Social media can be cruel, cold and heartless, but there are moments when it transcends its built-in filters, ruthless manipulation, thirst for user data and algorithmic limitations to capture and convey the zeitgeist of the times, as newspapers, radio and television did in an earlier era.
With TikTok’s future still uncertain, the Chinese app Xiaohongshu just hit an inflection point on both sides of the Pacific. A mass conversation is taking place, a million conversations at once. Youth in the U.S. and China have found, for the time-being, a relatively open platform, on which to communicate, and it turns out they have a great deal to say to one another.
It’s silly, and it’s not. It’s serious and unserious at the same time. It’s full of ignorant asides, crude allusions but not without moments of grace and insights. It’s raw and relatively unmediated, a broken wall that allows traffic both ways, and sets a tone that rings true to teenagers and adults. But it’s full of propaganda too, and some of it is damaging to Xiaohongshu’s positive image at the moment.
The relative ease of access to Xiaohongshu has allowed its foreign fanbase to soar, by some accounts well over a hundred million, in a matter of days. This is not a Chinese-only app, nor a bifurcated app like Tencent’s TikTok/Douyin that subjects citizens to digital segregation with a Chinese version for Chinese and a non-Chinese version for non-Chinese, but instead, one big happy (at the moment) family.
At last an app that brings people together instead of tearing them apart.
And one of the strange discoveries in testing out the app is that disaffected American youth are not alone in sharing a morbid, fascination bordering on admiration, for the now-imprisoned Luigi Mangione, a well-educated young man whose alleged shooting of an insurance company CEO on the streets of New York City, and the dramatic dragnet that followed, made him an instant media star.
The initial surprise at seeing an accused murderer get any airtime in China at all was surpassed by the realization that clicking on a few links leads the viewer to more material about Luigi, produced by Chinese in Chinese for other Chinese, than one might ever have expected to exist.
With the advent of millions of young Americans pouring onto the site, tributes to Luigi are proliferating wildly, with everything from photos from his tragic, photogenic life put to music, including a particularly well-done mashup using the song “Mama” by Freddy Mercury, with whom the accused shares a passing resemblance. There was even a mini action movie fantasy that shows a Luigi lookalike narrowly escaping prison by jet after a blistering attack on the police.
The creative use of music and cobbling together action scenes for a tribute video is one thing, but the prevalence of AI on the site is a problem, too. Fake news and fake interviews limit the site’s credibility, a problem facing social media sites everywhere, and most especially Twitter and Facebook, as they have dropped curation and content controls.
One widely-shared Xiaohongshu post, that appears on Twitter as well, claims “American college students are singing Chinese National Anthem in NYC.” It’s a story which would hardly be of passing interest, even if true, but the claim is all the more ridiculous by the fact that it is actually a video of Russians singing, not the national anthem but, “If There was no Communist Party, there would be no New China.”
A more impressive musical number, all the more impressive because it appears to be almost entirely fake and largely generated by AI, shows a Marlboro Man style singer crooning “lost my home last Friday…planting seeds on xiaohongshu for all the world to see…on bridges built in kindness, the world’s a brighter moon…”
Illogical lyrics, catchy melody, made by whom and for what purpose?
Attribution is not clear, but it shows up on sites that carry Chinese nationalist content.
The tsunami of America’s self-style “TikTok refugees” hitting the shores of Xiaohongshu has created a fast-moving dialogue, a dialectic in which each side is grasping the rare opportunity to keep lines of communication open and make it work. To this end, a welcoming attitude by Chinese already on the site, which started out with travel, shopping and lifestyle topics in mind, is a key development. This, and a respectable amount of self-restraint and good manners on both sides have helped create a conversational tone that American newcomers almost uniformly characterize as “nice.”
Indeed, compared to the toxic flame wars on Twitter and elsewhere, the “niceness” of the Xiaohongshu experience to date is the real news.
In speaking directly across a divide that other platforms fail to bridge, Xiaohongshu has brought the (mostly) young people of two nations together in a way that subtly and not-so-subtly defies establishment thinking on both sides. It is, for the moment, more immediate and real than CNN and CCTV. What’s more, because it bridges cultures instead of divides them, it is potentially more dynamic and transformative than TikTok (banned in China).
The online forum gives youth on both sides of the Pacific a chance to grumble, with irony and humility, about their sense of helplessness, a sense of coming into a crazy world they have little control over, coupled with a nagging sense that each has been misinformed about the realities of the other. Posters admit a lack of knowledge and asking questions both pointed and banal, and many of the answers conflict with the received wisdom of the respective media on both sides.
The humility is astonishing, especially the well-meaning, albeit humorous, attempts to speak the other’s language.
Ni hao! What do you guys eat for breakfast? How much does your job pay? What’s the price of groceries? Can you help me with my math homework? How about teaching me some slangy Chinese?
Or consider the words of a video post from a frustrated woman venting plaintively in an American trailer park:
“I feel so radicalized….American society is toxic, so gross, they jack prices up on everything, we don’t get health care…This is a class war!”
There’s something rebellious about the free-wheeling and often striking personal posts, by which young people with no one to talk to, end up talking to total strangers in the hopes of making a virtual connection with someone, somewhere.
Many regular users of Xiaohongshu on the Chinese side have been more than accommodating, responding kindly to posts from Americans who somehow broke through the digital fence and changed the nature of the discourse. Predictably there are nationalist hotheads posing as gatekeepers, but most members of the community appear to put their guard down enough to talk, and show a willingness to listen.
Meanwhile, Americans who made a point of turning to a Chinese site, not Meta or Facebook, as a form of protest against the U.S. media in general, are astounded to find they have gained tens of thousands more followers than they ever dreamed of, and maybe even some new friends.
Naysayers notwithstanding, the shell-shocked youth of both nations have risen to the occasion, coming out of the woodwork, coming alive, laughing, crying, strumming guitar, sharing favorite foods and at times waxing outright eloquent.
It’s as if kids whose parents, teachers, politicians, priests, police, commissars and shrinks “just don’t understand” belatedly made the discovery that there are young people just like them on the other side of the U.S.-China divide.
It’s like pen pals, only much faster and with many more correspondents.
Whether it is a genuine moment of generational solidarity, or just a flash in the pan, the American invasion of Xiaohongshu is attention-grabbing.
Who would have known that the youth of two countries so badly at odds might share the same sense of quiet desperation, disaffection with old ways, a hunger for meaning, and a propensity to radicalize?
Although America has long imported refugees from all over the world, it does not have much experience exporting them, so the ready willingness of young Americans to declare themselves “refugees” is a formula that is at once endearing and humorous, with or without the so-called “cat tax,” (obligatory sharing of pet photos.)
While the “refugee” metaphor may be overblown and mainly rhetorical, it captures the angst of a generation, indeed even simmering rage, of discontent with no easy place to vent. Zoomers, who have grown up phone- in-face, know a thing or two about fishing for friendship online. Digital natives to the core, they have their own argot, arch-heroes and outlook; it’s only natural they should see things differently from the Boomers currently running (ruining) the world.