Western Users Flooded RedNote During the TikTok Ban — And Found Something They Weren't Expecting
When TikTok faced a US ban in January 2025, hundreds of thousands of Western users migrated to Xiaohongshu. What they found accelerated the Becoming Chinese moment.
What Happened
In January 2025, as TikTok faced a potential US ban, several hundred thousand Western users migrated to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) — the Chinese lifestyle platform often called "Chinese Instagram." Within 48 hours, RedNote became the #1 downloaded app in the US App Store.
What followed was unexpected. Instead of arriving as critics or observers, many Western users posted videos introducing themselves — speaking no Chinese, using captions translated by Google — and Chinese users responded in kind, often with warmth and curiosity.
Reuters coverage of the migration
Why It Matters For Chinese Wellness Culture
The migration did something that years of food and wellness content could not: it put Western users directly into Chinese lifestyle feeds, without editorial mediation.
What they found was not what they expected. The dominant aesthetic of Xiaohongshu is not political or nationalist — it is domestic, warm, and extraordinarily ordinary. Women showing their skincare routines. Men posting their thermos collections. Evening foot soaks photographed before bed. Morning congee with goji berries.
For users coming from TikTok's more performative content culture, the contrast was noticeable. Several viral posts from this period were Western users remarking that Chinese social media felt "quieter" and "less about showing off."
What This Produced
The RedNote migration is widely cited as the accelerant for the chinamaxxing and Becoming Chinese trends that expanded significantly in early 2025. It gave millions of Western users a direct, unmediated encounter with Chinese everyday aesthetics — and many found the encounter disorienting in a productive way.
The thermos. The hot water. The deliberate slowness of the evening routine. These were not exotic wellness hacks — they were just how ordinary Chinese people lived. That observation, repeated across hundreds of thousands of first-encounter posts, was more persuasive than any wellness article.
The thermos and hot water moment is a direct cultural descendant of this encounter.