03/09/25 - Tiktok Refugees: Some Personal Thoughts.

So, people have been asking about my take on the Tiktok refugee situation, and now that things have died down quite a bit, I think I can say that my main take on it is that I’m…disappointed. Disappointed, but not surprised.

I’d had admittedly very idealistic hopes that with Americans pouring into Rednote, it would be a great opportunity to tear open some of the CCP’s lies. And in fact, people got to fact-checking right away. And I’m disappointed that at the end of the day, nothing really changed. Or maybe, in fact, things may be even worse now because people think they know the truth because an “American” told them so, and it’ll discourage them from further attempts to seek the truth. And I’m not surprised because when I thought about it, I really should’ve known from the start that this was exactly what would happen.

Because Chinese censorship’s focal point has never been the Great Firewall. It’s the subtle algorithm that keeps anything that goes against the government narrative out of the spotlight. And they didn’t even have to change anything about the algorithm to deal with the influx of Tiktok refugees. What already existed was perfectly sufficient.

It’s always been true that poor people don’t have a voice on the Chinese internet. Statistically speaking, 40% of China makes less than 1000RMB per month. When former Premier Li Keqiang brought up this statistic, I remember the whole internet reeling in disbelief. Nobody could believe those numbers. And I honestly couldn’t believe the sheer amount of disbelief, because I come from small town, rural China, and all the farmers I know make about 3000-4000RMB per year. It blows my mind all the time how segregated Chinese society it. How little people from one strata know about other strata. I honestly think that most middle-class Chinese people seem more ignorant about the lower classes than they are about America.

And that’s not a coincidence. It’s because the government makes every effort to paint the image of China as prosperous, wealthy, successful. For example, 10% of that 40% of people who make less than 1000RMB a month are illiterate. Now, illiterate people still get on social media—my grandma does. But what they mostly do is just scroll around on tiktok. They don’t leave comments or create their own content, because they can’t. I’ve tried to teach my grandma how to use speech to text, and it doesn’t work for her because she can’t speak Mandarin. She only speaks in our unique, local dialect. 75% of that 40% of people who make less than 1000RMB a month comes from rural areas, and only 66% of Chinese rural villages have internet. There are apparently still some villages that don’t have electricity. And the internet in my hometown is extremely spotty.

And meanwhile, Rednote is a particularly bougie social media platform. I think I’ve mentioned before that it actually started as a overseas shopping platform, where some brand name products are cheaper in their country of production than in China, so people would put together lists of what they want to international students studying in that country to buy locally and mail back to China for a profit. Rednote’s user demographic is predominantly young, predominantly female, and predominantly comfortably middle-class.

And when they try to bring a spotlight to poorer people’s circumstances, those posts get banned right away. A content creator, 户晨风 (Hu Chenfeng) is known for making a lot of videos about comparing cost of living. A lot of his content is something like, “What can you get at the supermarket on one day’s worth of minimum wage in Shanghai?” “What can you get with one day’s worth of a janitor’s salary in Japan?” That sort of thing. And when he tried to do a video covering, “What can you get with one day’s worth of social security payments?” He ended up interviewing a grandma who said that all she gets is 120RMB a month, which is the minimum social security payment, and over 50% of retired people only get minimum payments. Every retired person in my village only gets minimum payments because when they were young and working, China was still communist and taxes were a thing yet. By the time you were allowed to contribute to social security, they were already retirement age. Hu Chenfeng actually changed his content that time, because realistically speaking, you can’t get anything for 4RMB in a store (maybe a single lollipop?), so he instead looked to see how much he could buy for 120RMB, and even went a little bit over as a gift to the grandma.

And that content got him banned for well over a year. Because the government has an initiative to prevent influencers from “exploiting poor people” to make money. Even now that he’s resumed making content, you can tell there’s extra moderation on his content and his livestreams regularly get banned over the most bizarre stuff. And that’s not even to mention the amount of haters/bots that chase him everywhere he goes and downvotes his content and leaves angry comments that he’s a “traitor” to China, because he…made videos showing janitors in Japan can buy more food than retired farmers in China? He smeared China’s image, and people are mad at him for it.

Hell, I’ve been banned from making comments for a week once, because I saw a blogger talking about high crime rates in America, and the source they cited was CSI. The TV show. And all I commented was, “But the story on a crime show necessarily has to involve a crime?”

I regularly see Chinese people on the internet confidently assert that, “There aren’t any homeless people in China. I’ll pay you 500RMB if you can find even a single one for me.” But I know for a fact there are, in fact, homeless people in China, because there are anti-homeless bars on park benches in China. Why would anyone build park benches in such an annoying way if it wasn’t to stop people from sleeping on them? People will talk about how at least poor people in China don’t have to sell their own blood, even though yes, they very much do.

Around the time of the Tiktok refugee situation, I think I covered a post myself where someone posted a photo of their house in rural China—a honestly rather nice house, in my opinion. It’s nicer than a lot of houses in my hometown. But nonetheless, his comment section was filled with people telling him to delete the photo. They say it’s to prevent…leaking information to spies? Although nobody is concerned about that when people are posting photos of their luxurious mansions or dash cams from their sports cars. And there are a few comments admitting that they’re telling OP to delete his photo because, “We shouldn’t be showing the bad stuff to Americans.”

But when it comes to Americans, it’s the other way around. A post that says, “Most Americans work two jobs to get by.” will get tens of thousands of likes and get quoted by every single blogger and influencer that’s covering this. Americans saying they work 80, 90, or even 120 hours a week will get to the top of the comment section. And then, when influencers cover this, they’ll casually say, “America doesn’t have 996. They have 496. Americans have to get up at 4AM and work two jobs until 9PM to make ends meet.”

