As TikTok’s ban in the United States looms, hundreds of thousands of young people are reportedly flocking to a Chinese social media platform that a Pentagon-designated “Chinese military company” owns a substantial stake in.
Xiaohongshu, known as “RedNote” or “RedBook” in English, is a Chinese-owned video-sharing and e-commerce platform that has been described as the Instagram of China. The app, which is seeing a surge of young so-called TikTok refugees, has received multiple large rounds of investment from the Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent. The U.S. Department of Defense designated Tencent on Jan. 7 as a “Chinese military company,” meaning it is “directly or indirectly owned, controlled, or beneficially owned by” the Chinese military or that it is a “military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base.”
