{"id":20431,"date":"2025-01-20T04:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20431"},"modified":"2025-01-20T05:25:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T05:25:18","slug":"tiktok-rednote-and-the-crushed-promise-of-the-chinese-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20431","title":{"rendered":"TikTok, RedNote and the Crushed Promise of the Chinese Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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China\u2019s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.<\/p>\n

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The Chinese social media app RedNote<\/a> is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Calling themselves \u201cTikTok refugees<\/a>,\u201d these users paid the \u201ccat tax\u201d to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?<\/p>\n

Americans also posed questions to their new friends. \u201cI heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,\u201d an American RedNote user wrote. \u201cCan you tell me how can I get it?\u201d An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: \u201cBelieve me, it\u2019s true,\u201d the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.<\/p>\n

I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With access to an online population of one billion<\/a> and an army of hard-working, resourceful engineers, China\u2019s internet platforms are world-class in their design, functionality and user experience \u2014 as is demonstrated by TikTok and now by RedNote, or Xiaohongshu in Chinese.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The office of Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, in Shanghai.<\/span>Alex Plavevski\/EPA, via Shutterstock<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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China\u2019s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.Calling themselves \u201cTikTok refugees,\u201d these users paid the \u201ccat tax\u201d to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?Americans also posed questions to their new friends. \u201cI heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,\u201d an American RedNote user wrote. \u201cCan you tell me how can I get it?\u201d An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: \u201cBelieve me, it\u2019s true,\u201d the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view.With access to an online population of one billion and an army of hard-working, resourceful engineers, China\u2019s internet platforms are world-class in their design, functionality and user experience \u2014 as is demonstrated by TikTok and now by RedNote, or Xiaohongshu in Chinese.The office of Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, in Shanghai.Alex Plavevski\/EPA, via ShutterstockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20433,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20431"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20434,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20431\/revisions\/20434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}