TikTok people moving to Xiaohongshu and learning that the Chinese aren't evil monsters is warming my heart.

Seriously who could have guessed? Sure it might not amount to much but even the fact that people are learning that what the US has been teaching it's people about China has been mostly lies is amazing.

There is no way in hell this could have ever happened even when I was a kid. People were simply too racist. They still are, but the fact that even the slight reduction in racism we have in modern day is enough that Chinese people and Westerners are coming together and being cool with each other online is nothing short of a miracle.

No wonder the US hegemony hates teaching it's people foreign languages, no wonder it encourages xenophobia, that barrier was so powerful in keeping people from learning first hand what Americas "enemies" are really like.

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Incredible bag fumbling on the USA's part. Total Chinese Cultural victory, Alpha Centauri launch by end of year.
- Aren't they just going to ban this one, too next?
  
  It took 5 years for the TikTok one to go through, and even if it also gets banned, it makes a great point about a major threat to America
  
  They can never take away my sid meier treats
  
  From the Blinken and Romney talk, we know that the main reason for the Tiktok ban was ultimately that both parties saw prevalence of unfiltered information about the Palestinian genocide as a threat to US propaganda. If the Xiaohongshu exodus becomes a direct, fruitful cultural exchange with Chinese users that goes against ramping up tensions with the PRC, we will eventually see another ban that will at least go through its preliminal stages under Trump and that will continue regardless of the next presidential election outcomes. It will probably not even take that long because there's a precedent, an established process and a supreme court ruling in a comparable case now, because Republikans are even more confrontational towards the PRC than Demokrats and because ties between the GOP and the Amerikan digital bourgeoisie have deepened so much during the last weeks.
- Incredible bag fumbling on the USA's part. Total Chinese Cultural victory, Alpha Centauri launch by end of year.
  "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
  -Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

The worst non-horny content is the fucking “booktok” exodus, I guess I’m glad yall are reading but good god is it all YA fantasy???
- these dweebs are voraciously taking brando sanderson international
  
  Swear to fucking god
- If "booktok" is non-horny content to you, we are... not seeing the same booktok. Mine is all faerie porn and Mafia romance.
  
  I guess by non-horny I mean not sexually harassing Chinese women
- You wish for people to "read ANYTHING other than Harry Potter".
  Another finger on the Monkey's Paw curls inward.
- Is there a hashtag or whatever for that? I've got a day off at the end of this week and was going to read Brigitte Reimann's 'Siblings' so I could probably post about that as a homeopathic amount of antidote.
- I've seen people shilling 48 Laws of Power already

i'm about to sound like a wet blanket but i gotta complain about the americans.
i do like that chinese and americans are connecting, but what i did see that i don't like is you have a bunch of thirsty ass dudes commenting on all of the women's appearances, basically like virtual sexpats. i really wouldn't doubt it if a lot of these men think "once this--i'm assuming very poor chinese lady sees ME, an american comment, she'll come have sex with me thinking i'm rich and giving her american citizenship, which i also baselessly assume she is desperate to have, since china sucks so bad".
and then, i saw this one american woman just frankly being so fucking cringe and annoying. she had her phone held up so you could only see the top half of her face and head, looking like the mf las vegas dome, doing a super exaggeration yelling laugh immediately as the video starts playing, yelling "GUYS!!!!!". then she did the yell/laugh thing through her whole video, and i was just like damn, this person is very unpleasant.
- Hopefully the horny posters will get banned lol. Yeah unfortunately there is going to be a lot of cringe that comes with this whole thing.
- and then, i saw this one american woman just frankly being so fucking cringe and annoying. she had her phone held up so you could only see the top half of her face and head, looking like the mf las vegas dome, doing a super exaggeration yelling laugh immediately as the video starts playing, yelling "GUYS!!!!!". then she did the yell/laugh thing through her whole video, and i was just like damn, this person is very unpleasant.
  That's like half of TikTok. I don't know why so many people decide to take video of their foreheads while their microphone peaks trying to pick up whatever background audio they're trying to record a live reaction to.
- You should cyberbully her.
  
  i commented “please algorithm, less of this annoying woman and more of the cool chinese posters” and she replied some bs about how i was “trolling” which “was not welcome here” as thats “meta behavior”. i told her she isnt entitled to positive feedback lmao.

