Little Fire Book
Can Chinese Social Media Save America?
Propaganda
Twenty five years ago an American kid asked me, “do you have pandas in your backyard in China?” I answered a more polite version of, “no, you idiot, we live in a fifth-story apartment.” Meanwhile, my peers in China asked if it rained in America. I presume all those kids would have grown out of ignorance without my help, and yet the propaganda that persists to this day in both countries about the other is more complex but no less outlandish.
In January I joined the Chinese social media app Xiao Hong Shu (XHS; aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote) and it feels like what I imagine the Berlin Wall coming down was like, but funnier. Grown people are having the first conversations of their lives with someone from “the bad place,” realizing the most basic assumptions we made about each other are wrong.1 It feels strange to have this experience along with other Americans because I spent 13 years in China. I thought I knew about China and Chinese people.
I do know my own experience and parts of the experiences of my local friends at the time. I’m in part from China. But the China I knew is 18 years gone, as is the America I moved to in 2007. I thought that half a lifetime in each country, a love of reading, decent internet literacy, and skepticism of media in both countries made me immune to propaganda. But no!
Brittanica defines propaganda as “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion. It is often conveyed through mass media.”
Propaganda has almost exclusively negative connotations for Americans because we think that if we believe propaganda, we’re sheeple. This belief is so entrenched that our own government can quite effectively lambast any “foreign” information by calling it propaganda, and American people easily dismiss information from our own government if we suspect it’s propaganda.
It’s unfortunate that our government has a robust reputation for disseminating half-truths because it undermines the credibility of facts they try and disseminate through mass media. Good ideas, like wearing a face covering to slow the spread of air borne disease, become suspicious because dissemination of an argument to influence public opinion through mass media is propaganda.
It’s funny that I recognize the untrustworthiness of government media but didn’t think my beliefs could be influenced by it. China is renowned for their propaganda and I’ve seen some harmful examples in person. But I was not prepared for the scale of untruths originating both from the US and China that XHS is illuminating.
Manufactured Threats
How did a negative view of China become so cemented in the US, and why do Americans have so little information about China? Unless it’s from a Chinese source, which is automatically viewed as suspicious in the US, I hear exclusively negative news or commentary about China.
This has a surprising amount to do with Mark Zuckerberg, who’s gone before Congress multiple times, whipping up fear about the encroachment of Chinese tech on “the free world.” The “threat” to Zuckerberg is all about his empire of profit and he’s successfully lobbied the US government to protect “national security” by protecting his monopoly on modes of communication.
Zuckerberg isn’t the only fear-mongering bootlicker in the game, but his strategy of “protecting” his interests by casting political fear and doubt on his rivals has shaped the playbook for sentiment and policy from the US toward China in the past decade.
Ezra Klein explained the stance of each of the past three US administrations (44,45,46) toward China culminating under Biden in an alarmingly juvenile posture that Chinese production of almost any kind, such as solar, biomedical, infrastructure, and manufacturing, is a competition and thereby a security threat to the US because we’re not “winning.”2
The so-called competition from China is, with no pun intended, a manufactured threat. US intelligence offices report that China is not bent on being the next superpower, a term American oligarchs throw around with hysterical insecurity. Jessica Chen Weiss (2022) writes, “framing competition with China in ideological terms risks backfiring by turning China into what many in Washington fear it already is.”
It is true that China’s economic and technological advancement has boomed in recent years while ours has lagged. It’s very American to view that as an affront, especially since China has economic troubles of its own and because the advancement of American technology, such as Meta and Google, has focused almost exclusively on profit instead of quality in the past decade. Zuckerberg should worry about competition because his products suck, but he’d rather destroy would-be competitors than provide a decent user experience.
As Klein and Weiss point out, in keeping with the idea of “winning” industrialization instead of focusing on improving performance, the US has taken to trying to cut their opponent off at the knees through decoupling - that is, trying to make it harder for China to innovate by withholding knowledge, resources, and collaboration. There are all kinds of ways in which this is self-sabotage, particularly in areas like medical research. Not only is the framing of this manufactured competition overly ideological, it’s tipped into militaristic panic.
