“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The American government bans TikTok, so we are looking for an alternative… We are very sorry to interrupt you here. “I hope we don’t have to stay here too long,” said a Xiaohongshu user under the name Ryan Martin in a video posted yesterday that appeared to be aimed at the app’s Chinese user base. He translated the statement into Chinese and, using a robotic speech generator, read it out in the video, which has now been liked over 24,000 times. “It’s okay, you don’t interrupt. When you are active, we sleep,” reads one of the top comments in Chinese.

The platform also features dozens of live audio chat rooms in which American and Chinese users explained to each other – presumably in many cases for the first time – how their respective societies work and cleared up common misunderstandings. One of the most popular chat rooms has been heard by almost 30,000 users.

While Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which the Supreme Court is currently considering and which could lead to a U.S. ban on TikTok, the law does stipulate that any “controlled by foreign adversaries Application” may suffer a similar fate in the future. In other words, there is no guarantee that Xiaohongshu won’t follow in TikTok’s footsteps and also be blocked by the US government.

The TikTok ban may have catapulted Xiaohongshu into the spotlight in the US, but the app has long been successful in China. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has operated one of these, if not one The The app has been the hottest platform in China in recent years, reportedly generating over $1 billion in annual profit in 2024. To put it simply, it is the hottest app in China that non-Chinese people have never heard of before.

It also has a significant following among Chinese speakers outside the country, ranging from Chinese students abroad to Taiwanese and diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist hotspots and travel companies around the world have taken notice of the app as many Chinese tourists use it heavily to get local information and recommendations from other Chinese.

The app differs significantly from TikTok in a few key ways. While Xiaohongshu allows users to post short vertical videos just like TikTok, the majority of content on the platform consists of photo slideshows with text, which is why people often view it as a competitor to Instagram rather than TikTok. The app’s AI-powered grid-shaped feed (dubbed the “Mason Grid” in professional tech circles) has been so successful in driving engagement that major social media companies like Tencent and ByteDance have copied the design into their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance alongside TikTok, is widely seen as an attempt to emulate Xiaohongshu and his success.

In fact, the app doesn’t even have a good English translation of its own name: Xiaohongshu is just the phonetic translation of its Chinese name. 小红书. While the literal translation “little red book” may remind English-speaking users of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s collection of speeches and propaganda slogans of the same name, it has a different connotation in China, where users interpret it as a source of reliable user-generated recommendations for everyday things , such as which restaurant you should visit or which cosmetic product you should buy.