167. TT Refugees to xhs: Unpacking Global Social Media Shifts
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今天这一集呢也是全英文的,因为今天这一集我想聊一聊前一阵子非常火的洋斗难民移民到小红书的这件事情。

外国友人

OK.

Right, so today's episode is about the TikTok refugee migration to Xiaohongshu for about 96 hours, I reckon, and then migrated back because Donald Trump has temporarily lifted the or suspended the ban.

So during those four or five days of phenomenon, there's a lot of talks internationally. There's also a lot of talks in China. All sorts of influencers, large or small, mainstreams or fringe influencers are all recording English messages, chatting or greeting our international refugees.

So I thought this phenomenon was quite interesting. I didn't do an episode back then because I wanted to wait and see how long it will last and then what happened next. So I waited and now I think the phenomenon is almost temporarily off so we can look at it very objectively and calmly.

Now the guest I have invited today to the show is a China expert. She's a Westerner but she studied in China and then she came back to China. She founded her own agency and she's been doing a lot of cross-border business with China, about China, providing advisory services to international firms and brands about this interesting market.

Now, during this phenomenon, my guest has her insights and great observations. And a lot of the international press has invited her for interviews, and they have forwarded or included quotes from her LinkedIn posts.

and pose on other major platform. So I thought her observation was brilliant and very insightful. So I invited my guest today to be on my show. So the guest that I invited today is Olivia Plotnick. Hi, Olivia. Hi, Bessie. 大家好,我是 Olivia. Olivia can speak a little bit of Chinese, but she's not comfortable doing the episode in Chinese. I'm sure she's just very humble.

Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners, including your really long history with China? Yeah, thank you so much in the first place for having me on. It's a really great honor to be reconnected with you and get to have this discussion on your podcast, which I admire so much. I think you take the time to look at things with a lot of nuance and clarity.

I have been in and out of China for what feels like most of my adult life.

I came to China for the first time in 2007, actually, when I was in high school. And I've been coming back ever since. I moved to China. Why did you come to China when you were in high school? Was it an exchange program? Kind of an exchange. My high school was one of the first high schools in the U.S. to have a Chinese program. And there was a government-sponsored initiative by the Chinese government, actually.

for US students to come to China. Actually, students from all over the world. So there were, they selected students from across the country and as well as the UK and South Korea.

Japan, I believe at the time to come to China for several weeks during the summer in 2007. And we spent the whole summer traveling around China, learning Chinese. And I think that was really the first touch point for me that

I knew I had to come back and I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I think that planted the seed that somehow China was going to be involved. It just felt at that time so much was happening and it was so different and it was so interesting. And so I continued studying Chinese in high school and in college. In college, I came back

To China, I studied in Beijing. And then after I graduated from college, I came back again in 2015 and then never really left. After that, I lived in Shanghai for a long time and I started working in marketing for agencies. I've always worked on the agency side and we were helping U.S. and European companies.

companies with their digital strategy. And of course, at the beginning in 2015, it was still helping them a lot with, you know, redoing their website, primarily helping them with like Baidu and a lot of WeChat.

But eventually, you know, it evolved to many other social media platforms. And in 2019, I actually I was working at Ogilvy in Shanghai and I left to start my own agency. I wanted to try things on my own.

And I was really passionate about Chinese social media. I found it really interesting and I really wanted to be challenged. I think more than anything else, I felt that I wanted to be, you know, in English we say confident.

thrown off the deep end. I wanted to have as many challenges thrown at me as possible. So I started my own agency and hired a team and we started working with clients and it's been five and a half years now.

The majority of my team has been with me almost the entire time and we've worked on some really cool projects and we have amazing projects kicking off this year. And a main theme or main thing that I love about

running my agency and getting to do what I do is being a bridge between the West and China. I think when I first came to China, it was such a different landscape than it is now. It was 2007, no WeChat,

No mobile payments, nothing like this. I signed up for Facebook in Beijing at a public university. Continuing to come back to China every few years, it kept evolving at a time when social media was evolving.