The "Chinese Grocery Hauls" are radicalizing Americans about food prices and you love to see it folks.

Did people think Chinese people were ever evil? Videos of china on my feed are always positive
- I dunno what feed you mean because most westerners think China is an authoritarian dictatorship. There are a lot of people that won't touch anything owned by Tencent simply because it's Chinese. Youtube is flooded by social credit score and Winnie the Pooh Xi jokes. Outside of the internet the mainstream News is constantly harping on the "China Threat" and how it's a threat to democracy. Those are just a handful of examples off the top of my head but even small stuff like all through my working life I've had co-workers used communism and Chinese as shorthand for bad. "Made in China" for example is shorthand for "badly made" when Westerners say it.
  
  The flood of Chinese treats banned from the US being seen might unironically be the radicalisation trigger for the US.
  We've had Treaterites but are you ready for Treatist-Leninists?
  
  I wrote a long, detailed dismantling of a the sundae cherry comment "the US sometimes behaves badly but isn't genocidal like China" atop a lot of barely-disguised sinophobic posting on a [redacted professional industry I work in sometimes] news site the other day. In part because that particular comment was so blatently an inversion of reality and partly because I'd had enough of how pervasive and unchallenged it was.
  
  I didn’t join tik tok for two reasons:
  1 addictiveness
  2 China has a more robust surveillance system than the US does and are further along in facial recognition tech. I don’t want them getting a scan of my face. It’s bad enough the US likely has one because of my drivers license, but our tech hasn’t caught up to chinas yet. Or at least the implementation of it. I fully expect the worst of Chinas social credit stuff to be implemented in America as well as America importing Israel’s surveillance tech that they’ve mastered in their genocide of Palestinians. Im off the major social networks now but im deeply uneasy about where the world is heading. I don’t want anyone to have my data anymore whether it’s a Chinese based or US based or any other country based company. The data will one day be used against me.
- You're very fortunate. Sinophobia is 'baked into the cake'
  as it were where I live. Chinese people are depicted as childlike, unscrupulous and brainwashed all at once as though they are 'programmed' by the CCP (CPC) to be spies for the country or rabid nationalists while still being shielded from the rest of the world behind the Great Firewall. Any basic normal day-to-day stuff, if done by a Chinese person, is instantly suspicious. Posting cute panda videos? It's an insidious SoFt PoWeR pUsh. Buying infant formula? It's China flexing its economic might to deprive western babies of nutrition. Highly coordinated dance? It's brutal training to quash individualism (unless ofc its shenyun in which case it's 4000 years of esoteric tradition and majesty...). Chinese people cannot exist or act in the west without being seen through the lense of the yellow peril.
- considering "it's chinese" is liberal for "it's bad", yeah I would say so
- I asked on my group chat if people were thinking of switching over to xiaohongshu and received a response "why, so a Chinese steals my social security number?"
  I think we still have a long way to go with this whole racism thing.
- on my feed
  You're probably a decent person and the algorithm put you in a bubble.
- They think of them as scheming hordes incapable of independent thought or creativity.
  
  I think most Americans barely think of them at all
- Are you in the US?

I've been talking to trans people in China on that app. I think it's an amazing place for cultural exchange. It's been really nice to cut through orientalist propaganda to understand the ways that Chinese society actually is transphobic and not just the weird shit Americans make up about them. I recommend everyone at least download the app to talk to a few Chinese citizens.

It's nice and it reminds me of why I like the internet (in a similar way to how discovering chapo.chat/hexbear did years ago). When I was young, the internet opened up my world from just my little town to the entire world. At the time, I was talking to people from Europe when previously I had barely talked to someone from a different town than me. The connectivity of the internet can be a beautiful thing, despite everything.

It's quite funny, they'd rather learn a new language (one that's notoriously difficult to learn) than use Instagram Reels. Not complaining.

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