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Meredith Chen

Mary Roettger was just one of millions of Americans seeking a social media life raft when she warily logged onto China’s RedNote platform for the first time in January.
As fears loomed over a threatened US ban on TikTok, the Florida writer braced for a clumsy, spam-filled experience full of “negative people”.
Instead, she was struck by a starkly different culture. Roettger was “blown away with the amount of tenderness and excitement” of the online community suddenly before her.
“That was new,” said the 27-year-old, who shared on RedNote her poems, pictures of her cat and videos taken during casual strolls. “It was people speaking with people, not taglines and hollow trends. These were real people connecting and sharing.”
Like Roettger, droves of other RedNote migrants – self-proclaimed “TikTok refugees” – swapped jokes, memes and pet photos with their Chinese counterparts, talking about life across different countries and cultures, from food and make-up to common day-to-day struggles.
Their spontaneous exchanges, many of which evoking the original dream of the internet as a global village, offered a glimpse into a flourishing rapport between Chinese and foreign internet users – one shaped by fun trends and playful interactions on social media, transcending political divides.
It has not gone unnoticed.
In Beijing, there is a desire to ride this wave of unexpected enthusiasm by translating the frenzy into a broader strategy to nudge home-grown social media platforms onto the global stage.
While social media may offer a powerful platform for China to “tell its story well” by shaping narratives that bypass traditional geopolitical frames through memes, travel vlogs and grounded interactions, experts have cautioned that transforming engagement into influence is a formidable task.
Long-term geopolitical mistrust, cultural differences and regulatory hurdles have complicated the path to sustained international traction. But at the end of the day, genuine, creative authenticity and interactions – rather than heavy-handed state involvement – are key to building lasting engagement and enhancing mutual understanding in an increasingly fragmented global landscape, according to observers.
Image recalibration
From the frenzy of “TikTok refugees” and the cult following of Pop Mart’s Labubu to a spiking interest in web novels and short dramas, global appetite for Chinese pop culture hit a fever pitch in 2025.
According to observers, these organic cultural exports have done more than generate sales, they are driving a quiet but meaningful shift.
For young, digital-native audiences in particular, these trends are reframing China as a more relatable society.
Shaoyu Yuan, an expert on soft power at New York University, argues that this wave of digital content has successfully pushed the narrative in a “more positive direction”.
Whether through lifestyle influencers or viral memes, these offerings provide foreign audiences an “emotional entry point” to a nation often defined by hard headlines. The content revealed a side of China that was “softer and more relatable”, Yuan said.
“Instead of seeing China only through the frame of tension, authoritarianism, or rivalry with the United States, younger audiences see humour, fashion, creativity, community and normal everyday moments,” he said.
“Once you see people as relatable, it becomes harder to flatten a country into a threat.”
The shift has been seen in recent US polling. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, published in October, found that more than half of those asked favoured a friendly policy of cooperation and engagement with Beijing over containment and decoupling, up from 40 per cent in 2024.


The growing overseas popularity of Chinese social media content offers a crucial counter to persistent problems, including racial bias, misinformation and Cold War-era misunderstandings about China, according to Jianqing Chen.
The assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St Louis sees the cultural success as a hopeful counterpoint to darker global trends.
“Ultimately, the global enthusiasm for Chinese digital culture represents a silver lining amid the dark clouds of rising xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment worldwide,” Chen said.
“It suggests that grass roots cultural openness and exchange can persist even in an era of political closure.”
For US resident Roettger, interacting with Chinese users on RedNote remade her perception of China from a distant, foreign country into a familiar and relatable world of shared daily life and human connection.
“My initial exposure [to] China and Chinese culture was very shallow … But now I see how much more connected we as people are. Doing the same things day in and day out wanting connection, happiness and laughter,” she said.
Beyond the headlines dominated by trade disputes and military tensions, soft power and cultural influence have emerged as a crucial battlefield in the deepening US-China rivalry. Both nations are keenly focused on projecting a more favourable national image to the world.
Yet Chen argued that the soft power framework might not precisely capture the increased global popularity of Chinese social media content, since the emerging cultural trends were largely shaped by market dynamics and grass roots creativity rather than centralised government planning.
“Organic, bottom-up cultural exchange may prove more resilient, [and] responsive in navigating an increasingly fragmented global landscape than a top-down governmental imposition against the people’s will,” she said.
According to Yuan, although the depth of impact is still limited – it will not change foreign policy overnight – the breadth has been expanding quickly.
China’s latest soft-power exports had traded in warmth and familiarity, bypassing official channels and remote official statements to court a digital generation that formed opinions via accessible creators, he added.
Going global
Amid the wave of enthusiasm, Beijing seems to have recognised the potential for social media to reshape its national image on the global stage. Expanding the international influence of such platforms is now a strategic goal of China’s latest five-year plan – covering 2026 to 2030 – in a bid to sustain the cultural resonance.
In a study session on November 28 of the Politburo, the country’s top policymaking body, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to “strengthen international communication networks and capabilities, using the internet to convey China’s voice and tell its story well”.
The government’s push to harness this cultural power was recently underscored by Li Shulei, the ruling Communist Party’s propaganda chief. In a November 7 article for the party mouthpiece People’s Daily, he urged innovation in international communication and the global expansion of China’s social media platforms.
Chen summed up the strategic intent of this official endorsement: China was seeking to pivot from its historical role as the “world’s factory” to becoming “a source of creativity that sparks genuine global curiosity”.

