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There has been quite a ruckus over the impending ban on TikTok, a mainland Chinese short-form video hosting service, and its supposed replacement by REDnote (aka Xiaohongshu [XHS], aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, aka RED), a Chinese social networking and e-commerce platform. I think that much / most of the commotion is sheer hype to stir up business. Nonetheless, since hundreds of millions of impressionable youths and clueless adults are all in a lather over this battle of the alien apps, I suppose we can't ignore them on Language Log.
The claims about the supposed impact of this switcheroo are outlandish at best — such as that hordes of Americans are scrambling to learn Mandarin so they can use REDnote (you don't just rush out to learn Mandarin so you can hop on an online app), that they are military applications being tapped by the Chinese government, and so forth.
That's about as much as I personally am prepared to say about the internet imbroglio, so I will hand the baton to two of my colleagues.
First, Bryan Van Norden tells me that he has been hearing interestingly complicated reports from his native-Chinese-speaking friends about the meaning of the phrase xiǎohóngshū 小紅書 / 小红书 ("little red book").
Here is what I have heard from two different native informants:
Even native Chinese people who were born after 1960s might not be very clear about the historical usage of the terms 小红书 vs. 红宝书. During the Cultural Revolution, 红宝书 was used broadly to refer to all books written by Mao, whereas 小红书 specifically referred to the little red book formally named 毛主席语录. It was literally small with red plastic cover, a concise collection of quotations from Mao's writings for everyone to carry in their pocket. As you know, although the name of the current Chinese social media platform evokes an association with the historical 小红书, it has little to do with Mao's legacy.
and
As regards the name of the app, I believe the official English name is the Red Note or Rednote. But many people are also aware that the literal translation should be the Red Book. The Chinese name, as far as I know, has always been 小红书, never was 红宝书. But the irony lies in that 小红书 was actually a retranslation of the English translation of 红宝书, which was coined in the late 1960s during the last decade of the Mao Zedong era. I am under the impression that Little Red Book, the popular American women’s magazine, was named after the English translation of 红宝书 which became a sort of catch phrase in the early 1970s when the Sino-US relationship thawed.
I think that when the second person refers to "Little Red Book, the popular American women’s magazine," he means the magazine Redbook, whose name considerably antedates Mao.
The following remarks come from Conal Boyce:
RedNote 小紅書 stampede (and an LGBTQ "warning" about [gasp!] skin)
The government threatens to ban TikTok over ill-defined security concerns; the people flock to RedNote, showing zero concern over its being an explicitly Chinese forum. (To the contrary, their only comments so far have been about how warm and welcoming the Chinese people are, as they encourage these #TikTokRefugees from other countries to learn Chinese!)
Hm. Could there be a Lesson in Governance there?
But not everyone is happy. Below it appears that one Wokie has issued a warning/lament to other Wokies. Or, is this perhaps a ploy of the US Government, a last-ditch effort to curtail the stampede to RedNote, by warning the LGBTQ "community" that RedNote is not their cup of tea? One that "doesn't allow showing skin"!
RedNote scare tactic:
What is RedNote? The TikTok alternative that doesn't allow showing skin or LGBTQ+ content
With heavy censorship of bodies and LGBTQ+ topics, RedNote might not be everything TikTok refugees are seeking.
Written the next day (1/15/25) by Conal:
In the past, I simply had an "opinion" of what TikTok probably was, based on bits and scraps of hearsay. In the last few days, I've been reading the introductory remarks of the #TikTok_refugee people as they say "Hello" to the world via RedNote, and "Hello" to the Chinese people in particular. Given that this is a crowd of "early adapters" to a new app, I realize that one cannot assume that they represent the whole vast TikTok population itself. (One of the 'refugees' even warns that "There will be a second wave [of us TikTok refugees] — and those people you may not like; they might have political axes to grind, and you may not find them so friendly and fun-loving as we [of the first wave] are.") But with that caveat, here is my revised view of what TikTok is "all about," preceded by the standard view, for context:
STANDARD VIEW, PROMOTED BY THE 'ADULTS' OF AMERICA AND THE ESTABLISHMENT:
TikTok is a place where preteens rot their minds. It reinforces their tendency to have very short attention spans. There is no future for these kids, hence for the world. (Also, is it a place for old-man predators, who pay to see little girls bare their legs? So they say.) All told, it's an utterly trashy app with no redeeming features.
(The canned view of TikTok immediately above is one that I easily bought into, I admit, over a period of years, since it fits well into my own view that we all now live in the Eternal Present of Garbage World. And I still do believe that we live in the Eternal Present of Garbage World; that's a simple fact, as foreseen by Leonard Meyer and Stanislaw Lem in their essays of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But that's a bigger, all-inclusive topic, for another day.)