The stage is set for Project 2025 to be a vile but viable map for international relations. Their agenda reads:
“The next conservative president must end the left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority.”
This brinkmanship is needlessly dangerous, but it’s exacerbated by strategically limited contact between every-day American and Chinese people. In my early 20s, I was studying to become a Foreign Service Officer, a position that usually involves working for a diplomat or at a US embassy anywhere in the world. FSOs are reassigned every 2-3 years, specifically so they don’t become too attached to the country they’re stationed in and will continue to represent US interests.
It troubled me that within that regulation there’s the assumption that immersing yourself in a place compromises US interests or your Americanness. It’s sadly accurate when Americanness gets defined by suspicion and sabotage of everything, everyone, and everywhere else. It makes America into a small and miserable box and to echo Weiss, the more we live into that story, the more we become it.
The TikTok Saga
When I left China in 2007, I lost contact with all my local friends. I’ve spent almost two decades making a home in the US and I threw myself into every way of doing that I could think of. It eventually faded from my mind that not only do I not have contact with old Chinese friends, I can’t contact them.
We didn’t have smartphones or apps in 2007 and all access to the-internet-in-America has to go through a VPN (location encryption) from the China side. A variety of Chinese government policies restricting full internet access have been in place since 1995 and they’re collectively known as The Great Firewall. I used a VPN to access online classes as a high school student and at least in 2007, it wasn’t particularly easy. Unregulated VPNs are illegal in China.
I seek out Chinese things to feel closer to my heritage, but I stopped noticing how relatively scarce they are in the US because I’m used to going out of my way to find them. The things I read about China tend to be historical work written by 外国人, foreigners, or contemporary work by Chinese or Chinese Americans writing in English, which tends to be not directly about modern China and/or contains criticism of the Chinese government. I continue to respect those perspectives, but since following Radii Media and Sixth Tone on Instagram last year, both English-language sources of Chinese contemporary culture, I’ve been struck by the limits of my own perspective.
There’s a much longer story about TikTok, anti-Chinese propaganda, US government surveillance, and a public awakening that’s in the background of all this, but click here for flashcards. Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’ right to ban TikTok, and the app became inaccessible in the US on January 19th. Fewer than 24 hours later, a message appeared saying that “thanks to President Trump, the app is coming back.” A lot happened on January 20th, and while the TikTok drama may not have been on everyone’s radar in those hours, it stands as an incredible and interconnected marker of the unveiling of the new order.
While corruption, surveillance, and fascism were rife in the Biden-Harris administration, a newly visible component of Trump’s second presidency is the opera box of Broligarchs. Elon Musk (Twitter/X), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta; Facebook, Instagram, Threads), Tim Cook (Apple), Sam Altman (OpenAI), as well as Google and Microsoft all donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign. One million dollars is symbolic as most of these companies are worth a trillion dollars each. Companies that donated to Trump’s first campaign avoided tariffs under that administration, but given the concerted effort to make their physical presence seen at the inauguration, the Broligarchs are not only in alignment with the administration but seek to gain further control through it.
If X and Meta weren’t purely state-controlled media3 before, they are now. There have been some noticeable changes to Meta apps and TikTok,4 including offers of thousands of dollars to TikTok stars to link their accounts to Meta platforms. Amid a swelling exodus from TikTok and Meta to other apps like SubStack and BlueSky, the dark horse was XiaoHongShu.
XaioHongShu is a Chinese app resembling an Instagram-Pinterest-TikTok hybrid, made by and for Chinese users. It’s known for being user-led by progressive Chinese women. I first heard of XHS days before TikTok closed because American users were flocking there as a deliberate snub against the half-lie that TikTok isn’t safe because of Chinese data mining. China may well be mining US data. I’m far more concerned that the US government definitely is, and in flaunted collaboration with the Broligarchs.
