Is the TikTok refugee influx prompting us to start looking for memes on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) now?

“Hello Chinese people, I am American, I am a TikTok refugee.” Users who have been browsing on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) these days may have already seen similar posts flooding their feeds.

This wave of “cultural immigration” from Europe and America has propelled Xiaohongshu to the top of the App Store overnight, making it the hottest free app globally.

Since TikTok faced a ban in the United States, the “spiritual homeland” of European and American trendsetters collapsed overnight. In resistance to the U.S. government's ban on TikTok, millions of creators, fashionistas, and content consumers, like a digital version of the “Exodus,” surged towards Xiaohongshu.

This sudden “refugee wave” has not only propelled Xiaohongshu up the ranks but has also led foreign netizens to affectionately refer to it as “Rednote, a book of the world.”

What's even more wonderful is that recently Xiaohongshu quietly updated its short video interface, imitating TikTok's design style. It seems that the official team was well prepared to receive TikTok refugees, to the point where some netizens joked, “This team’s operations are literally in the stratosphere.”

It is said that the Xiaohongshu team is frantically updating algorithms and adding real-time translation features. Netizens jokingly remarked that this year's Shanghai Spring Festival has added another brightly lit office building. However, this exchange also brought a smirk to Zhu Xiaohu, an early investor in Xiaohongshu.

This is also a sudden “cultural immigration,” triggering a transnational surfing carnival and a collision of Chinese and American cultures:

“The biggest advice given to Xiaohongshu was hoping that the Xiaohongshu CEO would quickly improve his English proficiency for future U.S. congressional hearings,” “Why do so many Chinese Xiaohongshu users all call themselves momo and even use the same profile picture?” “Surfing in their respective time zones, Xiaohongshu has achieved a new era of ‘Early C (Chinese) and Late A (American).’”

Ok, after reading through these interesting memes, some financially gifted netizens have had a sudden burst of inspiration: “Suddenly thought of a way to earn dollars on Xiaohongshu”:

One Dollar gives a Chinese name to foreign friends, One Dollar determines the zodiac sign, One Dollar examines physiognomy, One Dollar reads the palm...

Immediately in the comment section, a netizen who loves to argue raises the barrier to this money-making method: "How to open up a payment channel?"

For ordinary netizens, this is somewhat challenging, but I believe this question will not stump the readers of this article. Crypto friends have ten thousand kinds of coins to choose from for receiving payments.

At this point, the editor suddenly thought again, in addition to trendy refugees flooding into Little Red Book, is it possible that there are also TikTok refugees from the crypto industry joining in?

A search reveals that indeed there are, and even major players in the crypto industry quietly set their sights on this wave of traffic, with suspected appearances of Coinbase's soft ads. With the help of other colleagues' hints, the editor also found a lot of content related to the "cult coin" $XRP, bringing their own "faith" to Chinese netizens.

For such a high-profile event, sensitive Chinese stock investors also want to join in the fun; however, after examining all related stocks, they only found one company, One Net One Creation, with business cooperation and conceptual association.

Compared to the traditional financial circles that do not have many hype targets, the crypto world has a lot more choices. Various related Little Red Book memes start to proliferate, such as "$xiaoya, $momo, and Potato Captain," but so far, no heavyweight and viral meme concept has emerged.

Just as cultural refugees find a home on Little Red Book, the heat of the crypto world is gradually spreading in this land. As the momentum grows, Little Red Book is also highly likely to produce viral memes similar to chillguy and apple on TikTok, and may even become the next cultural export stronghold.

While Laowai (foreigners) learn memes on Little Red Book, they are also gradually experiencing the unique charm of the Chinese internet: "Americans are too boring and too serious; their homepages are either self-introductions or just cats, dogs, and coffee experiences. On the other hand, Chinese people are all abstract deities, born with memes. Let's learn Chinese memes hhhhh!"

If there is going to be another wave of TikTok meme trend, then this wave of meme coin is highly likely to originate from local memes, with foreigners adapting to Chinese internet memes.

For those in the crypto community reading this article, if you haven't downloaded Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) yet, you may miss out on the final phase of this bull market's "meme economy experiment." The next meme coin, or a brand new cultural symbol, may be born in some inconspicuous comment section, possibly originating from Xiaohongshu's Chinese memes, or a combination of Chinese and English "Chinalish memes."