes one realize things are not supposed to be this way.”
The Xiaohongshu boom is at once touching, opportunistic, ephemeral, showy and sincere. China state input sees to it that posts on topics regarded as sensitive, such as the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, are taken down.
The best of the banter is apolitical, but when serious topics are broached, the approach is often indirect and humorous. Satirists since the times of Jonathan Swift know that censorship is best evaded by subtlety, allegory, and humor.
Posts in which the tone is in-your-face political, especially those enhanced with AI or with actors/influencers playing to a script, i.e. diatribes against the United States that align perfectly with the orthodox CCP party line, are less convincing. But the second life of misinformation is long, creating a tainted information ecosystem that needs to be regarded skeptically and navigated with care.
If you can wade your way past AI posts, deep fakes and tiresome propagandists, there is the reward of discovering things you didn’t know about, as well as the delight of finding posts laced with the subtle sarcasm state censors don’t quite know how to react to.
While many U.S. posters have remarked how “nice” everyone is, and good manners counts for a lot in this day and age of diminished public discussion, it may be part of the subculture that evolved from a mutually supportive community of women sharing shopping tips online.
A great deal of content is self-effacing and polite, though not without an underlying sense of powerlessness in the face of larger malevolent forces. It’s a situation that Zoomers can relate to, kids who have been through a pandemic at an impressionable age, and so much more.
American migration to Xiaohongshu is not so much an act of willful ignorance as willing intransigence, and it resonates with American “don’t fence me in” culture to the core. Whether it’s a protest march, a sit-in, or merely sitting on a bus, sometimes doing what you are not supposed to do is a pointed rejection of the way things are. The Zoomers are looking for some elbow room, and that’s the potent stuff on which social change is built.
Which is why TikTok, whose quality user interface got so many Americans addicted to a Chinese app in the first place, is likely to end up the loser, regardless of what the courts decide.
China-owned and operated TikTok pre-emptively cut access to American users on the eve of the much debated and delayed U.S. ban as a ploy to rile followers and dramatize their corporate plight.
Consider TikTok’s tone-deaf messages to its 170 million users. If it’s rather rich for a corporate board to impose the demand for “nonenforcement” of law on an outgoing President, it’s even more out of touch with the young and rebellious user base to portray the controversial Trump as a savior.
As Biden’s last day approached, TikTok told followers:
“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers, assuring nonenforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.”
And no sooner did Trump come into office than it said:
“We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance…It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
Accused by U.S. law-makers of being a vehicle of political influence, TikTok executives just clumsily proved to the youth of the world that old-school, arm-twisting political influence is exactly what they do.
Despite the vast sums of money spent on lobbying, the establishment tone of TikTok’s corporate PR is not likely to play well with the rebellious hordes ditching TikTok for Xiaohongshu.
As many new members of the little red book have said, even if TikTok gets reinstated they are staying right where they are. There’s even a hashtag: #not going back.
Refugees rarely go back to their country of origin in the real world, and increasingly, that seems to be the case in the virtual world as well.