evolving in and of itself globally. And I think once China in the early 2010s, between really 2009 and 2013, when a lot of the Western tech platforms had to exit,

the rest of the world didn't really care. It wasn't as big of an impact. And China just became kind of its own thing, closed off, and the rest of the world carried on. And Facebook developed Instagram, Snapchat. You had China kind of become its own little corner. And so for a long time, I would speak to delegations and companies and entrepreneurs

entrepreneurs and investors outside of China telling them, hey, you need to pay attention to what's going on in China. It's incredibly interesting. It's innovative. You know, in the first half of 2025, it's been one month already. I think for the very first time you have the rest of the world

finally understanding what China's digital ecosystem is capable of. And, you know, not only with Red Note, but now obviously with, especially in the past, you know, week and a half, we have Deep Seek coming out and everything around that. And so I think it's this huge awakening of,

of the world beginning to see China in a new light and with red notes.

actually experience firsthand not only China's incredible digital ecosystem, but just how beautiful the country is, how diverse it is, how interesting, how welcoming the people are. So that has been really interesting to watch and I'm sure we can get into all of that.

Wow, so your history with China has been almost 18 years and still counting. And that explains why you're very insightful behind the TikTok refugee phenomenon. Yeah, I think it was the culmination, like I said, of many years of trying to communicate like, hey, guys, look, look, listen, look. And then finally, it just, you know, blew up all of a sudden. So I think

that was, and I literally on January 16th, you know, whatever day it was, I was, I watched it completely unfold hour by hour on my phone and, you know, kept refreshing the app store and kept refreshing Xiaohongshu and seeing all the posts and like just, it was such a surreal moment to watch. Now, so you being also an American,

Do you think that your fellow Americans, those TikTok refugees, what they've chosen to do with this migration, temporary migration to Xiaohongshu or Red Knoll, a typical sort of F-U, F-U-C-K-U message to the American government, especially the new president? You know, if we look back,

to last year, almost a year ago in March 2024, when Congress, the U.S. Congress, was voting on this ban, you had the first kind of inkling that this could mobilize people because

At that time, in the headlines, it was, you know, people were inundating U.S. congressmen, congresswomen to demand that they oppose the bill. And this, I think, really shocked a lot of the media. It really shocked Congress that there could be such a visceral reaction to this piece of legislation. Of course, you know, it did pass and it

and it was upheld. And then, you know, when you actually had the band being upheld and everybody starting to completely jump over to this other Chinese app, I do think it was a big act of, you know, defiance. The irony definitely wasn't lost on people. You had posts from Americans saying,

saying directly that they will just give their data direct to the Chinese government, that they really don't care. And I think this is the case with any social media, that you do have the power to mobilize a reaction, right?

And that's what makes social media quite tricky in a lot of cases and quite a sore spot for governments. So in this case, the reaction was to go and download Xiaohongshu. I don't know the exact video that set off this whole trend. And it's interesting to me, a lot of times or a lot of people have asked why.

why 小紅書 , why not any other app? And of course, there is a Chinese version of TikTok in China, 抖音 , but you actually have to have a Chinese phone number to download 抖音 . So that was kind of blocked right from the get-go.

And Xiao Hongshu, you know, they have not tried to go global in a very public way. They've been relatively quiet. There was a lot of speculation, a lot of confusion around the name. We all know it as Xiao Hongshu and Xiao Hongshu.

I've called it red or little red book before, but it turns out that everybody started calling it red note. And, you know, even I think up until a few weeks ago, we just discovered, I think Ed Sander from TechBuzzChina did a lot of great research on this.

But he noticed that actually they officially changed the name to RedNote in the later half of 2024. So there was kind of some official internationalization of the app, but this wasn't publicized anywhere. And, you know, they haven't run ads or anything else or campaigns to get international users like some other apps have. So I think...

you know the the major thing was it took everybody even the Xiaohongshu team by surprise that people were downloading this app yeah i think prior to july 2021 there was still the intention at least Xiaohongshu's investors and shareholders intentions of going IPO in the US but there was a sudden turn

that they have announced the US IPO plan suspension temporarily, you know, blah blah. So we can come back to that later. But you mentioned an interesting question a lot of people ask, right? So why Xiao Hongshu? Like we said earlier, that your history with China has been 18 years and still counting. So you were there definitely when WeChat was at their prime,

And I think WeChat, the Tencent team has tried, to my best knowledge, twice going global with the WeChat platform. But I don't think they have created the kind of global awareness or impact or at least usage like the ones that Biden has done with TikTok.

But anyway, WeChat has some awareness internationally. And if people like yourself have some connections with China, whether doing business or advisory or have lived in China, you will have an account with WeChat. So you'll be able to access a WeChat 朋友圈, the community, the social media bit, and also now a up-and-coming WeChat video. So there is some level of international awareness

Why didn't the migration happen on WeChat instead of a very through and through Chinese backend and frontend platform Xiaohongshu? You know, WeChat did make a big push to go global around 2017, 2018.