政治 ≠ Politics
The US government and corporations have gotten away with plundering the world in the name of business. Capitalism doesn’t have a built in off-button, instead it runs on the vortex of endless profit. Most Americans, myself included, grew up equating our access to the potential of The American Dream with freedom. Anyone who said stop was an unamerican commie, and Communism, with China as its poster child, is thereby the perceived enemy.5
Sometimes people ask me if I miss China or wish I still lived there. I do miss it. But until this week, I’ve never wished I still lived there. At age 16, I was ready to live in the US because I felt that I’d never be able to have a job in China that paid for the quality of life I hoped to live as an adult. What irony! I’ve never worked a living-wage job in the US in my 18 years here. The American Dream is propaganda - a mass disseminated rumor that if you work hard, you can be rich. In my China era, most of our local friends believed in the American Dream as much as I did!6
China today has over four times the population of the US and its history is 20 times as long, but I view Chinese culture as more monolithic than the US. Americans value “thinking for yourself” even though we’re plenty susceptible to propaganda and a lot of alternative thought will get you censored or punished. By contrast, Chinese culture doesn’t venerate individualism. It’s misguided to conflate greater unity with brainwashing.
Chinese netizens helped explain the XHS guidelines to American users right away, including “nothing political” (particularly against the Chinese government), “don’t show skin,” and “don’t flaunt wealth.” I have conflicting feelings about some of the these, but different rules make sense in a different house.
In a XHS video titled “why I left America after college,” a Chinese film student who’d studied at Columbia concluded that you can’t simply make a film about a topic that interests you in the US. Instead, whatever you make is essentially a competitive pitch for your group identity to be seen or taken seriously. The student realized he couldn’t make anything in the US that wasn’t going to be weighed foremost on his representation as a Chinese person.
Of course politics and political life exist in China too, but it makes sense that identity politics aren’t as prevalent in a collectivist society. If we think of democracy as the idea that everyone’s individual voice contributes, it was inevitable that American culture become defined by a belief that unique needs and wants are each politically significant. It’s galling to trumpet that idea as ideologically superior when US leadership has never listened to or represented key segments of American society.
Americans can’t opt out of politics, even if they claim to, because the rules that govern our society and our access to everything are decided, allegedly, through voting. If you don’t like what your peers vote for, your only recourse is to vote differently or try to gather support for your protest. Thus all areas of life become inseparable from policy, and as the Chinese film student noted, every story we tell first has to prove to our peers why they should side with us or listen in the first place.
It’s exhausting and very often dehumanizing to constantly define and uphold your identity as your right to exist. That’s less necessary in a more monolithic society, and thereby we reach the possibility of an apolitical space that’s at least less repressive.
All governments are in the business of defining acceptable ways of life, and anyone’s relationship to government is defined by how much you align with the mandates of those with power over you. At this time, it seems to me that most Chinese people are more in alignment with their government than most Americans are with our government.
There aren’t many easy comparisons between Chinese and American governments or societies, so the question of our various relationships to government fall on a complex axis. My relationship to the government with power over me is antagonistic, I am predisposed to love Chinese society, and the combination of those feelings is informed by my sense of morality. Other’s alignments vary on those axes, and they invariably shift as governments and societies and morals change.
Material Girls
XiaoHongShu is a visual format lifestyle app, so there’s plenty of literal and metaphoric airbrushing. The image-consciousness of Chinese users, while not unilateral, tends toward the idealization of thinness and whiteness. Skin whitening creams were ubiquitous when I lived in China. But XHS also has Chinese representation and discussion of disabilities, neurodivergence, mental health, and LGBTQ+ relationships that were absolutely not above-ground the last time I was in China.
From my own experiences in China, people with disabilities were routinely outcast - either literally thrown in the trash (or worse) as babies where they died or were taken to orphanages, or confined to begging on the street. So it’s really surprising for me to see a huge, and apparently apolitical, leap in equity. At the same time, the Chinese government’s track record of enacting unilateral good change for its citizens when they decide to is pretty good. Chinese people didn’t resist mandates that have eliminated extreme poverty, stopped the spread of Covid,7 and stopped littering, but Americans seem to think this maniacal.
