NEW JERSEY – In a crowded high school cafeteria in New Jersey, Ms Ellie Lindal took a video of her shrivelled cheeseburger and posted it on Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu, which Americans call RedNote.
She added a caption translated into Chinese: “This is my bleh school lunch, my Chinese comrades. Your dumplings and noodles look much better!”
Within minutes, comments and airbrushed photos of mouthwatering local cuisine poured in from Xiaohongshu users with IP addresses from cities like Beijing and Chongqing.
This cultural exchange among American and Chinese youth would have been quite unthinkable until just a week ago, when over 700,000 new users joined the app in just two days, Chinese media reported on Jan 14.
The influx came largely from American TikTok users seeking a new social media home as a ban on TikTok loomed in the US, which has about 170 million users of the app. TikTok said on Jan 17 that its service …