You know, I think there's a lot of reasons around that. You know, I remember reading an entire book breaking down why that globalization strategy failed. But one important thing that we can look at in this context, and I think it is important to think about in the larger conversation around social media and why

certain apps like xiaozhu and like tiktok became so popular was this idea of fostering community and i don't think that wechat fosters community in the same way that xiaozhu or tiktok does wechat has traditionally been known as a walled garden so you have to you know directly

connect with someone either by in person adding them as a contact or knowing their contact information and so it's much more manual to actually build up a network in terms of who you are able to chat with and message and post to your WeChat moments now obviously WeChat has added

channels and mini programs, which are a little bit outside of that walled garden ecosystem channels, I think you have to look at it in regards to WeChat's overall user base. WeChat has over 1 billion users, right? Xiaohongshu only has around 300 million monthly active users.

They are very different communities. WeChat channels is a bit like TikTok or Douyin if there was not much interaction on those videos. So I think for the most part, people are scrolling through WeChat channels videos and just consuming that content.

Whereas on Xiaohongshu or Douyin, TikTok, people are commenting and interacting and engaging and building out these communities. And so I think Xiaohongshu, for those reasons especially, was just a much better landing pad for international users. It was much more accessible. It was much more light.

what they had already known in terms of Instagram and TikTok. You know, you have that feed, you're able to see different types of content and the algorithm, of course, is just so much better at showing you content that you are going to be interested in. So to summarize, I think the key points are

really open ecosystem the ability and the ways in which both creators and users can engage with each other and build that community the algorithm for showing you you

you know, types of content that you will be interested in and hook you in and keep you in there. The ethos of WeChat, Alan Zhang has famously, you know, given many talks and I think I will always remember his position, particularly as they started, you know, developing out WeChat and WeChat mini programs was that

WeChat should be something that you use as a tool and not necessarily something that they wanted to keep and suck you into. And that is very different than other social media platforms, especially TikTok and especially, you know, platforms like Meta, who just kind of

feed off of how long can they keep a user inside the app? Well, I guess also if you were a very experienced and long time TikTok users, it's all about video. And on WeChat in terms of user experience, it takes a few steps for you to find out or locate the entry of into the WeChat video. It's not very obvious.

So you sign up an account with WeChat, you have to sort of fiddle a bit with the app to find out, oh, that's where you first of all upload a video. And that's where you see other people's videos. So it doesn't really appear automatically. But I guess like you said, Xiao Hongshu, once you sign up an account, you open the page and there you go. Their text and their video, it's just right there.

Right. And I think, you know, every platform has its, you know, very unique point of differentiation. And WeChat was first and foremost a messaging platform. And I think that will always be its strength, a tool for messaging and direct communication.

Now, TikTok and Douyin, those were video-first platforms, right? And so their strength is always going to be video content. And earlier on, you also mentioned that this whole phenomenon also shocked Xiaohongshu themselves because there was no intention, at least for now, no intention of globalizing their platform because...

I mean, we all use Xiaohongshu. You look at the front end, you look at the back end, everything is in Chinese. So I'm also surprised that the TikTok refugees are able to really find out how to register an account with all those Chinese front end. But like I said, in July 2021, there was an announcement because I think that's when the US-China relationship got really tense. So there was an announcement of the US IPO plan suspension by Xiaohongshu.

and they haven't actually westernized or internationalized their platform. It's not just English, right? If you want to go global like Facebook, you need to embrace so many different languages. But we haven't seen that action in place. And I remember back in March 2019, me and my team actually organized a small event in New York for one of my portfolio companies.

that was a very early thought about going sort of cross border and bringing these exciting marketing ecosystem in China to the west to introduce it to them. And I actually invited to see, I went to the co-founder of Xiaohongshu

Marinda and said, would you be interested to come into this event and sort of market and promote Xiaohongshu to the friends in New York, all the marketing, you know, the marketeers, brands and agency.

I didn't get a very exciting response or reaction. Instead, she sent a VP to this event. So there wasn't that much interest by Xiao Hongshu even back then 2019. And if you look at the audience event in New York, a lot of them don't even know what Xiao Hongshu is. And there was also a very lukewarm interest in this. So there was never an intention of going international.

