CFOTO|Future Publishing via Getty Images

A smartphone user in Shanghai, China shows 'TikTok refugees' flocking to the RedNote app.

The United States is losing the war for soft power, and nothing shows that more dramatically than the TikTok saga.

Before President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office to suspend the ban on TikTok, the U.S. government had ordered ByteDance, the China-based company that owns TikTok, to sell the social media app by Jan. 19 over concerns that the Chinese government could use it to steal Americans’ data and spy on the country.

But the unexpected reaction from self-declared “TikTok refugees” – most of them American social media creators and users frustrated by what they saw as U.S. government overreach – was a threat to “hand-deliver” their data to Chinese President Xi Jinping rather than migrate to U.S.-owned alternatives such as Instagram and YouTube. While many of the videos from angry TikTok users were satirical, a significant digital migration is giving the Chinese government a lot more information about Americans – and Americans more information about China.

In the days before TikTok was meant to disappear from U.S. app stores, Reuters reported that nearly 3 million new American users joined Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app known in the U.S. as RedNote. (The literal translation is “Little Red Book,” which sounds like a reference to the book of quotes by Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong, but the app’s Chinese founder says the name is a tribute to the colors of his alma mater, Stanford Business School, and the U.S. consulting firm where he interned.) The RedNote app, which allows users to post and reply to videos, photos and long-form text, is designed for Mandarin-speaking Chinese users, but skyrocketed to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store’s charts earlier this month.

Raja KrishnamoorthiJan. 10, 2025

While these reactions may seem silly or harmless, they are emblematic of something concerning: a shift toward China in the global balance of soft power, one that policymakers in the U.S. appear unprepared to confront. For........

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