The only US program I can think of that succeeded in almost immediate and widespread good on a scale like China does routinely was 92 years ago with Roosevelt’s Civil Conservation Corps under the New Deal which attacked 24% unemployment by putting young people to work in forestry, pest reduction, road building, and other public works. The planning alone that must have gone into the many parts of the New Deal is unimaginable from any US administration in my living memory.
Not everything is rainbows and butterflies on XHS. Chinese users have been open about their worries, such as the pressure to perform at work and school, sole responsibility for aging parents as generations of only-children, and depression. Some of those worries are at least tangentially political. China’s one-child policy officially ended in 2015, but its effects will continue for decades. You had to get government approval to have a second child in the time I lived there, and that often required a bribe of one kind or another. Femicide, forced or undisclosed sterilization, and other violence against girls and women wasn’t uncommon as a result of that policy and the ramifications are long-lasting.
XHS users are also open about things they don’t worry about, such as housing, healthcare quality and costs (trans-affirming care is available, but not widely), and food costs. I don’t shop at Costco in the US, but I pity myself seeing the bounty and price of Chinese Costco hauls on XHS. Even more pitiful, Chinese netizens have expressed genuine shock and concern about the quality of food available to Americans and quickly identified the cycle of chemical-heavy food leading to chronic health issues leading to a need for healthcare that is inaccessible due to insurance corruption. They absolutely love Luigi Mangione for reasons that I have yet to uncover.
I find the XHS rule of “no flaunting of wealth” amusing in light of the influx of American users illuminating that the Chinese working class is more financially secure than the American working class. I think the intent of the rule is avoid the insane materialism with which US internet culture is saturated. China does have an elite strata who are grotesquely wealthy and often corrupt (at least when I lived there), and I’ve seen some “poor content” on XHS, but the former seems less at the expense of the latter or even the “middle class”; that is, less Capitalistic.8
There are murmurings that the Chinese government will likely put holes in The Great Firewall because, get this, it’s intent was to protect Chinese people from the unhealthy American internet and with the communication that XHS has opened up, Chinese people are no longer in danger of wanting the American disease. Beside spinning authoritarianism as benevolence, I have to admit they were right! The influencer-to-broligarch pipeline is the New American Dream, but I’ve heard that the Chinese internet has its own cutthroat and equally difficult hunger games for viral fame. XHS users have said repeatedly that only the richest and poorest Chinese people benefit from going to the US these days.
There’s definitely an underbelly to the XHS persona of China. To what degree do less directly impacted members of a society recognize the underbelly, and how do we respond when we see it?
Achilles’ Heel
A major and enduring topic of propaganda, both Chinese and American, is the denial of internment and disappearances of Uyghur people. I know and have seen the motivation and modes of disinformation from the Chinese government on this topic, but I didn’t understand why Americans, particularly leftists, think the internment of Uyghurs is a hoax.
I’m not an expert on Uyghur history, but I did live in their homeland for over a decade and my family knows Uyghur political prisoners. What the Chinese government calls the “Uyghur autonomous region” of Xinjiang, the Uyghurs want to reclaim as East Turkestan. The struggle for control of this region has been tumultuous since at least the mid-1800s. Joseph Stalin assisted a rebellion that led to the Soviet-backed Second East Turkistan Republic in the 1940s, which of course was not recognized by the central Chinese government.
The name Xinjiang means “new territory” and is a classic imperialist land grab. Uyghur resistance has taken various forms, including bus bombings in 1997, labeled separatist terrorism. Some separatists are alleged to have fled into surrounding mountain ranges, strongholds of the Taliban and al-Qaeda - mention this to most Americans and they’ll never question tactics against Uyghur separatists. Uyghurs are predominantly Muslim, which somehow feels threatening to imperialists.
The Urumqi riots of 2009 were similarly a deadly boiling over of racial-ethnic tension and oppression. No one denies that these events happened or that people were killed. Nor is it surprising that an imperialistic government blames resistance fighters for using violence and locks them away forever under terrorism charges. This is exactly what the US government does to Black and Indigenous dissidents and unequivocally supports Israel in doing to Palestinians.