The algorithm isn’t the only thing at work here. With how much media attention and traffic the Tiktok refugee situation was getting, obviously, all kinds of influencer companies made their move. A substantial number of what looks like “American” comments on Rednote aren’t from Americans at all. It’s just a Chinese MCN company that used a white person’s selfie as their avatar and are writing their apps in English (or deliberately wonky Chinese, like it’s been put through Google translate). So it’s hard to say how much of the people saying, “Everyone I know works 90 hours a week, and I feel lucky to only work 60.” are actually Americans in shitty circumstances looking for comfort online, and how much of it is just a Chinese influencer company who knows exactly how to get attention and likes.

That’s where a lot of the more insane takes come from too, the ones that nobody who’s spent more than a week in America would actually believe. Like, “Americans aren’t actually allergic to peanut butter. They just can’t afford it and are too ashamed to say so.” Or, “American houses don’t have foundations. That’s why they’re so cheap.” Or, my personal favourite, “Americans take Ozempic because they can’t afford groceries.”

I was asked before, “How has the Tiktok refugee situation changed how Chinese people view America?”

I’ll let this Zhihu post answer that for me.

“I’m very sad.

Tens of thousands of kilometres away, hundreds of millions of people are being brainwashed every day by their government to hate us, but they’re just a bunch of honest and kind peasants. They’re not like how trashy Hollywood movies portray them at all—humanoid animals who are slutty, disrespectful, arrogant, lazy, greedy, can’t speak two sentences without swearing or talking about sex. They’re just as hard-working as all proletariats in the world. They’re optimistic, kind, logical, focused, hard-working. Their emotions and spirit are almost the same as us. They have much more in common with us than we have with Bush Jr. or other elites.

We used to make fun of them for BLM, rednecks, army grunts, getting high, shoplifting, never eating vegetables, being fat, white people food. And now ew’ve discovered that black lives have never mattered, rednecks can’t afford sky-high tuition, grunts have to pay the military for rent, addicts are broke and on the verge of death, shoplifters just don’t want to starve to death, not eating veggies is because planting a veggie garden is illegal and the only affordable food is industrial garbage, and white people food is because they only get a 15 minute lunch break. And all of a sudden, these ugly, laughable people have all got reasons that you can understand and sympathise with. The echo chamber that the media spun had turned them all into monsters.

A second before, you were thinking that China and America are bound to have a fight. Hundreds of millions of Americans are bound to be your enemies. And now, a false mirror has vanished, and you’ve discovered that they’re just like you. Like you’ve taken a second look at the black hordes of monsters and found they’re all your brothers and sisters. This is a delightful surprise.

And yet.

You’ve discovered that their lives are hard. It’s even harder than the worst off Chinese people you know. All the things that anger and upset you in China is only worse over there. You just met a huge group of people who might be your friends, but you’ve also learned that they currently live in hell. You watch them suffer, you watch them cry out about their stifling experiences on Chinese social media platforms. You’re surprised that what’s been portrayed as paradise by media and movies is actually just a boiling oil pot, frying every single of your newly-met brothers and sisters. And these brothers and sisters of yours in hell might be forced onto the battlefield by relentless demons to turn their blades on you. This has happened 70 years ago.

Now not only do you understand the banner on Tiananmen Square, you also understood why he would want to liberate all of humanity when he saw the world map for the first time. But more than that, you feel powerless and helpless. They could’ve been friends you never met from thousands of miles away. Perhaps one day, you might even be able to laugh and drink with them in reality despite only having met online before.

But for now, all you can do is keep watching them suffer, and even realise that one day, they might have to kill you or you might have to kill them. And the demons feasting on their flesh will still party on.

It hurts.”

Take that for what you will.

The reason I say I’m disappointed is because of what this has changed about how Chinese people feel about themselves.

Before, I was confident that there’s really only so far the CCP can go before they have to worry about the people rising up in arms. I said before that China today isn’t China in the 50s. You can’t starve tens of millions of people to death anymore and not even see a ripple. American values and ideals are very pervasive, no matter how high the CCP builds the Great Firewall. Chinese people aren’t North Koreans. They know about concepts like “democracy” and “freedom of speech” and “worker’s right”, and they naturally long for it. That’s why no matter how laughable it is, the CCP has to claim that it is, in fact, democratic. That China has freedom of speech, that China has more freedom of speech than anywhere else in the world.

When people are working 996 schedules in China, even if they don’t know any different, or everyone around them is working similar schedules, they still feel dissatisfied. They know that they deserve better. They have an innate sense of injustice when they work hard all month just to learn that their entire pay check had been deducted in fines because they were 2 minutes late to work that one time. They instinctively don’t think anyone should actually be arrested for having a VPN.

But now, I don’t know how many people actually believe that those American movies and TV shows are actually just a lie. That it’s the same everywhere in the world. That it really is unreasonable to think that people shouldn’t be forced to work 996, because everyone everywhere does. That they should be grateful they have to pay upfront millions to treat a loved one’s disease or they’ll get kicked out of the hospital, because surely the same illness would cost ten times as much in America.

I think this has turned out to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns from the CCP yet. And I hate to think how many people who might have otherwise made a post, spoke up, filed a complaint, sued, or done anything to combat the oppressive circumstances they found themselves in, now held back because, “What do I have to complain about? It’s much worse in America.”