Faced with the possible loss of TikTok, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States have downloaded Xiaohongshu, one of China’s most popular social media apps.
Also called RedNote, Xiaohongshu has been the most downloaded free app in the United States on the Apple store since Tuesday. The app lets users share short videos as well as still, text-based posts, which sometimes attract long, Reddit-like comment threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends content targeted to keep people scrolling.
Here’s what we know about who is behind the company.
Xiaohongshu is operated by Xingyin Information Technology Ltd., which is based in Shanghai and owned by the billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. Xingyin holds a minority stake in a consulting and entertainment company based in Henan that is also funded by the provincial government, according to Wirescreen, a data platform.
As of last July, Xiaohongshu had raised nearly $1 billion since it was founded over a decade ago, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind the country’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.
Xiaohongshu caters mainly to people who speak Mandarin, and until this week was little known outside China, where a vast majority of its users are based. Over the past few days, the company has posted multiple job openings looking for people with fluent English skills while it scrambles to accommodate the influx of self-described TikTok refugees.
People flocking to download the app in the United States said, in interviews and on the app, that they wanted to show they did not share Washington’s concerns about TikTok’s ties to China.
But, like ByteDance, Xiaohongshu is a privately held company that is bound by Chinese law, including laws that would require it to turn over data to the Chinese government if requested to do so.
The post Who Is Behind RedNote, the Chinese App Attracting TikTok Users? appeared first on New York Times.