Just like in the US, many people in China don’t know or don’t see police brutality against minorities with their own eyes, nor are prisons and detention centers easy to access. This unseeing is partly because of social and class segregation and partly because our governments churn out alternative narratives. The more a person benefits from alignment with the government (aka privilege), the harder it’s going to be to concede that occupied peoples have the right to resist. Social media making police brutality, prison conditions, and resistance more visible to the public is a major threat to government control.
There is heavy Chinese military presence and surveillance throughout East Turkistan/Xinjiang province, both in the 90s and early 2000s when I was there, and last I heard an eyewitness account, which was late 2010s. Even with the diplomatic protection of a US passport, we were constantly going through military checkpoints, had people tailing us even to other countries, had some sort of government agent break in to our apartment (with a key!) while we were asleep and take information but not cash, and I even had an army guard point a rifle at me once. All of that is tame compared to what some of my friends experienced.
Some of what Americans hear about the Chinese surveillance state is incorrect. One XHS user explained how the Social Credit System is an anti-fraud watchdog, not an attempt (or even a possibility) of grading every aspect of every person’s life. I think that’s a reasonable explanation of SCS, yet it’s also reasonable that if you aren’t targeted by surveillance, you’re less likely to believe the intensity with which someone you don’t know is being targeted.
As in the US, the Chinese government uses racism to control public opinion about incarcerating minorities; “Black people commit more crimes” and “Uyghur people are a terrorism threat” both appear to be pretty effective propaganda to get the general public to ignore or even participate in the oppression of their neighbors. Praising “good” minorities as entertainers, appropriating aspects of their culture, and “touristizing” native lands is the equally insidious but prettier propaganda familiar to dissidents in both China and the US.
The Chinese government recognizes 55 minority groups, including the Uyghurs. The representation of minority cultural heritage in general in China and on XHS is nothing short of Disneyfied. One way the central Chinese government colonizes and erases Uyghur and other minority presences that “threaten” them is through tourism and migration. East Turkistan/Xinjiang is large, beautiful, and resource-rich. Encouraging settlers to migrate from elsewhere in China to Xinjiang with the promise of jobs not only helps the CCP establish a resource-mining workforce but also contributes to outnumbering the Uyghur population. The CCP also gets an excuse to stomp on political or religious separatism in the name of making the new territory safe from extremists. That’s colonization, baby.
Roosevelt was instrumental in the environmental preservation of land in the US by federally protecting National forests, and I’ve benefited from it. He wrested that land from Native Americans stewardship. It makes me sick with sadness and anger to see minorities in China coerced into being costumed tour-guides of their own homes. Knowing the sham of that propaganda machine from experience prompted me to consider for the first time that Indigenous Americans might not celebrate National parks. It’s not hard to believe why I’ve never heard that perspective, even as I know that there is no clean water on many reservations.9
I’m sure there are Chinese netizens who believe in good faith that the Chinese government is not brutally and systemically oppressing Uyghurs. One XHS user pointed to the industrialization of Urumqi (a massive city) and machines harvesting cotton instead of Uyghur people picking it as evidence that all is well. There’s a bizarre strain of this half-seeing among American leftists too. Leftists in the US are the most critical of the evils of the US government and many embrace communist ideals as part of resistance strategies.
It’s true that in the US at present, criticism of anything having to do with China quickly gets coopted into anti-Chinese hysteria, and leftists are right to denounce that. But Redditers seem unable to hold that one can rightfully criticize blanket anti-Chinese arguments without dismissing all criticism of China as lying propaganda.
Correct information coming from untrustworthy sources is hard to swallow. We should be suspicious of propaganda. Without first-hand accounts, which social media makes possible in many cases, the government can say whatever they want and even if there’s an element of truth to what the government says at some times, public trust is too fractured to have a moral response to oppression. If we let the government or resistance ideology and theory trump morality, we get a public majority too weakened to believe that genocide is real or too exhausted to resist.