But I guess with your agency work, the agency that you found that you do a lot of work with on-shot home-shoot for your clients, have you gotten any or received any indication or seen any signs

that posed this phenomenon that there is a change of mind at the Xiaohongshu management about riding on the awareness of this event to go global now with this platform? We can look at a couple of things. I think Xiaohongshu responded quite quickly to accommodate many English-speaking users in

just over a week of the TikTok refugee situation, they did come out and release pretty decent translation tools for multiple different languages. There was an interesting article in Rest of World that showed

all of the different downloads by country and popularity, of course, the majority from the US, but you also had a lot of interest coming from countries all over Europe, as well as Australia and even countries in Africa as well. So they released support for many different languages. Now, they're

hasn't been any proactive press. You know, you don't see anybody from the Xiaomengshu team coming out and doing big interviews or talking about their plans to go international or to ride this wave. They are being very closed off. I keep drawing parallels with Deep Seek as well, you know. They are also...

being very, I would say just playing their cards close to their chest, right? I think in a very different way from if this was a US company that suddenly gained money

hundreds of thousands of users and they would be very vocal about their ambitions and going abroad. So I think they're playing it very close to the chest. It's very hard to know exactly what they're thinking because we just haven't received any official information from them. From what we can tell from past interviews and looking at it currently, as you said, it doesn't seem like there's a huge interest in

to go abroad or to make a big push to go international. They were gearing up or I assume they still are gearing up to IPO in Hong Kong this year or potentially next year. And I know that they've been putting a lot of effort into that and into revamping their structure in China in terms of how their e-commerce

team is structured, putting more emphasis on developing out their live streaming functions. So, you know, making revenue streams for the company. So it doesn't seem like they have a huge initiative to go global, even after the TikTok refugee situation. Now,

they have put a lot of effort as well into making sure the content moderation is up and complies with Chinese government regulations. But I assume that they are also kind of waiting to see how the dust settles. And if people continue to stay on, obviously there was a huge surge, but trying to

put a bunch of time and investment and deter themselves from probably what is a pretty carefully planned out roadmap, you know, towards IPO in Hong Kong. Doesn't seem like it would be a big advantage for them. Well, I guess they're being very busy answering questions from Beijing, which we won't go. We won't go there in this episode. I still want this episode to be published.

Now, let's talk about also the user experience, right? I'm sure you've got waves and waves of friends coming to you and asking you, how do I use this platform? I'm sure there's a lot of what the F moments for those refugees. So just a few things that I can sort of think of if I compare these two. Other than at the very beginning, all Chinese front end and back end,

there is that you know the display of the video or the content is slightly different because on TikTok I think it's just like Douyin right you look at single video and then you just scroll down if you are not interested scroll down to the next one but Xiaohongshu is still much very much a grid or gallery views so that must be the first sort of oh wow this is very different and then Xiaohongshu the reason why it's called red note and I'm sure you're very familiar with this

A lot of the users find xiaohongshu really useful is because it's more of a lean-in kind of usage. You write notes, it's almost like you write a tutorial notes that people can just grab and apply whether it is a travel guide or it is a tutorial about how to cook, tutorial about how to use certain tools or certain products.

So it's that very leaning rather than a passive viewing kind of experience. And of course, you know, being a Chinese platform, you have to face content censorship if you touch upon a very sensitive subject. For these refugees, I mean, they used to be able to just talk whatever is on their mind, but not so much on the Chinese platform.

Even with the xiao hong shu mascot, the icon, you know, the little potato head, xiao hong shu, right? I'm sure a lot of the refugees were like, what the... Just explain to us or tell or share with us, what are some of the interesting sort of user experience? What the F moments some of your friends have come to you? Are there any ones outside that I've just mentioned that you thought, oh, that's quite interesting? This is kind of the first time

where Americans were the ones who were lost, right? It's a good way of putting it. Yeah, a lot of the time Americans are the ones who invite foreigners to the universities and the schools and we're the ones showing them around, explaining how things work.