According to Yuan, the international nature and growing popularity of user-generated digital cultural content is creating a “genuinely new pathway” for China to shape narratives and project a more positive image, presenting an “inverted pattern” to Beijing’s top-down communication strategy.
China’s international outreach has long depended on official channels, state media messaging and the Confucius Institutes. But they have been viewed with scepticism abroad and rarely resonated with younger audiences.
“It actually rewires the whole system, from a propaganda-style broadcast model to a messier, bottom-up and often more convincing ecosystem of everyday storytellers,” Yuan said, referring to ordinary social media users, small studios and influencers.
The shift made China appear “more plural and normal”, turning international communication into a conversation and giving Beijing a softer form of influence, built upon diverse user-driven impressions rather than a single polished narrative, he added.
Challenges abroad
From Beijing’s perspective, the strategy to expand social media influence abroad held promise, but executing it would be a formidable challenge, Yuan said.
According to experts, despite the momentum, potential obstacles to expansion include geopolitical trust issues, market saturation, cultural and regulatory barriers, and the complex negotiation between government objectives and genuine foreign audience response.
The global political climate compounds the challenge. As Chen noted, US-China tensions, tariff disputes and rising commercial protectionism pose significant headwinds to the global expansion of Chinese social media platforms.
Yuan said the state could fund expansion, buy advertisements and push app store rankings, but could not manufacture organic enthusiasm at will.
Alexander Davey, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said: “A core challenge is whether Chinese platforms can operate under the same norms as global incumbents like Instagram or X, where the environment is often chaotic, political and polarising.”
Overseas success would hinge on whether Chinese platforms could loosen controls and give users and creators enough agency and autonomy to allow natural user interaction, without triggering a sense of over-management that discouraged engagement, according to Davey.
New international users on RedNote soon realised how content moderation worked – and where the limits lay – on a platform that served both domestic Chinese users and a foreign audience, he noted.
Apart from cat pictures and memes, topics often considered sensitive in China surfaced in exchanges on RedNote occasionally after the January influx, as international users steered their curiosity to probe the boundaries of Chinese censorship. These included conditions for LGBTQ groups, difficulties around labour strikes in China and sensitivities over youth unemployment.
For Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Centre for International Security and Strategy, the problem lies in deep-seated Western misunderstanding. This often means that Chinese messaging abroad – whether from scholars or social media platforms – is seen as propaganda, which then sparks significant ideological scrutiny and obstacles for Chinese platforms seeking to go global.
Yuan made a similar point. “Anything that looks like ‘TikTok 2.0 from China’ will immediately face political suspicion in the US and Europe, no matter how good the product is. Data security, content moderation, potential government influence – all of that will come up on day one now, not five years later.”
Dylan Loh, an associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University who specialises in China’s foreign policy and diplomacy, said the “TikTok refugee” phenomenon was fleeting, with non-Chinese users on RedNote dropping steeply. US President Donald Trump reversed the TikTok ban after a 14-hour shutdown.
Loh added that while Western platforms had been created with global scale in mind, Chinese apps, by contrast, had mostly grown only within the domestic market.
China’s social media ecosystem has long been considered relatively closed, subject to real-name registration requirements, strict content moderation and regulatory oversight, and of course the Great Firewall. All this has reinforced conclusions that Chinese platforms are closely intertwined with the state.
Sun agreed that the RedNote surge was a flash in the pan, driven more by the momentary desperation of US users in the face of an imminent TikTok ban than by genuine platform loyalty.
The drop in non-Chinese users suggested that China’s social media ecosystem still felt unfamiliar and not fully compatible with Western habits and expectations, even after RedNote launched a translation feature, he said.
Governance and localisation posed further challenges, Yuan said, pointing out that global operations required navigating not only European Union and US regulations but also local cultures and digital service rules.
Daniele Carminati, an expert on international relations and soft power at Mahidol University International College in Thailand, said China faced “a slow and tortuous process” in a global landscape already dominated by American social networks.
China’s geopolitical outreach was expected to resonate more in Southeast Asia and the developing world, which tended to be more receptive to Beijing than Western countries, he said.
Chen said China’s policy documents indicated the government understood that its role was to provide cross-border institutional infrastructure and services rather than direct cultural expansion.
As such, it had focused on building the legal, financial, accounting and diplomatic infrastructure that would enable Chinese companies – the “real agents” of overseas activity – to compete globally, rather than trying to orchestrate cultural content itself, she said.
Soft power, Yuan said, ultimately rested on credibility and values, not only on resources – the best the state could do is create good conditions around this ecosystem.
“Provide stable rules, protect intellectual property, ease up on non-sensitive everyday content, offer background support and then keep a light touch,” he said.
Angela Xiao Wu, an associate professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, said that the recent thaw in US public opinion about China stemmed largely from American domestic politics, with a backlash against the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric “channelled indirectly into a broader reassessment of China”.
Chinese social media content had been swept up in this counter-current, she said, but much of the reaction was contingent and possibly temporary.
Sun suggested a flexible view on the go-global strategy; instead of platforms, promoting individual, grass-roots voices abroad might be more effective and easier.
“Every individual in China could be a communication channel,” he said. “Chinese culture emphasises collectivism while the West places high value on individual expression. To engage Western markets effectively, one needs to operate according to their norms.”
Telling China’s story worked best when people could come to China and when Chinese people could go abroad, Sun said, adding that meaningful cultural exchanges would first require more “stable political signals” from the US side.