MY REVISED VIEW AFTER READING DOZENS OF INTRODUCTORY REMARKS POSTED RECENTLY BY THE #TikTok_refugee COMMUNITY:
In a world gone mad, this is the ONE place where a person can simply relax for a moment and have fun, dammit. In a world drowning in censorship, this is the ONE place left that honors free speech. And there was this surprise: These people appear to be around 20 to 30 years old, some as old as 60, most of them quite articulate. I.e., not preteen babblers, "rotting their brains out" etc. These are real people.
Another surprise: Many of them seem dead serious about learning Chinese. In my opinion, this TikTok/RedNote phenomenon might well prevent a war with China, because at lightning speed it is creating bonds between real people on both sides, oblivious of their brain-dead 80-year-old governmental overlords.
Written three days later (1/18/25) by Conal:
I've made my first (and probably last) post on RedNote, just to see what the app feels like, from the inside, so to speak. From here on, I'll probably just be a spectator there.
In my "Hello from Minnesota" post, I deliberately provoked a bit of censorship. Speaking about the many connections suddenly being formed between the people of the two countries, I tried at first to include this parenthetical phrase: …(绕过政客)… "…(bypassing the politicians)…"
The app let me know something was wrong. It did so by claiming that it "could not generate an image from the text" (hence, there was nothing yet for me to post).
I removed the four characters in parentheses. The app was now happy to generate an image of the remaining text, and I posted it.
(I used Chinese for this longish "Hello from Minnesota" message, based mainly on Google Translate. Some of the Chinese looked hideous, but probably less hideous than my own rusty Chinese would have been.)
So, there's the expected CCP censorship, lurking somehow in the app. (Or maybe it was just a random software glitch. Who knows.) What did pass through was my remark about the TikTok refugee phenomenon possibly "preventing a war," so I was satisfied with the post. I didn't specify a war between who and who, such as Orange Man and Pooh-Bear, just "prevent a war" 防止战争, in generic terms.
GenZ angle: This has been a real education for me about people known as GenY, GenZ, etc. Until a few days ago, I would have been guilty of thinking of all such people as mindless deranged youths, just like the majority of Americans seem to view them. I.e., I've now become aware of the pervasive anti-GenZ bigotry in the US, based on some fantasy notion of who GenZ people are and how they think (or rather, fail to think, because they smoke dope and put pig-rings in their noses to indicate that they are X'd out of society, etc.) After viewing hundreds of posts on RedNote by my fellow TikTok_refugees, who are by-and-large of GenZ age (if not authentic, dyed-in-the-wool GenZ-ers) I'm cured of that bigotry. Most of them seem perfectly articulate and "adult," although at the same time they might reveal an outlandish sense of humor. And so what?
Half a day later:
As others discover how much censorship is lurking beneath the shiny friendly surface of RedNote, they may come yelping back to the US with their tails between their legs.
But the way I see it, even if, in the long run, these 'refugees' are terribly disappointed, the important thing is that they did deliver their message to the US Government about not tolerating censorship here!
Bryan and Conal are both vastly learned Sinologists, so they have a better chance than most folks of making sense of the contretemps over Tik Tok and Red Book. We had a similar angst over Zoom, another Chinese online product, back in the throes of the pandemic, but here we are using it every day half a decade later, and one of my smart Penn undergrads from a few years ago, an Indian by birth, is a rapidly rising executive at Zoom, the world's largest videoconferencing software communications firm.
Anyway, there's lots of propaganda flowing out there about Tik Tok and Red Book. I've been trying to make this post for the last few hours and I keep getting bombarded by things like this:
"Rednote is Showing Americans how much Better China is", serpentza (1/18/25) — 18.12 YouTube
"American VS Chinese: Cultures Clash on RedNote!", Fung Bros. (1/18/25) — 16:02 YouTube
Even Taiwan is getting pushed / dragged into this squabble: "Is TikTok pushing Taiwan’s young people closer to China? A growing number of researchers fear that the controversial app is promoting pro-China content and softening attitudes towards the People’s Republic"
Selected readings
January 19, 2025 @ 8:19 pm
· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Language on the internets
Permalink
Joe said,
January 19, 2025 @ 8:28 pm
So I understand that 小红书 is not the same phrase that's used in Chinese to refer to the famous book(s), but would Chinese users recognize it as a pun on the familiar 红宝书? Or does the pun not even work because the words are in a different order?
Martin Dorey said,
January 19, 2025 @ 9:23 pm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Communications appears to have been founded in San José, California. The prime mover and CEO was born in China, true, but was living and working in Silicon Valley at the time. It appears to have been funded by former coworkers from other San José companies and venture capitalists.