Now you have Americans asking for help and asking, what do we do? How do we behave? How can we be on this platform? I think that was a very interesting cultural moment.

first for a lot of people and it was I think very awesome to see a lot of Chinese users and creators be able to say okay hey listen this is how we do things here let me explain to you these are the rules of this is how you behave this is what you call people

These are the things you can talk about. This is what you cannot talk about. And of course, there are outliers and people who are not going to behave. But I think

in general, for the most part, what I've seen on my feed and what many people have seen on their feed is people relatively respecting that and feeling as though they are in somebody else's home. I thought it was very interesting that that term was used a lot. A lot of Americans saying we are in somebody else's home. We respect that.

their rules and their customs.

you know, tell us how to, how to behave. Now, there is also an element of a lot of Americans came on and Xiao Hongshu just turned into the American version of TikTok because Americans were all posting content that they would normally post on TikTok, which is not the same content that you would see posted on Xiao Hongshu. So how well that advice has been applied is, um,

is left up for debate, I think. But the cultural moment of that, you know, kind of role reversal of Americans being the one who are lost and being the one who had to ask for help and being the ones who not everything is in English because no matter where you go as an American, normally English will be present, right? And that is...

having to use multiple different translation apps and not knowing what is going on is a very new thing for the majority of Americans. And so I think it was probably and hopefully a very humbling moment for a lot of them to experience that. So the cultural discovery, cultural role reversal, I think, was definitely one of the main WTF moments

moments on Red Note, right?

I was like you as well. I was like, you know, glued to my phone just watching the whole phenomenon unfolding in front of me in those few days. But I also, other than looking at or watching the TikTok refugees uploading videos, complaining, doesn't complain and saying hi to their Chinese friends. But I'm also seeing the Chinese Xiaohongzhu users excitement unfolding.

They, like you said, they're rushing to the platform to upload English episodes. It's an English content to help out their American friends who are lost.

or to just say hi and they do their normal content in English. I think on the one hand, this is very typical in China. Anything that's hot subject and hot topic, everyone will rush to the Xiaohongshu platform to say something about it. So I think there is that in that. But on the other hand,

I think China and the US, I think ever since, I don't know, 2012, when the US pivoted their strategic focus from Middle East to Asia, that tension has increased over and over as the year went by. So the two countries have very little and decreasing interaction between the two countries. There was always tension there.

But suddenly it's really just people to people. Like people are lost and they're in my home and they're lost. So I'm just going to offer help. So no more US-China tension. No more, you know, you are you, I am me. But it's quite an interesting, just ordinary people helping out ordinary people that human nature unfolding in this whole episode.

So why do you think that the Chinese Xiaohongshu users responded to this phenomenon the way they did?

I watched a really enduring video by one of the Chinese content creators I have followed for years now. She makes beautiful videos traveling all over the world. And she made a really beautiful video about this topic. And in it, she described...

being young and writing and practicing English in school and writing to an imaginary friend, an imaginary pen pal. And for a lot of millennials, I think growing up and learning English probably did the same exercise in school. You write to an imaginary pen pal and all of a sudden you're

You had your pen pal or you had this kind of coming to life in real form directly in front of you, being able to communicate with somebody across the world in English and English.

tell them all about how you live your day, how you live your life, show them because they're genuinely interested and exciting. And so it almost feels like it brought this a moment of nostalgia when everything else in the world right now seems and feels so uncertain and tough to deal with and to cope with. And it brought back...

a moment, as you said, of humanity and people to people.

And I think this really touched people and got people much more involved than it just being, you know, this viral hot topic. I watched so many videos from Chinese users and even some who were crying because it made them so emotional to have these interactions with

with people from all over the world who were curious, who were asking them for help, who just wanted to see and share with them. It's interesting because if you think back to, God, I don't know, 18, 15, 20 years, let's say when you first signed up to Facebook, right? So when Facebook went international, I don't remember any posts by American users saying,

volunteering tutorial to their international friends about the best way to use Facebook. This is how we use it. So these are the things that you could follow, you could consider making your Facebook account work. And the same with Snapchat, the same with Instagram, or maybe I'm just not, I wasn't seeing enough. You know what I mean? So if you think back, the reverse,

I'm not sure you have the same human to human, people to people, helping each other out interactions. I think because it felt more of a trickle, like most of the world came online relatively similar times. And we kind of, you know, social media, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram kind of began to,

spread around the world incrementally aside from China. And then all of a sudden with this, you had this uncharted territory, two countries, two very different cultures getting access to each other for kind of for many people the first time ever. And there has obviously been such an air of misunderstanding

from both sides, I think, due to a very tense political situation. And so to have that barrier, all of the sudden breached, I think made it quite unique. I think this whole phenomenon temporarily went away because the TikTok ban was suspended temporarily also.

