RedNote: The Chinese App That Gained Popularity Among TikTok Creators but Had Unintended Consequences

With TikTok scheduled to go dark in the United States on January 19, a large slice of its American audience answered in a way nobody in Congress modeled: they downloaded a different Chinese app. Xiaohongshu — RedNote, to English speakers — took the number one spot on Apple's free US App Store chart on January 13, and its international build reached the top of the US Google Play chart the following day.

The people doing it named themselves almost immediately. "TikTok refugees" posted farewell clips on one Chinese-owned platform and introduction clips on another, treating the move as a protest against a law written to reduce Chinese influence over American feeds. Reuters counted more than half a million new users in roughly two days. China Digital Times put the single-day peak at nearly three million US downloads.

What RedNote actually is

Xiaohongshu launched in 2013 as a shopping guide for Chinese tourists comparing prices abroad. Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu built it out of Shanghai under Xingyin Information Technology, and it now runs past 300 million monthly active users, nearly all of them inside China. A 2024 round of share sales valued the company at roughly $17 billion.

It is not a TikTok clone. The feed is a two-column grid of photo posts with long captions — closer to Pinterest than to a full-screen video scroller — and commerce sits at the middle of it. Skincare reviews, restaurant lists, travel itineraries, outfit breakdowns. The core audience skews young, urban and female, and the app's business is built on turning those recommendations into purchases.

The welcome was real

For a few days the app produced something genuinely rare: unmediated conversation between ordinary Americans and ordinary Chinese users, on a Chinese platform, with nothing partitioning them. Newcomers paid a "cat tax" — a photo of their cat as an entry fee — and got cat photos back. Chinese students used the influx to get help with English homework. Duolingo reported a 216% jump in US users starting Mandarin.

None of that was planned. The interface is almost entirely in Mandarin, and new arrivals worked through it with phone cameras and translation apps.

Then the rules showed up

The unintended part arrived fast. RedNote is a domestic Chinese platform, and domestic Chinese platforms moderate to the standard the Cyberspace Administration sets, not to the one American creators are used to. Reporters found that searches for Xi Jinping or "Free Hong Kong" returned nothing. American users began reporting deletions and suspensions — for referencing LGBTQ+ identity, in one case for a low-cut top — often with no explanation they could read.

That is the difference the download charts obscure. TikTok's US moderation has been criticized plenty, but it is written for a US audience. RedNote's is written for a regulator in Beijing, and the newcomers arrived without the instincts that Chinese users developed over a decade of self-censorship. Group chats sprang up specifically to teach the new rules: what not to search, what not to name, what gets an account frozen.

The company was improvising too. Within days it was urgently recruiting English-language content moderators, a scramble visible in job postings and a trending Weibo hashtag. An app with essentially no non-Chinese review capacity suddenly had to vet an anglophone flood against Chinese censorship rules.

Beijing was watching the same numbers

The migration created a problem for RedNote as well as for its new users. Because the platform never separated audiences the way ByteDance splits TikTok from Douyin, Chinese users could see American posts directly — the one thing the firewall exists to prevent. The Information reported that Chinese officials raised it with RedNote's government relations team, warning the company to make sure China-based users could not see posts from US users.

Eric Liu, a former Weibo content moderator now at China Digital Times, put the ceiling on it plainly: "The fact that Americans are using Xiaohongshu is already [stepping] on the red line. This is something that will not be able to last because Americans don't practice self-censorship."

Washington noticed too

The lawmakers who voted for the TikTok divestment law did not read the exodus as a joke at their expense so much as a gap in their own bill. Rep. Dan Newhouse said the app "provides an opportunity for the CCP to further influence Americans." Rep. Rich McCormick told NOTUS that "we will legislate against them." Rep. Tim Burchett called it "very concerning."

There is a substantive point under the posturing. TikTok spent years and considerable money routing US data to Oracle servers on American soil under the arrangement it called Project Texas. RedNote has no equivalent. Its user data sits in China, subject to Chinese data and security law, and it has faced nothing like the scrutiny TikTok has absorbed from US regulators, auditors and researchers.

So the protest worked as a gesture and worked against itself as a strategy. Creators fleeing a law about Chinese control of their feed landed on a platform with more of it, less transparency about it, and no obligation to explain a takedown. Whether the moment survives the week is not really up to them — it depends on whether Beijing decides an open channel between American and Chinese users is worth the risk, and the early signals say it has already decided that it is not.