On Paradis Island, the city where humans live is protected by a 50-meter-high wall. Inside the city are fragile humans, while outside are man-eating giants.
The people inside the city all know that one day the wall will fall, but many didn’t expect that it could fall inward.
This isn’t a metaphor for the Berlin Wall; it’s simply a story from a manga called Attack on Titan.
Recently, a group of Americans, calling themselves “TT refugees,” has flocked to Xiaohongshu (The RedNote).
The background stems from the risk of ByteDance’s TikTok being banned in the U.S., causing many users to avoid moving to platforms like Facebook. Eventually, RedNote, the red software known as REDNOTE in the U.S., opened a door for them.
The easy access, with no need for a Chinese phone number starting with +86 to register, caused RedNote to quickly rise to the top on January 13, becoming the most downloaded free app in the U.S. Apple App Store.
Soon, a group of foreign visitors from the U.S. poured into RedNote. Having long been indifferent to the University of Tokyo (Tōdai), they collided head-on with Chinese users, with quite a bit of impact.
The story looked sexy and charming: unlike platforms like Kuaishou, RedNote was full of users sharing sophisticated lifestyles. They were educated, well-spoken in foreign languages, and could easily offset the overall educational level disadvantage.
The initial impression was like a race between different countries, where each side was matched at least in strength.
So, the early stage of this “friendly” exchange went smoothly. The two sides exchanged emoji stickers, joked about Trump, and even helped each other answer English questions, breaking down some long-standing misunderstandings between the two peoples.
When the comment section began to bubble with affection between nations, RedNote’s stock soared, and outsiders saw it as a path to wealth, with traffic overwhelming the platform.
However, the most challenging problems lay ahead. This is why foreign visitors are rarely seen on Chinese social platforms: essentially, the high walls not only protect against external giants but also prevent ordinary citizens from developing a fear of giants.
Once basic communication is completed, exchanges will enter deeper waters. On the one hand, ideological differences will lead to growing friction. On the other, the gap in living standards is vast. Even in an international city like Shanghai, the minimum wage for employees often falls far below the U.S. blue-collar standard.
One side brings benefits of the open sea—salaries in the thousands per day, standardized working hours, and worker union protections. On the other, there’s the tolerance for marijuana and guns, as well as increasing support for adult sexual freedom and women’s rights, which may be a surprise to many people.
No matter the confidence, it can’t compare to the confidence of a full wallet. When money is tight, even the gods of the land must learn to bow for five pecks of rice.
As a platform, RedNote has long been cautious about maintaining its community attributes, creating a “small but beautiful” space for a small, niche group. As one of the most strictly managed platforms, its tone and safety are defended by a large team of auditors working tirelessly.
On the table, the left hand holds boundless traffic, but internationalization’s future is uncertain; the right hand holds limited capabilities, with auditors unable to keep up and huge compliance risks.
RedNote’s current pain likely outweighs its joy.
They know full well that if they were to open the border between nations and suddenly put it into the hands of civilian channel distributors, the tight grip of laws like the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law would immediately fall upon the head of a company trying to go public.
The tightening grip doesn’t scare the monkeys, but for ordinary people, once it’s on, the chanting could kill them. This is a death sentence.
There’s a precedent for this. Once, a game called Clash of Clans operated globally on the same server. Due to its free speech chat channels and increasing use of sensitive words, it was eventually forced to separate into different regions, isolating the two worlds once again.
In Attack on Titan, when the wall cracks, after a brief contact between the two sides, the wall is patched up, and their coexistence returns to a balance.
This brings to mind another matter. Recently, People’s Daily solicited “China-U.S. Friendship and Cooperation Stories,” hoping to write about the deep emotional ties between the two great nations across the ocean.
China-U.S. relations hope to be built on the people, with the foundation in the people, the future in the youth, and the vitality in local communities.
When you open the door and invite your neighbor to eat dumplings, only to find that the neighbor really shows up, and then you look back at the remaining flour in your house, you realize that neighborhood stories can’t just be about empty posturing.
So, the best mediation approach is to let RedNote be the bad guy.
In most stories, the bad guy has malicious intent, hides evil plans, and is eventually defeated and despised by the good guys.
Source: Like a beam of light