Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Davos, Switzerland on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.
And listeners, please support my work at www.sinicapodcast.com. Become a subscriber and enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China-focused columnists and commentators. Make sure to check out the latest series from our friends at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Studying China in the Absence of Access, which will run across the next few months. I was originally going to skip putting out the regular podcast this week, as I’m about to start my work that I do each year at the World Economic Forum, but the stranger-than-fiction mass migration of mostly American TikTok users to Chinese app Xiaohongshu is just a topic that demands an episode. So, even though I had to put this together in a hurry, I lucked out by getting, well, the two individuals who would’ve been my top picks to talk about what we’re going to talk about anyway. So, I am mighty pleased about this.
Today is Sunday afternoon here in Switzerland, January 19th, just a few hours after TikTok, as they indicated they would, went dark in the U.S. But rather than dwell on TikTok, we are going to focus mainly on the Xiaohongshu craze today and try to zoom out a bit and look at what it all means. Joining me from New York is Ivy Yang. Ivy is the founder of Wavelet Strategy, a New York-based consultancy specializing in, well, specializing in kind of what I used to do for Baidu, which is communications and crisis management and the like — you know, PR. She writes the Substack newsletter, Calling the Shots, focusing on bridging the U.S.-China communications gap, which you should definitely be subscribing to if you’re interested in that fascinating topic. Additionally, Ivy contributes a column to The Financial Times Chinese edition. She explores cross-cultural communication, business strategy, and global market trends. She was also one of my buddy Jeremy’s favorite contributors to The China Project on those occasions when she did write for us. We were very blessed to have her. She’s a product of NYU and Columbia where she did her MBA, and she is unfailingly in the know about what’s happening at the intersection of tech, business and culture. Ivy Yang, welcome at last to Sinica. So glad that you could join us.
Ivy Yang: I’m so, so, so glad. Thank you so much for having me, Kaiser.
Kaiser: Yay! Also joining us for the first time is David Fishman. If you had told me that David would be joining to talk about the TikTok refugee phenomenon on Xiaohongshu for his debut on the show, even just a couple of weeks ago, I would’ve thought you were insane. There were, after all, so many other topics that I’d discussed, well, having him on to chat about when we met in person for the first time back in October in Shanghai. After all, he is, well, you might know him, he’s a senior manager at the Lantau Group where he specializes in China’s power sector. He focuses on areas like coal, wind, solar, nuclear, and he is absolutely great on all of those topics. He’s also a former contributor to the late China Project. You might know him, too, from his amazing Twitter threads and his newsletter, which is called Crossing the River, where he often relays, quite faithfully because his Chinese is truly excellent, these conversations he has with what academics might call “subalterns.” Even though he’s based in Shanghai, he’s kind of made a name for himself by exploring China’s smaller cities, towns, and villages, and having these deeply human, empathetic, and often really kind of funny and unfailingly eye-opening conversations with just ordinary people. It’s actually his ability to recount his own encounters more than just the fact that I know he’s been watching the Xiaohongshu TikTok refugee phenomenon really carefully that convinced me he was just the right guy for this. Plus, I just think he’s great. Don’t miss him on Twitter, where he’s @pretentiouswhat, which is a very funny, funny handle. But check out Crossing the River, which is his Substack. So, two Substacks to follow, Calling the Shots, Crossing the River. Don’t get confused and go looking for “Calling the River” or “Crossing the Shots.” Anyway, David, welcome to Sinica.
David Fishman: Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me, Kaiser.
Kaiser: Great. All right. Let me just say that I promised to have both of you back on the show to talk about the things you’re more known for, but thank you so much for making the time so last minute to join me.
Anyway, so I don’t know whether either of you knows the answer to this because I certainly don’t, but how did this whole thing get started? I mean, we know in general terms that there was this “sell or be banned” deadline that the U.S. Congress had imposed of January 19th, just the day before the inauguration. And as a kind of self-consciously ironic and in-your-face response, an act of comic defiance, all these American TikTokers just started downloading Xiaohongshu. Any of you have any idea of the actual first person to do this, or any speculation on that?
Ivy: There’s always been a contingent of TikTokers and Instagrammers who are on Xiaohongshu.
Kaiser: Ah, okay.
Ivy: The beauty and fashion influencers come to mind because Xiaohongshu is predominantly a female demographic of users, and a lot of overseas content creators have discovered Xiaohongshu because there’s also a lot of moving Xiaohongshu content that’s overseas over to Xiaohongshu. So, they see the opportunity of just directly communicating with their would-be or already followers. So, that’s already been kind of a small group of people that’s on Xiaohongshu. And as with a lot of things on TikTok, right, sometimes it starts with a fad where people are just like, “Hey, I’m just going to talk about my experience on RedNote,” and that kind of blossoms into a whole trend. And I think with the pending shutdown of TikTok, that became from fad to trend really quickly and into a movement.
So, I would say that that’s the origin of how RedNote suddenly became this destination for all of these TikTok refugees to try it out. And you see that there are people who are genuinely curious about what’s over there on the other side, and as an act of defiance. And there are people who are being opportunists as well. They see that there is a traffic tilt towards people who have overseas IP addresses, and just by saying, “RedNote is great and TikTok is something we loved, and these are the reasons why we’re not moving to Instagram and YouTube,” they see that there’s a lot of traffic going to these topics, and when they go and they post these videos, they quickly can ramp up their follower base, so why not?
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When did you guys first notice that this was happening? Was that like Tuesday or Wednesday, or...?
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