Some people, such as Adrien Zenz, who have talked about Uyghur oppression are not considered credible because of other stances they proliferate or their potential ulterior motives. Zenz is infamous for saying, “I have been sent by God to destroy China," so his reports about Uyghurs are suspected by leftists to be a a ploy to get “good guy” military power to “do something” in China.
Part of why state oppression and genocide of Black and Indigenous people and Palestinians has increasing attention is because we have increasing access to firsthand footage. That remains elusive, though not nonexistent, for Uyghurs. There is bitter irony in growing up being taught the importance of survivor accounts of the Holocaust, only to have many of our elders deny survivor accounts of Gazans and peers deny Uyghur accounts.
Some leftist denial of Uyghur oppression centers around the accuracy of the term “genocide.” Uyghurs aren’t being bombed like Gazans, but they are being targeted, interned, and abused because of their ethnicity and religion in large numbers. I personally witnessed the desecration of Uyghur burial grounds and a Han Chinese teacher threatening to cut a Uyghur student’s vest with a cleaver as punishment for misbehavior in class, and that was long before the mass detainments.
Some Reddit dumbass who is correctly against Islamophobia went so far as to say, “there is not a single American who is qualified to speak about [Uyghurs] because not a single Western institution cares at all about any Muslim.” Righteous anger about point A doesn’t mean that point B from a source you mistrust is necessarily false.
Leftists thinking that Uyghur systemic erasure is a hoax because the American government is Islamophobic and Sinophobic is kind of like being anti-Nazi but pro-Israeli government. What I don’t know is how many Chinese people know the truth about what’s happening to Uyghurs or at least doubt the propaganda, and what they are doing or could do about it. As in the US, just because the government speaks for the people doesn’t mean that all (or even most) of the people agree. There were and are resistance movements and protests in China - some are effective, others are crushed.
Age of Empires
Some Chinese XHS users have noted that the blossoming of domestic US authoritarianism is similar to the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the successive Qing dynasty (1644-1911) inquisition in Chinese history.
Corruption and financial mismanagement by Ming dynasty officials accelerated economic collapse, causing widespread rebellion and a government overthrow led by Li Zicheng. Amidst this chaos, the Manchus invaded and seized power, beginning the Qing dynasty while the Ming emperor hung himself as Beijing fell.
The Qing dynasty led a literary inquisition, censoring writings critical of their rule. Eventually they were forced to shift focus to the economic and military crises that arose as China began to modernize and had increased contact with other nations.10
There’s a similar correlation in European history of the so-called Dark Ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire, followed by the creative exploration of the Renaissance, followed by the Enlightenment’s focus on scientific reason and individual liberty which heavily influenced American colonizers.
At every turn, the brutality of rulers waters the seed of their eventual destruction. Those who stifle learning and creativity, and the criticism of oppression that follows, become fertilizer for forces they cannot stop.
China’s governing body has been destroyed and remade at least 14 times over the span of 5000 years. Imperialism and oppression of minorities will haunt the current Chinese government in time and the ability of China to reawaken after justly deserved political implosion is mettled. The US is a pitiful prize for nonexistent ambitions of Chinese conquest, but if my experience and XHS is any indication, Chinese people welcome you with open arms. 欢迎光临.
These quotes begin around the 20-minute mark.
This is a fascinating piece on how state controlled media in country A can be an excellent source of information that country B wants to stifle.
Here’s more about the likelihood that Oracle will buy TikTik from its Chinese parent company to give the US government control of the app.
More depth here on Capitalism, Communism, shifts in their definitions, and whether governments adhere to those terms.
I’ve seen XHS content about wild prosperity propaganda about the US in China “from US NGOs and immigration offices,” such as the claim that “working as a dishwasher in America will provide you with a house after two years,” but I haven’t been able to find evidence or reasoning for it.
Capitalism doesn’t mean “good at making money,” it’s theft of profit from workers. China doesn’t operate by textbook Communism, but it seems as if the success of China’s economy in the last 30 years has been distributed among a huge portion of their society, whereas in the US (or Cuba!), prosperity is hoarded by the elite.