Rednote: the Latest Step Towards the Collapse of the US Empire

The Berlin Wall has fallen and people are sprinting East, not West

“All Americans are amazed like North Koreans who never saw beyond their walls. I’m sorry your government fed you so much propaganda…well, welcome and have fun!”

Anonymous Chinese User

“Americans are so repressed and we don’t even know it.”

Anonymous American User

It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Whilst TikTok had capitulated at every turn and done its best to flaunt its anti-China credentials, the US ruling class was determined to nip the persistent threat to their authority in the bud. TikTok would be gone and control over information would return back into the hands of America’s many oligarchs. It was expected that users would naturally move over to Reels, where an American Meta could keep feeding people with a happy mixture of Neo-Nazi and Onlyfans content, free of the sorts of revolutionary sentiment that seemed to always be bubbling away on TikTok. But really it didn’t matter where they went - Shorts, Reels, hell even Spotify’s swipe feed - they would all be back under the control of the same people anyway. What the ruling class (or anyone else for that matter) didn’t expect was that its own citizens would do almost anything, even including learning Mandarin, to spite their own government and allow their data to be accessed by the Chinese state.

Little Red Book (more commonly known as Rednote) is a social media app almost identical to TikTok, though it primarily caters to Chinese users and is based in China, something TikTok never was. It features cute cat videos, makeup tutorials, dancing teenagers and, of course, plenty of Luigi Mangione edits. Almost overnight the app has emerged from obscurity and is now storming its way onto phones and tablets across the Western world, hitting #1 in top downloads in the US and even rising to #3 in the UK, #2 in Canada and #4 in Australia¹, despite the fact that the countries are not planning to ban Tiktok.

On the face of it, the movement can be simply read as yet another harmless internet fad that will disappear just as quickly as it emerged. Perhaps it will. But already the mass movement is exposing yet more cracks in the decaying foundations of the US Empire, from the state’s hypocrisy over data usage and free speech to making a laughing stock of its political priorities. Easily worst of all for American capital, Rednote is also killing Americans’ fear of the supposed ‘Great Other’.

Amongst the universal content seen on Rednote that is largely identical to other social media platforms, there are some important differences. One of the most immediately noticeable are the frequent edits of Chinese megacities, illuminated and neon against dramatic nightsky backdrops. The comments are filled with Americans who are part unsure whether to believe their eyes and in awe of what they are seeing. Quickly, comparisons with the US are made: the homelessness, the abysmal public transport, the way in which everything seems either rusted and on the brink of collapse or is shiny, gated and hidden. The second way in which Rednote’s content distinguishes itself is by what it lacks. There are no ads. For people who have become accustomed to the unrelenting bombardments of Tiktok shop, of the Temu ads thrust onto your screen every three swipes, it feels like a world apart. That’s not all though. There is, as far as I can tell, little to none of the widespread pornographic or racist content that has come to plague Western apps, in particular Instagram. And somehow, whilst all this is absent the fun Mangione edits remain untouched. To the Western eye, it is as if the censorship model has been inverted, for once targeting harmful content rather than being used as a tool of petty political meddling. Of course, it would be unsurprising to learn that political sensitive content relating to the Chinese state is not not allowed to be posted so freely. But for the millions of Americans swarming over Rednote this is an irrelevancy; they have far more stake in Luigi thirst traps than infographics on Tiananmen Square.

The significance of all of this is hard to overstate. In an attempt to safeguard its rotting regime, US capital has employed a militant sinophobia and new Cold War framing against the Chinese state, constructing China and the Chinese people as a new threatening Great Other, capable of replacing the old Soviets or ISIS and Al Qaeda. Yet unlike the Soviets or ISIS, the US public is finding the Chinese Other to not only be unthreatening but in fact preferable to their own political setup. This is the crux of the Rednote saga; the Berlin Wall has fallen and the masses have moved East. Every minute on Rednote millions of Americans are interacting on a personal level with the once mysterious Great Other, making up their own minds about this formerly hidden group, forming their own uncontrolled opinions. Comment gifs show America’s Statue of Liberty in the embrace of a Chinese Youxia, a traditional Chinese warrior, the countries’ flags flying in the background. Americans are realising that the Other dances like them, smiles like them, memes like them. Jokes about reconnecting with ‘my Chinese spy’ make a mockery of the state’s claims of a totalitarian Chinese Big Brother waiting to control American lives. The fear is vanishing and the Great Other, which the US has spent years constructing, is collapsing before our very eyes.