Are you still seeing the TikTok refugees hanging around on Xiaohongshu? Or it was really a one-off and they have now all gone back to business as usual back in the TikTok platform? There definitely are still people on the platform. I am seeing less content. And I don't know if that is particularly because of content moderation that's happening, you know, greater, you know, the silos are kind of coming back up.

I do have two accounts. And one, I have tried to not interact with any TikTok refugee content just so I can try and keep it as local as possible. And on that one, certainly I'm seeing very little content. But I actually see content from local Chinese users who are still creating a lot of English content for the TikTok refugees.

I am still seeing people on the platform. I don't think it presents too really unique potential for both Chinese users and international users. So for international, I think, celebrities or athletes or creators who...

who really want to reach and engage with a Chinese audience and who have the resources to be able to potentially set up a team or work with an agency in order to then be able to

obviously monetize and do live streaming and kind of carry that on for them to build up their fan base because this is probably not a market that they ever thought about before, but just having the experience over the past few weeks might have shown them a really interesting opportunity that they can then continue to take further. It's been really cool to see a lot of

you know, Chinese American celebrities or comedians getting an account and people just giving them, you know, the biggest reception and them kind of reconnecting with their Chinese roots and finding this huge, you know, fan base in China. So I hope that they also continue to create content from those accounts and

Another really amazing thing that I've seen is Chinese creators who are such amazing content creators and so clever and so good at what they do, gaining attention.

a following on and that translating into them gaining followers on other platforms. Maybe we can get into this later, but I think the TikTok ban and what happened with the TikTok refugees and red notes

kind of showed us this idea that I think there's a big shake up in terms of platforms and platform loyalty. And so if people do find a creator that they like,

they are more willing to follow them on multiple different platforms and to really stay with them regardless of the platform that they're on. But just because they really love that creator. So I think it's been really great as well to see a lot of Chinese creators get Western audience and grow their brand outside of China. And I guess a lot of the major American influencers

will want to start building a portfolio also to mitigate the risk, right? Because if they bet all their content creation, the monetization of their content creation on just primarily TikTok, that's going to one day probably going to go away if the tension between the two countries doesn't relax. So I guess they're building up

a much bigger portfolio now. Exactly. I think if anything, this taught people that they need to figure out ways to diversify their platform strategy and where their audience is. And at any moment, any platform,

could go belly up. And I think that was a huge wake up call for many, many people. And if you're a creator who your income depends on one single platform, I think this was probably a very big wake up call for you to try and figure out how do I secure my income streams beyond dependence on a certain platform? Mm hmm.

Now when this phenomenon was taking place in mid-January, I saw on LinkedIn that you've got quite a lot of interviews by Western media. You were invited onto Western podcasts talking about this phenomenon and you have written your own insights as well.

So I like to know other than the who the heck is red note question, what other questions that you've often got asked by these Western medias or clients of yours? Everyone wants to know, is this going to last? Will this last beyond the TikTok ban? And similar to what we've talked about, I think things are definitely fizzling out. But this represents

a huge gap in the market right now, especially for US social media users. The longevity of this trend is something that was on people's mind a lot. Another interesting question that I got was

why Red Note versus Lemon8 also got brought up a lot. You know, Lemon8 is another app from ByteDance, which has also made a big push for internationalization. They have spent a lot of money trying to get creators on the platform, you know, trying to build up users on the platform.

And so a lot of people thought that that would also be a next choice if people were leaving TikTok. Of course, then we have to look at, well, if TikTok by the same rules and regulations that TikTok was able to be banned,

Lemon8 could have potentially been next up. You know, it is an app also owned by ByteDance. But I think Lemon8 as well didn't work because they didn't have a great content library that Xiaolongxu had built up. Lemon8 was, it felt very fake. You know, I think if you are

paying people to create content to be on your platform and it's not organic or you haven't really built that up over time it's not going to have a very unique point to it the two biggest questions on media mind and brand's mind is

How long is this going to last? Do we need to pivot our strategy? Do we need to accommodate for having Western users on the platform permanently? Do we need to use this as a channel to reach English-speaking users on now? How is this going to impact our domestic users? And we're seeing it relatively fizzle out permanently.

feeds are returning to normal. My team has also been keeping a close eye on it. And I think if you are a Chinese user, unless you're interacting with a lot of the TikTok refugee content, your feed has relatively gone back to normal.

