As US netizens move to Rednote amid TikTok ban, remember China has always stressed mutual development over competition

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United Statesians are moving to Rednote as the threat of TikTok closure looms.

It’s become the #1 downloaded app in the appstore (and yes, you can download and install any Chinese app from abroad!), and Chinese netizens are already welcoming this influx of users with playful banter.

One example of jokes flowing between US and Chinese users of the Rednote app

What becomes clear is that banning TikTok — or trying to compete against China as the US State Department has been doing for over a decade — is a fools’ errand. China has often stressed that they are happy to work with anyone, including the US, for mutual development.[1] [2]

What is the end plan in regards to TikTok? Ban Rednote afterwards? Then ban WeChat, Weibo, bilibili, then ban anything Chinese from the US?

The US has almost 0 industry left[3] and developed mainly third-sector jobs like most of the imperial core because this is, for now, the only jobs that can be done locally.[4] It needs China, whether it wants to or not.[5]

At the same time, Trump already preemptively announced 100% tariffs on Chinese products, which faced very vocal backlash from business owners. Tariffs are paid by the importer, in this case businesses in the US, and the cost is passed onto the consumer by raising prices. A blanket tariff that would double the price of everything imported from China — including machinery that is used to make products locally — would only hurt the US economy.[6] [7] [8]

China has become a difficult problem for the US economy model because it shows a different way of doing things in the age of capitalism. One that is not predicated on imperialism and the exploitation of the Global South for the benefit of a minority of the world’s population. In fact, as poverty in the US has stagnated at a woeful 11% of the population since 1970,[9] (and this is echoed throughout the whole of the imperial core), China has managed to lift 800 million out of poverty.[10]

China Central Television Headquarters, Beijing.

Thus atrocity propaganda is manufactured against China and disseminated all around the Global North so that we do not look at how well things can work abroad.[11] [12] This isn’t true only for China, it’s just that China has become the world’s largest economy in terms of GDP by purchasing power parity (meaning adjusted for local cost of living)[13] and thus becomes enemy number one to US hegemony. Plenty of developing countries are able to afford social services, which begs the question: why is healthcare dwindling in North America and Europe, and why are jobs disappearing, when the rest of the world seems to be booming?

It is this fear around China that has prompted the ruling class to start any sort of discourse they could to demonize a country that, by all metrics, its citizens love. While both Donald Trump and Joe Biden boasted a measly 43% approval rate upon their respective exit from the Presidency,[14] [15] in China, trust in the government (held by the ruling Communist Party of China) hovers around 85-90% consistently year after year.[16]

Thus campaigns around “debt-trap diplomacy” in Africa start appearing (despite this type of diplomacy being mostly the M.O. of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two Western institutions). The now-debunked claims of genocide against Muslims in Xinjiang were also tried, unsuccessfully, to elicit hatred along religious lines.

In reality, China is offering loans for much-needed infrastructure projects (which offer very little profit) at better rates than the IMF or the World Bank do, and readily forgives these loans if the country cannot pay them back.[17] In Xinjiang, terrorism through the East Turkestan Independence Movement (which is now part of the ruling coalition in Syria) has caused hundreds of deaths since the 1990s, with two deadly knife attacks committed within a month of each other in the capital of Urumqi back in 2014.[18] [19] These attacks were masterminded from abroad, making it difficult to put a definite stop to them by conventional means. Instead, the Chinese government started looking into the reasons people in Xinjiang joined this terrorist group, and counteracted their influence by solving problems at the root — namely by addressing a lack of opportunities in life (correlated with poverty and a lack of education).[20] Today, as evidenced by plenty of vloggers filming their travels in Xinjiang province,[21] the problem has been largely solved — and all without dropping a single bomb.

Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad site

This discourse surrounding Asians and Chinese people is not new. Chinese labor was instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad around the turn of the 19th century. Chinese workers made up 90% of the labor force in the Central Pacific railroad, working in dangerous and backbreaking conditions for lower wages than their white counterparts.[22] After the railroad’s completion in 1869, they were denied citizenship by federal law (the Chinese Exclusion Act) and could even be deported after having built the railroad that powered transcontinental travel.[23]

The idea that Europe and North America do everything right and the rest of the world does everything wrong is what prompted EU High Representative Josep Borell to infamously say, “Europe is a garden, and the rest of the world is a jungle”.[24] As long as we don’t look to other models for inspiration, as long as we think of ourselves as inherently superior and having nothing to learn from other countries, then we will not ask for change at home and we will accept these worsening conditions. We will accept this quality of life as “the best we’ve got,” unable to put food on the table while billionaires take their private jets to go watch the sunset in Brazil or their yachts for an afternoon spin in the Pacific.

But memes and funny videos do one thing: they help us forget how hard life has become for a moment. Taking these mental health distractions away might very well be the nail in the coffin for US hegemony in that they are very easy to access and accordingly will be very hard to take away. Through TikTok, millions of people have been exposed to a different way of doing things that is neither European nor American — this is readily evident from TikTok’s algorithm, which was a huge factor in making the app the most popular social media platform in the world.

Our economical model in the West is to conquer and steal. Through regime change operations,[25] we keep resource-rich countries poor and prevent their social development, leading to cheap (and downright exploitative) labor availability. This has been the western model for hundreds of years, dating back to the very first colonies, and it is still in effect today as imperialism. Yet, China proposes a whole new model that works alongside other societies and not against them. As more countries turn towards China as their trading partner, Western business owners enter a crisis: they lose out on profits but remain deadset in their mistaken ways. Instead of changing course and adopting (some of) the Chinese model, capitalists prefer to flood us with propaganda around China — at the same time as the US government is funding and enabling a demonstrable genocide in Gaza — so that we accept to subsidize their way of life: if profits diminish in sales, they can be made up for by retaining our wages.

The fate of TikTok in the United States is still hanging in the balance. But consider this: if we are able to get TikTok to stay open… what else can we get to happen?

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