None of this is of course to say that Americans suddenly believe China to be a utopia. Many are aware of its issues (a lack of free speech, human rights abuses, poor working conditions etc.) but have made the obvious acknowledgment that every blight on the Chinese political system is not only already present in the US, but in many cases far worse. In a Tiktok approaching 400,000 likes, an American woman screams “At least they have public transport, at least they have housing”². Whilst they may not use the same phraseology, millions of Americans are coming to the realisation that the difference between the US and China is not one of freedom and capitalism against a terrifying communism and dictatorship, but instead a neoliberal, decaying american capitalism against an energetic and efficient chinese state capitalism.

What are the Oppressors to do?

Ultimately the Rednote saga reveals an American ruling class trapped into an ever worsening vicious cycle. Deteriorating economic conditions, genocidal imperialist ventures abroad and a growing cesspool of corruption have turned vast swathes of the American masses against their own state, who have recognised that they have no meaningful say or influence over the way in which their lives are conducted. This leads to frequent outbursts of rebellion, temporary windows of autonomy in which the American worker is able to assert her own destiny, as she sees fit. To supress this anger the ruling class constructs a Great Other, which provides the ruling class with a tool for emotional blackmail (however bad this is, if we go it will be worse) and fodder for cross-class national chauvinism. Yet in pushing so hard against the ‘Great Other’ in banning Tiktok, the ruling class has overstepped, accidentally causing its own citizens to do the unthinkable and cross benches. This is because construction of a Great Other is most effective when concessions are granted appeasing material concerns at home. This acts as a two pronged attack on revolutionary sentiment, offering both the carrot and the stick.

After the fall of the USSR, revolutionary sentiment was supressed both through the idea that there was in fact no Great Other at all - no alternative to American neoliberalism - and that the only aspiring Other was islamic fundamentalism, which offered nothing but a return to feudal patriarchy and barbarism. These decades of comfortable domination allowed the ruling class to forget the need for domestic concessions; the particular horrors of ISIS suicide bombings and beheadings allowed them to construct a counter revolutionary approach which relied almost entirely on demonisation of the Other. As islamic fundamentalism has receded across the globe, the ruling class has turned to China for its new Great Other, and has played the same rule book against the Chinese state. Yet Rednote shows that the strategy of all out demonisation and no concessions is not working against this new Other. This is primarily because China, unlike past Others, is far more alike the US than it is different. Whereas both the USSR and the islamic fundamentalist movements operated under social, cultural, political and economic systems which had stark differences to the US, China has far more in common with the US than it has differences, and when it does differ it is only positive (better public transport, infrastructure investment, housing etc). This makes all demonisation of the Great Other a self critique of the US’ own system, exposing the attacks for being politicised and not motivated by genuine concern. Thus with every attack the problem only worsens.

As more and more begin to switch to the side of the Great Other (something largely unthinkable for ISIS or the Soviets) the ruling class will be left with only one choice - to enforce a separation through the continued banning of Chinese social media apps like Rednote. Unfortunately for them, this response only further reveals the true nature of the state, forcing it to expose its tendency towards repression and leading to a heightened unreleased tension within society which promises an even more violent eventual outburst. This cycle of escalating repression and outbursts of resistance will continue again and again until one eventually breaks and is subdued entirely. Thus even if Rednote is supressed the problem for the ruling class is not solved but rather worsened and concealed for the time being. Thus what the seemingly harmless Rednote fad signals is that the two safety valves of the ruling class are both failing, and the situation is facing an immediate escalation, with the ruling class left with few good options.

1. Tower, S., 2025. Top Grossing Apps | FRANCE | Top App Store Rankings for iOS [Online]. Sensor Tower. Available from: https://app.sensortower.com/top-charts?category=0&country=FR&date=2025-01-14&device=iphone&os=ios [Accessed 14 January 2025].

2. Kirsten, 2025. Trying the Red Scare 2.0 is Failing Spectacularly for a Reason [Online]. Tiktok.com. Available from: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdSfVX3B/ [Accessed 14 January 2025].