Claire said,
January 19, 2025 @ 10:26 pm
Long term Xiaohongshu user, Chinese GenZ with both Chinese and US cultural backgrounds here. 小红书 is an app used mostly by young Chinese females, even up to this day. It is very obvious that the kind of discussion culture/style there is highly reflective of the many struggles, joy, anger, sorrows and delight that is collectively shared by this group (which of course is different between subgroups, but that is a topic for another day). I would say the average person, even GenZ definitely understands what “小红书” could refer to if under that historical context, but nearly nobody would think about it in that context in daily use. This is because this app is so popular today in everyday life and is used mostly as tour/food/life etc. guides or basically a search engine (many people use this instead of usual search engines today, because it can give tons of real person suggestions on virtually any topic you can think about). Hope that answers your question. Feel free to ask me anything!
AntC said,
January 20, 2025 @ 12:52 am
"Is TikTok pushing Taiwan’s young people closer to China? …"
(Unfortunately, paywalled for me, but) here's some Taiwan-based commentary on the FT's piece.
My impression from visiting Taiwan is that everybody's very aware of pernicious PRC influence, and avoids Mainland-based apps. The most popular social media platform is 'Line' (Japanese-owned, worldpopulationreview estimates 21 million 'monthly users' in Taiwan 2024, of a population of 24 million.)
magni said,
January 20, 2025 @ 1:18 am
I've waited days for an LLog's post on this Internet commotion, especially regarding the supposed allusion of 小红书 (lit. "little red book") to Mao's Quotations, over which a bunch of ongoing debates between Chinese speakers and English speakers can be seen on X.
The inputs from native speakers as quoted in the post are basically correct in that 小红书 is a pun that is hard to get even for bilingual Chinese speakers (@Joe ), because one has to back-translate it into English, and to be informed of the English nickname for Quotations from Mao.
The pun itself is an intended one, but not necessarily political. The earliest news story that touched upon the name origin of the app [1] points to the initial envision that the founder Charlwin Mao (Mao Wenchao, 毛文超) had for his product: 海外购物红宝书 (Haiwai Gouwu Hongbaoshu, "the treasured red book for overseas shopping"). For a young adult as he was (and I am), this usage of 红宝书 is most reminiscent of popular English wordbooks for preparation for such exams as GRE and TOEFL. In these usages, 红 is a reference to the color of the book cover, and 红宝书 has most likely been an effort to ride on a name that is familiar to Chinese; there are other 宝书's like 绿宝书 ("green treasured book") as books' colors vary. Therefore, in this context the 红宝书 in 海外购物红宝书 evokes more commercial and overseas associations than political ones, just like in the case of wordbooks. This sort of associations fall apart in English, which explains why they opted for REDnote, a lousy and unexciting name, for official localization.
One may find Charlwin to be strange as a name. That's another story [2].
[1] https://www.whb.cn/zhuzhan/kandian/20140201/2567.html (Chinese)
[2] http://www.xmdkfw.com/news/20220512/87897.html (Chinese)
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2025 @ 7:08 am
Line users (from different countries and regions) faithfully, trustingly bring it to America.
The really smart and savvy ones think that Tik Tok is degrading and Red Book is superficial.
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2025 @ 7:16 am
Thanks, Claire. I think your characterization of Red Book is fundamentally correct, clear, and fair.
The vast majority of users I know are female, mostly in their 20s.
When they recommend some unusual place to eat in Boston or shop in New York or visit in the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania, etc., they almost always tell me they found out about it through Red Book.
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2025 @ 7:24 am
@magni
Glad we satisfied your wish for a post on Tik Tok and Red Book. I was aware that a lot of people were waiting for it.
Jerry Packard said,
January 20, 2025 @ 1:43 pm
The only term I remember is 红宝书. My PRC grad students used to tease me by calling their xeroxed reading collection ‘黄宝书’ because it came in a yellow cover.
Yves Rehbein said,
January 20, 2025 @ 2:34 pm
I just remember that RedMi Note 10 was a ridiculously low priced alternative to other Android phones after the US ban on Huawei and the resulting nonavailabibility of the app store on those platforms in Europe.
Funny little coincident in the name, isn't it?
David Marjanović said,
January 20, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
Some people in China are using RedNote to learn socialism…
…from Americans.
Pamela said,
January 27, 2025 @ 11:06 am
Had an interesting moment on Bluesky when an influx of TikTok afficianadoes was accompanied by new bullying from them, hypersensitivity to remarks from other users on the problems with TikTok, resulting in what one Bluesky member described as a"lord of the flies" phenomenon. There is clearly a culture on TokTok (not necessarily universal) that doesn't translate well to an environment of greater generational, political and cultural diversity. "Censorship" is a twisted concept for many TikTok users, who think censorship from mass bullying is not censorship, but attempts to make TikTok reposition itself to not be an instrument of Chinese espionage laws is censorship.
What stands out to me is the widespread assumption that TikTok content or user demographics are issues. The issue is the app. It is indeed a security risk to users, including those involved in government and commerce. TikTok can do all it does without being obliged to conform to dictats of the Chinese government security apparatus. The fact that it refuses to change ownership and free itself from such obligations is telling.