TikTok was developed as a Chinese-government digital product marketed to Western youth and operated under a secretive algorithm. It promoted anti-American narratives—from lavishing praise on Osama bin Laden to pushing transgender hype—but its chief purpose was probably data-mining. After the Supreme Court approved its ban, the app went dark, and some “TikTok refugees” switched to its sister company RedNote—both owned by the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance.
Although it’s hard to say how either product works, RedNote—literal translation Little Red Book, just like Mao’s—appears to be even more politicized than TikTok. Notoriously, patriotic and pro-Western accounts had difficulty operating on the former. On TikTok, the liberty-minded, EU-based Visegrad 24 was first banned and then, they believe, shadowbanned. RedNote, however, was designed for domestic audiences and doesn’t permit freedom of expression at all. For instance, a cartoon of Chairman Xi as Winnie the Pooh apparently constitutes a content violation on RedNote.
What I found surprising about the RedNote migration is that, even with all the data accumulated over the years from American teens posting their likenesses on the hot app, the Chinese charm offensive is rather lame. Of course, the United States is a large country, and some dope somewhere will fall for it, but I have my doubts of its overall effectiveness. Take, for instance, fashion influencer Kendall Kiper, whose previous claim to fame was an instruction on how to manipulate men into buying drinks. This time, the connoisseur of L.A. high life went viral on Twitter/X with a RedNote monologue typical of the newly converted Communist genre:
For my Chinese friends, I just want to tell you some discussions Americans are having right now. All of us agree and are astounded at how cheap and affordable your groceries housing and cars are. I’ve been watching your grocery haul videos and it is blowing my mind that America could never. A lot of us could also not believe by how advanced your country is because we were always shown and told that you are third world, like, starving country. That’s just not the case. The fact that 95% of you guys own homes is mind-boggling. It is like seriously almost impossible to own a home anywhere in the U.S. you have to work immensely hard. How about y’all’s law school is like $800 a year and I think that your homeless rate is like .18%. I have people living in tents outside of my building it’s like it’s terrible here—what? I saw somebody say earlier that a cancer medication that they get is about $20 in China and they are paying $22,000 a month in the U.S. for that same medication. What? A lot of you guys were also thinking that it’s propaganda that sometimes kids if they can afford it, but their parents want them they put them in a bulletproof backpack to go to school they also stand up and do the pledge of allegiance every day before class starts [laughs]. This whole experience might just be the most awake and united I think I’ve ever seen this country. We are pissed at our government, number one. Number two—astounded. Absolutely astounded.
Kiper’s monologue is reminiscent of Tucker Carlson’s musings in a Russian supermarket—nobody in the United States is impressed by a fully stocked grocery store; it’s our base-level expectation. Russians, on the other hand, are preoccupied with basic comforts. Likewise, it’s odd for a beautician to have the same interests as that of a housewife, which makes me suspect that we are looking at a psyop.
Never mind the erroneous foundation of the assumption that 95% of Chinese people own their houses—none of them do, because the country doesn’t have our understanding of property rights. Chinese rent their places of residence from the government, and the government takes them away at will.
Their homeless rate may or may not be .18%—the country is notoriously secretive about its core statistics—but ours is .19%, including those who are housed in some way (although, over the past decade, Ms. Kiper’s California collected half of the unhoused and put them in residential neighborhoods, making them conspicuous). And never mind that most of these individuals sleep on the street because they’re hooked on fentanyl, the synthetic opiate manufactured from Chinese compounds.
The script Ms. Kiper read sounds very familiar to me because I was born and raised in the USSR. A popular joke conflated two Soviet propaganda tropes: “We will catch up with and overtake America rolling downhill into the abyss!”The official government line held that America is decadent and dangerous and that its population is getting pauperized; moreover, while this is happening, the Soviet Union is certain to overtake the U.S. in development.
Side by side comparisons didn’t work well for the Soviet Union. The USSR lost the Cold War in 1959, when it barely began, because Nikita Khrushchev allowed an exhibition of everyday life in America to be displayed in the Moscow suburb of Sokolniki. Ordinary people visited Sokolniki and saw for themselves the comforts of an ordinary standalone home.
Contemporary China is not the USSR, but their per capita GDP is under $13,000 a year, compared to $86,661 in the U.S. There are a lot of Chinese people, so their leadership is able to pull the resources and throw their weight around, but it’s still a developing country. And because China is poorer, everything sold there is cheaper, while services like education and healthcare are so heavily subsidized, there is no point of even comparing them to those in the U.S.
The stereotype we have of China is not that it’s starving—that could be the panda bear’s own insecurity speaking. Our media never shows malnourished Chinese; if anything, it’s guilty of the opposite: We rarely see the poverty of the Chinese countryside. The stereotype we have is that it’s the land of cheaply manufactured junk. Which is why Americans are forewarned against taking medications from uncertain sources that might be coming from across the Pacific, even if they cost $20 a month.
Americans don’t realize just how poor the circumstances of people across the world are. Chinese people don’t live on sprawling properties like in the San Fernando Valley. What they call home is usually an apartment in a high-rise, and whatever their “grocery haul” is, they have to carry it home on foot or via public transport. Chinese car ownership is not high by global standards; it’s a sprawling land, but they rank 85th out of 182 nations—lower than Russia or nearby Mongolia. The rising Asian hegemon is not going to win the argument about relative quality of life.
The USSR learned that lesson. Having sacrificed over 20 million lives to win World War II, the Soviet people felt that they deserved to live like victors. Because socialist consumer culture couldn’t keep up, the propaganda machine had to explain that, being spiritually rich, meaning having a clear vision of a communist future to work toward, they didn’t need 25 varieties of shampoo at every pharmacy. Russian women felt otherwise—which should be obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about Russian women.
How spiritual, in their secular sense of the word, the Soviet Union was is another question, though it enticed the West with its cultural heritage. Contemporary China with its pernicious censorship, social credit, and gulags sounds like a cautionary tale to an average American.
If the Chinese Communists want to demoralize us, they are probably not going to get very far by telling us that they are the wealthy ones, that we buy our children bulletproof backpacks—which, at $100, are a fraction of what a family pays for back-to-school supplies—and that since our lives are so dangerous and our adversaries so superior patriotic exercises like the Pledge of Allegiance should be regarded as outdated. In the fair marketplace of ideas, that argument is not persuasive. They either miss our concerns entirely or overplay them. Pumping fentanyl through the open border, establishing police precincts on our territory, and promoting degenerate social media content to minors, on the other hand, have been foolproof methods so far and constitute a more formidable challenge than Maoist ideology.
Because MAGA did well on TikTok this election, President Trump expressed interest in saving it by turning it into an American-run company. I hope he succeeds, but social media personalities are often like weathervanes—they’ll say whatever. Kiper is case in point here. We can turn off the propaganda spigot, but the core problems of youth media consumption with all its mental health consequences will remain. China stands to benefit from it.
