By Maria Cernat, World BEYOND War, February 10, 2025
A few weeks ago, just one day before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2025, the Tik Tok app was shut down for a few hours in the United States. This occurred after the Supreme Court, following deliberations, decided to uphold the ban on the app’s operation. Donald Trump issued an order extending the platform’s operation for an additional 75 days. However, by the time the order was signed, the platform had already been shut down.
At that moment, something strange happened. No one expected it, but as a result of Tik Tok’s shutdown, over a million Americans quickly migrated to… Rednote, a Chinese app whose name, you can’t help but notice the irony, is a reference to the Little Red Book, Mao’s famous work. The app has been around for over 10 years and, according to user descriptions, is used by the middle and upper-income segments of Chinese society. It is not the Chinese version of Tik Tok. It is a different platform. The fact is that it only took the U.S. government’s announcement that Tik Tok was about to be shut down, for hundreds of thousands of Americans to turn to a different Chinese app. (TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, but its CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is Singaporean. The U.S. Congress’s antipathy toward TikTok is all about it being Chinese.)
And so the madness began. The interactions between the 300 million Chinese and the over one million Americans who turned Rednote into the most downloaded app in the days immediately following the brief shutdown of TikTok were explosive. On that occasion, I dared to say that, metaphorically speaking, the virtual Berlin Wall had fallen, and people interacted without any fear that the authorities—this time, the Chinese ones—would steal Americans’ data.
Of course, the American authorities and the mainstream media were stunned by this movement and responded forcefully, trying by any means to demonize the Americans’ move into a new Chinese virtual world. All the old Cold War scare tactics were trotted out: bloody communists, censorship, surveillance, oppression. But this time, it didn’t work.
It was now the turn of the mainstream media of the U.S. and -admiring countries like my own Romania to sound like the old communist propaganda trumpets – the ones that warned that the West was decadent and corrupt, that it destroyed the comradely civic spirit and tarnished socialist ethics and equity. Similarly hollow sounding were the warnings about “propagandist communists,” this time coming from the West and directed at Rednote.
Why?
First of all, the situation was unprecedented. It’s very rare for U.S. residents to look with such admiration at another country. The label “TikTok refugees” garnered over 100 million reactions, and the number continues to grow. The interactions between users in the U.S. and China have been stunning.
What I have observed from direct interactions with the platform and the videos tagged #tiktok_refugee, has been a joy of interaction on both sides. The Chinese have watched U.S. movies with great admiration for years. Moreover, from their statements, they study English in school, and a common theme is writing letters to imaginary friends from the United States! So when they found real friends from the U.S. on the platform, they immediately jumped at the opportunity. There is a genuine joy in sharing. The Chinese want to show what houses they have, what cars they have, what children they have, what gardens they have, how they dance, and how they cook. For me personally, this sincere desire for interaction was one of the rare, if not the only, moments when I saw a side of social media that I hadn’t experienced before – the one that allows interactions that form the basis of lasting peace, where authentic, spontaneous communication between people brings them closer through the little things of everyday life: what house you have, what you eat, how you raise your children, how you commute to work, how much you pay at the hospital. These are the ‘insignificant’ things of life that weld friendships and the desire for mutual understanding. I anticipate an increase in travel to China as a result of these interactions.
The image of a backward, oppressed China where people are beaten, intimidated, imprisoned, and starved has been replaced in the mental map of many Americans by the image of a prosperous China with open and educated people – because, beyond what politicians may say, money talks. Hundreds of videos compare what and how much Americans and Chinese can buy. Surprisingly, the Chinese have modern housing blocks, state-of-the-art subway systems with stations that look like they’re from the future, electric cars that seem like science fiction, affordable prices for school, healthcare, transportation, rent, internet, and food. The Chinese do not have the phenomenon of homelessness at the scale experienced in other countries. The spread of extreme poverty is much lower than in U.S. cities, which have become famous for the thousands of people lying in deplorable conditions on the streets.
I believe that if this phenomenon expands, mobilizing U.S. citizens for a war against China will be very difficult. The entire enormous effort to demonize the Chinese has been shattered in just a few days, during which people have spoken, shared the small details of their daily lives, joked, teased each other—doing what ordinary people do when they see beyond the distorted lenses that the propaganda machine wants to place over their eyes. Now is a moment like 1989, when people enthusiastically cross from one side of the ideological wall to the other, see each other, get to know each other, talk, and open up. It is an exciting moment with great positive potential and the possibility of easing tensions in U.S.-China relations.