So I think we'll see a dying off of most of the English speaking users on the platform or the hype kind of around it. Now, at the beginning of this recording, you talked about Chinese companies coming to the world now with really exciting platform and exciting products. The most recent being DeepSeek.

Now in the last, I've been working and living in China for the last 22 years, I have seen two waves of Chinese companies going overseas. The first wave was wealthy and established Chinese company going overseas with the money to buy. A bit like the 80s with the Japanese company, right? So they will go out and

investing in football club, buying buildings, buying company, Chinese theater, I think, AMC, what have you. So that was the first wave. It's just really the money going overseas. This wave is a very interesting one. This wave is Chinese company, young entrepreneurial, young innovators going to the world with exciting and good quality products. You know, not just ByteDance, but also Pinduoduo.

And you got all the EV, you know, really affordable green energy vehicles. And you've got DeepSeek. I mean, we all know that a lot of these products were there, not just because it's cheap, but it's really there's that force of innovation behind it. And then they do have exciting products to show to the world. But unfortunately, as long as there's a Chinese company or China Inc. label all over it, it got demonized.

So early on, you said that maybe there's a wake up call and people will start seeing, you know, exciting products, exciting platform, exciting technology coming from China. They will see it. But do you think they will accept it or they will just go back or retrieve back to the old?

demonize everything that's China. Yes, I congratulate you, but I'm not going to use your product and I will not welcome your products to my country, you know. So what was your observation?

This might be a very hot take, but I actually think right now could be one of the best moments for Chinese companies to go global. And because I think there's a really crucial thing that we see happening, particularly I speak about this in the lens of being an American, an American user of technology and

There is so much mistrust, I think, Americans have with governments, with large institutions. And this...

TikTok refugee situation showed us that Americans actually don't really care about where their data goes. They just want to use a good product. Now, that's obviously majority among younger users. I think you would have a different view for an older generation.

But I do think that we're moving into a period where people are more open to using products and interacting with brands from China if it's a good product. And you have another prime example, as you said, with DeepSeek.

That also shot up to, you know, the top of the App Store this week when they released their app. People are just finding that it's a really great product. Even though...

it is censored, which I think that argument is a little bit tricky as well because you could download, it's open source, right? So you could download it on your own device and input the materials and use it as you will. But I think there are underlying fracture here that there is so much mistrust

And Chinese companies are now coming out with just really good, really innovative products. And, you know, I think on the topic of deep seek and Chinese, you know, technology kind of rising to the top.

unexpectedly, if you will, really reminded me, kind of brought to light this quote from Kai-Fu Lee. I read Kai-Fu Lee's book on AI when it first came out in 2018, something like this.

And I have to admit, I remember thinking last year and the year before when OpenAI released ChatGPT thinking, oh man, where is China in this conversation? And there was so much in the media about how China is so behind on AI and everybody was expecting it to turn out so differently, right? And then now you have everything happening with DeepSeek and Kai-Fu League

recently posted his quote where he said, I predicted that the U.S. will lead breakthroughs, but China will be better and faster in engineering. Many people simplified that to be China will beat the U.S. and they claimed I was wrong. But with DeepSeek, I feel vindicated. And, you

I've read that quote from him and just put a smile on my face because that is exactly what we have seen kind of over and over again. Amazon and eBay enter China. Then you have Alibaba, right? Kind of working off of those models and developing an incredibly innovative and complex e-commerce ecosystem. You have Facebook enter China, then leave China.

And then you had WeChat develop, you had Xiaohongshu, you had Douyin. So, you know, I think China does a really good job of not being first, but, you know, it's the turtle and the hare, right? Kind of, they're not the first ones, but they can do it really well, I think, and innovate better.

quite well. And that's just something that a lot of people don't expect. And so I think that really magnified this whole phenomenon of Xiao Hongshu and people realizing, you know, how good Chinese technology actually is they hadn't been paying attention to. Well, if DeepSeek, the model is able to sustain, the most exciting thing for me is it can help democratize AI adoption.

because before DeepSea was noticed, I think AI is very much of a monopoly, monopolized by only a handful of countries who have the money, who have the talent to be able to develop, and it was very expensive to apply, to use.

But with this, I was looking at the AI nation ranking. I think at least the bottom 20, I guess, nations will finally be able to access to affordable AI. And I think that's the most exciting potential that I'm seeing with this deep-seek model, if they are able to sustain. I hope they do.