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Soft power – hard work: can China harness social media apps to rewire its global image?

 Illustration: Henry Wong

Bottom-up cultural exchanges may be more effective at navigating a fragmented global landscape than top-down governmental communication, experts say. Photo: Reuters

Overseas RedNote users impress by cooking ‘new world-famous’ Chinese steamed eggs

Overseas RedNote users have turned their hand to cooking what has now become the “new world famous” Chinese dish,  steamed eggs. Photo: SCMP composite/RedNote/madisoninsf.com

Chinese netizens have been impressed by the cooking efforts of their international counterparts. Photo: RedNote

Overseas TikTok “refugees” enter into the friendly atmosphere on the Chinese social media platform. Photo: RedNote

Is the Labubu trend over – and could Pop Mart’s Twinkle Twinkle take its place?

Labubu dolls, from The Monsters Have a Seat series. Photo: Handout

Labubus at an AliExpress pop-up store in London. Photo: Reuters

Paloma Morphy with a Labubu at the 2025 Latin Grammy Awards. Photo: AFP

Labubu toys from The Monsters Big into Energy series. Photo: Reuters

Pop Mart's Twinkle Twinkle. Photo: Handout

Labubu, soft power of a stealthy ‘ugly-cute’ sort, takes on America

Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

A Labubu doll at the host stand of a restaurant serving dessert in the shape of a Labubu monster figurine in Moscow. Photo: Reuters 

Aaliyah Thompson with one of her Labubu dolls out of its box. Photo: Monique Thompson

A poster of the Chinese animated blockbuster film Ne Zha 2 before a preview screening in London on March 14. Photo: XinhuaI

Labubu dolls on display at Pop Mart’s new store in Las Vegas; the grand opening on July 12 drew hundreds, some of whom waited overnight. Photo: Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS

A man walks with Labubu plush toys hanging from his backpack straps in Shanghai on July 4. Photo: AFP

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After the US migration to RedNote, experts say transforming engagement into influence will require a ‘light touch’ from Beijing


After the US migration to RedNote, experts say transforming engagement into influence will require a ‘light touch’ from Beijing.


Soft power – hard work: can China harness social media apps to rewire its global image?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}After the US migration to RedNote, experts say transforming engagement into influence will require a ‘light touch’ from Beijing

After the US migration to RedNote, experts say transforming engagement into influence will require a ‘light touch’ from Beijing