Happy Year of the Snake

I would like to wish my friends in China on the other side of the world a Happy New Year and happy year of the snake. I hope that this year brings you all good health, prosperity and new possibilities.

If you live in the West and haven't noticed, a quiet revolution has been taking shape on a Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu or RedNote. In the lead up to this revolution, the US federal government enacted a draconian law meant to coerce, censor and align content filtration on the short-form social media app Tiktok with the incoming Administration. At one point mid-January, it led to the temporary cessation of operations of TikTok, leaving US users with no home. What has happened as a result is nothing short of a black swan moment, whereby instead of migrating to one of the other American social media platforms, a sizable portion of the US Tiktok userbase downloaded a Chinese social media app similar to Tiktok with an interface written entirely in Mandarin.

What has happened since then is remarkable. Regular Americans have begun to make connections directly with regular Chinese people and Chinese content makers.

Tiktok Refugees

The Chinese users on RedNote immediately welcomed the "TikTok Refugees" flooding on to the app. Chinese people began to post content with bilingual subtitles and in English to help communicate with the new audience. The RedNote developers took Americans seriously by enabling software translations to allow people to read comments in English within a few days. I have personally been struck by how emotional people have gotten in their videos, both American and Chinese people, for just getting the chance to speak to each other directly--without the interference of mass media influence or censorship, cutting through decades of propaganda.

What did Americans find on Xiaohongshu? They found an opportunity for cultural exchange, for learning new food, new ways of life, new customs, slang, architecture, memes, making new friends, and comparison with the struggle of everyday existence in the United States. American TikTok refugees have had the veil lifted from their eyes about how large, how modern, and how safe Chinese cities are and also how affordable living is in other countries in comparison with the US.

Just a few aspects of modern China I'll mention: 350 kilometers per hour. That is the base speed for all new high speed trains in China. The high speed rail network is 40,000 kilometers long and connects pretty much every city in the country. Pretty much all large cities in China have extensive, interconnected, modern metro or subway systems. China is also the center for development and production of solar technology and electric vehicles, boasting the largest production capacity, the lowest cost, and the highest quality. Autonomous transit buses and taxis ply Chinese streets. China has made advances in space exploration, in nuclear fusion energy, and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It has done all of this by making different choices than the West has made about where to put its resources, what burdens and worries to take off of the plates of normal people, and how to organize efforts of national importance.

Why are you paying so much?

All of the discussions about the rising cost of living in the US are entirely turned on their head when compared with their Chinese counterparts. Housing is not terribly expensive in China as long as you don't live in the capital and most Chinese people have a home that they own free and clear, without annual property taxes. Housing by some anecdotes is 1/12th the cost that it is in the US. Healthy, fresh vegetables are dirt cheap and everywhere, with multiple servings costing a single Yuan, or about 17 American cents. Rail and mass transit systems are a civilized experience, rapid, reliable, clean, convenient, and inexpensive. Healthcare and education are not overly burdensome, and most people in China have some savings to invest in the future of their families.

The response from the Chinese people has been telling when they hear about how people in the US scrimp and struggle and live off of cheap ramen because they cannot afford anything else without going into debt. In most cases, the response is, "You shouldn't put up with that." "You are being exploited." It makes one wonder if we are living in The Bad Place.

To me, it sends a very powerful message when a society is friendly and welcoming enough that multiple Chinese children in the first grade are using the app to show off their school textbooks to help teach adults around the world, how to speak and write their language and communicate with them. In that interaction, there is no pretext, no desire to sell someone something. It is simply about a child reaching out to try to make new friends.

The Internet as a global community

In many ways the RedNote phenomenon reflects what the original intent of the Internet was supposed to be in the 1990's: a global communications network without barriers, a platform to help us understand that we, as humans, really have much more in common with one another than we think-and that given the chance, we really just want people to show us pictures of our pets. The TikTok Refugee trend has also attracted people from other countries to the platform, where there was no threat of a ban, breaking down the walls that existed there as well. The technology may be finally organizing itself in a way to catch up to that dream of a connected world. Where we had a language barrier before, there are automatic translations for some, and remarkably there are probably more people now than ever learning Mandarin via lessons taught on RedNote as well as apps like Duolingo.

The American people have been told by their government and the media for decades that China is an adversary. The Chinese people are not that at all. In many ways they may be the example we need to learn from to pull the US out of some 20th century bad habits.