From one Chinese app to another

That’s what US TikTok users did in protest of their government’s ban, and unexpectedly created something wonderful.

TALK about unintended consequences! I am referring to the United States government’s decision to ban TikTok, the hugely popular video-sharing app.

Because it’s owned by a Beijing-based Chinese company called ByteDance, US lawmakers were convinced it was a threat to national security and wanted it gone from America.

The decision was upheld by the US Supreme Court on Friday, and it was supposed to take effect on Sunday. And it did, all of 12 hours!

As CNN reported, after shutting itself down in the US, TikTok was back online half a day later and attributing its return to President Donald Trump.

Early on Sunday, a day before his inauguration as the 47th president, marking his return to the White House, Trump said he would issue an executive order to delay enforcement of the divest-or-ban law. Shortly after, access to TikTok’s app and web page was restored for its 170 million US users.

The ban saga is still not over. It is only delayed, and it remains to be seen what sort of long-term solution TikTok and the US Government would agree on. The US Congress had demanded ByteDance sell 50% of TikTok to an American buyer, which ByteDance had rejected.

Even though there is now a breather for the app, American TikTokers, anticipating the ban, had started looking to migrate to an alternative platform. And they landed on Xiaohongshu, which means Little Red Book and shortened to RedNote.

Many thought it was named after Mao Zedong’s 1964 compilation of quotations, which is known as the Little Red Book in English, but this has been denied by the app founders.

In just a few days before Sunday, more than half a million Americans had signed up with RedNote, making it the top downloaded app in the US.

How they found the app is anyone’s guess, but reportedly “TikTok refugees”, as they call themselves, chose the Chinese app in protest of the TikTok ban.

Herein lies the irony of the whole situation. The US government sought to ban TikTok because its lawmakers likened it to a “spy balloon in Americans’ phones” with a senator quoted as saying, “If you have TikTok on your phone currently, it can track your whereabouts, it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records.

“If the Chinese government gets its hands on that information, it’s not just a national security threat, it’s a personal security threat.”

To Americans who love TikTok, which for many is an important platform to help them make money as content creators and entrepreneurs, the possibility that the Chinese government was using it to spy on them and steal their personal data didn’t matter. And they wanted to make their anger known by doing exactly what their government wanted to put a stop to.

AP quotes Katie Lawson, a poultry farmer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who had posted videos of her chickens, on why she moved to RedNote: “When they tell us you can’t have a Chinese app anymore, we go straight to another Chinese app. We’re going to go explore that country and their values ourselves. We’re going to go straight to the source.”

RedNote is a lifestyle social media app for posting videos, photos and texts, and has functions like live-streaming and shopping.

It started as a Hong Kong shopping guide in 2012 targeting Chinese tourists, and now has 300 million users in China. Naturally, the language used is Mandarin.

But that did not deter the American refugees who managed to get on board, and found themselves warmly welcomed by their Chinese counterparts who saw English-language posts take over feeds almost overnight.

The digital wall that had kept both sides apart had cracked, and AP marveled at the unexpected “wave of US-China camaraderie (that) broke out online”, describing it as a “rare moment of direct contact between two online worlds that are usually kept apart by language, corporate boundaries, and China’s strict system of online censorship that blocks access to nearly all international media and social media services”.

The Americans found RedNote to be a friendly and toxic-free platform devoid of hate speech and divisive politicking, and that’s thanks to China’s uncompromising censorship laws.

Many posted videos to say they saw Chinese people and society in a new and positive light, unlike what their government had been telling them.

While the initial welcome has been very warm and wholesome, and some American refugees claim they were here to stay on RedNote, one does wonder how long the good feeling will last, especially now that Tiktok is back.

Still, now that ordinary Americans and Chinese have unwittingly been in direct contact with each other, with the usually insular Westerners being exposed to a China so modern and advanced that it has left them gobsmacked, it’s probably hard to slam down the wall again.

I understand how surprising and eye- and mind-opening the experience must be, as I went through it myself.

As a Malaysian Chinese living in a country with close ties to China, I was aware that the nation was on the fast track to improving and modernising itself. But I had no idea just how laser-focused and determined they were.

A few decades ago, all the news coming out of China was almost always bad. It was an oppressive communist state with no democracy; it was the sweat shop of many international brands and the supplier of cheap and badly made goods; it would steal technology from others; its pollution levels were terrible and its citizens were generally poor and downtrodden.

All that has changed. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was among the first to show just how far China had come.

It was a spell-binding event that has been hailed as the best in the games history. Now, China practically leads in almost every field and industry, including the space race.

But my blinkers really fell off when I started watching Chinese dramas 13 years ago. I started with a fictionalised historical drama called Bu Bu Jing Xin (Scarlet Heart) set during the reign of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing dynasty.

I was stunned by the elaborate sets, costumes, fabulous acting and immersive plot. The series’ high production quality easily surpassed the immensely popular 1980s TV Hong Kong dramas that I have fond memories of.

From the modern-day series, I gained insights into the contemporary lives of people from different strata of Chinese society, from the working class to the corporate tycoons, albeit dramatised.

It was similar to how many of us learned about American society and the lives of its citizens from TV sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne and Shirley, and Friends.

For those Americans who had lived like “katak dibawah tempurung” but have finally leaped over the digital wall in protest – apologies for the mixed metaphors – I hope they will continue to explore and discover not just China but also the rest of the world because, as a wise person once said:

“What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. And what we cannot control... we attack.”

The views expressed here are the writer’s own.