The TikTok “Sagadrama”: What’s next for Xiaohongshu?

TikTok was finally banned on Sunday 19 January 2025, with a brief access denial message for American and Canadian users. A glimmer of hope was offered with a mention that Trump will work with TikTok to reinstate once he takes office. Less than 24 hours later, TikTok went live again, although it’s not clear what instructions Trump gave Bytedance that would embolden them to ignore the law.

For now, it seems all is good in the world, with TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew even invited to Trump’s inauguration, sitting right now to the incoming president’s candidate for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Trump has said he wants TikTok to be 50% owned by a US company. While that seems unfair on the surface, it is in fact a common requirement for business in some countries that foreign companies must be part locally owned. For example, JVs between American and Chinese auto makers were a condition for market entry during the 90s.

Regardless of what will happen, we can all agree that China has scored a resounding gain in soft power without lifting a finger. By some estimates, 700,000 and possibly up to 3.4 million American TikTokers have jumped onto Xiaohongshu (RedNote), many stating they will never return to TikTok even if it’s unbanned. Hashtag #TikTokRefugees has logged over 160,000 posts, with many TikTokers freely admitting they migrated out of spite at their own government. Many posts feature TikTok migrants reacting in shock at what they are learning about China directly from Chinese citizens, refuting the negative “propaganda” they’ve been fed their entirely lives.

Sadly, this kumbaya moment of world peace is not destined to last.

Once TikTok is reinstated permanently, many TikTokers who rely on it for their livelihood will return for economic reasons, while retaining their Xiaohongshu accounts where many of them saw a spike in followers. But what of XHS itself? Either the US politicians will try to ban it (senator Tom Cotton has already said so), but more likely it will be region-locked, walling off American and the Chinese diaspora once more.

Will China let things stay the same and continue to enjoy the surge in soft power? They might, but only if stability and harmony can be maintained. We already see western trolls invading XHS, posting Tiananmen/Xinjiang/Winnie the Pooh type content for laughs, even openly attacking TikTok migrants for being “useful idiots”. Scammers are salivating at the prospect of a whole new wave of users, plying them with “contracts” and fake personas who want to “be friends.” Most importantly, will the first wave of friendly Americans be followed by a second wave of western psyops?

The Great China Firewall exists for a reason, so to allow this unfettered access might render the it superfluous. The GCF is regularly bypassed by mainlanders, so it becomes a question of tradeoffs: should the cultural exchange be allowed to continue, if undesirable influences are aggressively policed?

Nonetheless, there is already a rumour that China will launch a pilot scheme to demarcate a GCF-free zone in Shanghai, letting netizens access western sites such as Facebook, X and others without blocking.

The results of this experiment will be very revealing.