Beyond the actual interaction and the significant impact that sharing details of everyday life has had, there are a few observations I’d like to share.
Communist propaganda is rather weak. On the platform, there are pages of women marching, of men marching – feeble and pathetic. I expected much more elaborate content. Similarly, pages on Marxism or communism are quite feeble compared to those about tourist destinations, panda bears, or traditional dances. In fact, according to journalist Ben Norton, who recently settled in China from the U.S., there are two other platforms – the equivalent of X and the equivalent of YouTube – where political discussions take place. On Rednote, it’s about entertainment and having a good time.
The platform is content-regulated. When you search for how to buy tickets for the Australian Open, it doesn’t show you the most popular movies but rather those that best fit your search.
There are very clear regulations regarding pornography. Interestingly, I found Chinese men vehemently opposing pornography. I even found a citizen urging everyone to report an account of a fellow Chinese national for promoting flirting with strangers. Ironically, he wasn’t doing it to keep Chinese women for Chinese men, but because he believed that Chinese women are independent and know how to set boundaries, and the fellow citizen’s account conveyed a wrong idea about them. I don’t know if the Chinese inject feminism into their rice, as those who credit the Chinese Communist Party with unlimited power might be willing to believe, but many Chinese men lean towards radical feminism and wish to promote the idea of independent and strong Chinese women. Propaganda? Reality? It’s very hard to estimate. People seem quite convinced of what they’re saying there, but it’s difficult to assess.
The platform is strictly regulated to prevent hate speech, obscenity, insults, and pornography. If you’ve been immersed in the swamp of social media in the ‘free’ world, of course, you’d be inclined to believe that this libertarian utopia, which has degenerated – as expected – into digital feudalism, is the norm. Because if filth is your reality, naturally, you think it should be everyone’s reality. I recently wrote about how the libertarianism embraced in the very founding documents written by the creators of the internet led to a digital patriarchy where the victims of over 90% of deep-fake pornography are girls and women.
On Rednote, I watch little girls who fight valiantly with swords, who turn martial arts into an art – it’s incredibly beautiful. I also watch traditional dancers who excel in style and delicacy, without a trace of obscenity. I watch elderly women who teach Mandarin to those interested, women who are doctors, painters, builders. There’s a wide variety of professions and interests, and the prominence is not necessarily given to those who excessively objectify themselves, as is the case in our virtual world.
Regarding housing, if I may joke, I have the impression that the Chinese Communist Party is so powerful that it has scanned my mind and applied exactly the principles I was thinking about. The huge residential blocks have equally huge underground parking lots. There are absolutely no cars between the blocks. The first two floors are dedicated to common spaces: gyms, meeting places for neighbors, spots where you can invite friends. Similarly, between the blocks, there are sports fields and covered areas where you can hang out with neighbors or friends you invite over. Additionally, another principle the CCP has applied, at least in the wealthier cities, is that after giving birth, you can stay for up to a month in a clinic where nurses take care of you and the baby, teaching you how to take care of them. It perfectly aligns with what I believe is good for a new mother.
In China, there are poor rural areas with houses where water flows through the roof. Many Chinese people show how difficult it was to grow up in such a house with concrete floors and unbearable cold. Many show how they renovated these homes. Like any person who goes to work, they wish to return and improve the place where they grew up.
Perhaps the most interesting virtual Chinese personalities are… daddies. It’s hard to estimate if the practice of showing parental care for babies is common in China, but I am surprised by the touching willingness of Chinese men to appear on Rednote, especially caring for baby girls. I tried to strike up conversations with a few to see how acceptable it is in China to show men in these extremely vulnerable roles, contradicting the classic attributes of masculinity established by gender roles.
After a few weeks of using the Rednote app, I have many more questions than answers. I confess I was impressed by the variety of cultural differences.
There is so much to explore/analyze/evaluate/learn from interacting with the Chinese virtual world. I dare to advance the idea that interactions with ordinary Chinese people is the path to a less violent world where we learn from each other before we hate each other.