I'm personally very excited about AI and I think if AI was only limited to a handful of people, a handful of nation, that would be a pity. But if we are able to make AI more affordable, more accessible,

I think that's a good news to the world and that's probably going to be pushed or driven by either deep-seek or more Chinese companies in this sector. I think you have the prime example of, again, going back to the Western social media platforms,

the user experience on those platforms has deteriorated while the user experience on Chinese platforms who have been able to be quite innovative because I think there is so much competition

within China, whereas in the US on Western platforms, like you have Meta and you have Google, like you really only have the big giants, right? And so they have been very lazy in providing great user experience. You know, the experience on Google isn't even that great anymore. Google hasn't done anything crazy or innovative in years, right? Because there hasn't been competition for them. So

when you allow for more competition, it just is so much better for the user, for the experience of everyday users. And I think that's what Chinese e-commerce, Chinese social media platforms have shown us. And I hope that's what they continue to show us with the applicability of AI. Yeah, I think a lot of the Western platforms just got complacent because of their dominance position online.

But it's also interesting that the Chinese innovators or intrapreneurial or platform operators, because of this whole China and the West separation, they probably don't know how good their product is. I was just thinking back the year that Google pulled out their search engine from China, that was 2010.

And even earlier, 2009, like you said, a lot of these platforms came to China and left. That was in 2009. So it's been 15 years now. You will have at least one generation of young Chinese who probably never used Google's search engine. They probably don't know Google is a search engine.

unless they have VPN access or unless they have friends living outside of China, they're able to introduce the platform. But if they don't have any of those, they're really just living in China, living on the Chinese platform. So they don't really know how good their products are

So like you said, I'm really excited about what I've been experiencing and what I'm seeing. And I do encourage these Chinese entrepreneurial innovators going to the world with their top quality products. I mean, you are going to run into...

challenges or you are going to be demonized but then just pick your battle right pick the right markets and then just roll out there will be markets that welcome top product quality product whether it's Chinese product or American products or UK product you know so go go overseas go international and I think this has hopefully shown a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs that

Really, if you make a good product, people will use it and will fight for being able to use it. Now, finally, you run your own agency. Do you want to tell us the name of your agency? And would you like to leave behind your work contacts? So if any, like I said, Chinese companies wanted to go overseas, wanted to seek advice,

They can contact you or any Western international clients or Chinese brands who can also come to you for advice going global. Would you like to do that? Sure. Our agency is Wai Social and kind of a play on words, almost like you're saying Wai Social, but you say it very fast. And so Wai Social, W-A-I Social.

And you can connect with me. The easiest place is on LinkedIn. So I will include that link. And then on email, you can email me at olivia at whysocial.com. And we primarily help brands in several different ways. So we do strategy and account management for clients on social media platforms like Xiangshu and

Douyin and WeChat Weibo but we also run workshops for organizations and brands in and outside of China one thing we found particularly interesting over the past few years we work with global teams who they have

headquarters outside of China, but they have a team that they work with in China as well. And it can be quite difficult to have their global team effectively communicate marketing strategy or marketing plan with their China team if the global team doesn't understand

the Chinese digital ecosystem and the different platforms. So we work a lot of times with global teams to do trainings and workshops to be able to help them work better with their Chinese teams to understand the platforms better. Great. Now for China-based brands and companies, I think access to LinkedIn is not possible. So other than your emails, do you have any WeChat corporate accounts?

Yeah, we do have a WeChat corporate account. I can't say that we're extremely active on it. It's kind of the old adage of the cobbler's son has no shoes.

Yes, you can reach out to me on there or you can reach out to me directly to my WeChat. It's just my full name. Olivia Plotnik is my ID. So I will happily respond to messages and connect with you on my WeChat.

Fantastic. So we will list down all the company names and the various contact details, including corporate account, LinkedIn access, and Olivia's email in this episode's show notes. So for any of my listeners who are interested in contacting Olivia, just go to the show notes. You'll find the contact details. So hopefully you'll get great advice from Olivia, just like this insightful episode has given me.

Thank you very much, Olivia, for sharing your insights and observation. I find it extremely insightful and also I learned so much from your perspective as well.

Thank you so much for having me on. I love having this conversation and dissecting all of the interesting trends and it's ever changing. So I am only a keen observer who is very interested and fascinated by all of this, just like you. Well, happy new year, Olivia. I hope you have a great year of the snake. Yes, you too. Xīn nián kuài le. Xīn nián kuài le. Thank you. Bye. Bye.