HONG KONG — For most people in the United States and China, the information they hear about the other country comes primarily from their respective governments and media. Now they are learning directly from each other, at least for now.

Excitement has been palpable on the Chinese social media platform Red Notes (known in Chinese as "Little Red Book") after a wave of U.S. users opened accounts in recent days. The self-described "TikTok refugees" are looking for an alternative to the short-video app as it faces a U.S. ban over concerns about ties between TikTok owner Beijing-based ByteDance and the Chinese government.

TikTok said it will shut down the ban when it takes effect on Sunday unless it receives "explicit" assurances from the Biden administration, which has been "exploring options on how to keep the app available," NBC News reported.

In protest of the impending ban, TikTok users joined Shanghai-based RedNote in pushing it to the top of Apple's App Store and mocked U.S. security concerns as they tried to browse the Chinese-language app.

Their arrival brings Americans and Chinese instant online connections, even as academic and other exchanges have been stifled in recent years by pandemic border restrictions and tensions between the world's two largest economies.

"I'm very touched to see all the friendly American people coming here and seeing us getting to know each other and learning from each other," said Eric Wang, a 28-year-old graphic designer from China's Shandong Province. "It makes me feel like we're never really far away from each other."

On RedNote, Americans and Chinese can communicate in ways that they can barely do on Western social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X, all of which are inaccessible in China without a VPN. TikTok is also not available in China, although there is a version called Douyin.

"It's touching to see people who have never met and who may have been misled in the past now interact as equals and eager to understand each other," said Jia Yuxuan, a researcher at the center. China and Globalization, Beijing Think Tank.

The trust built through these connections "has unleashed a wave of fact-checking that traditional diplomacy has been unable to achieve for years," she said.

Americans on RedNote, for example, have been asking whether the Chinese actually live under a "social credit system," which scores individuals based on their behavior and blacklists them if their scores are too low.

"Chinese netizens in the comments section were simply surprised and said, 'This is not true,'" Jia said.

The number of U.S. iPhone users on RedNote rose from about 400,000 to 1.8 million in just one day this week, according to analytics firm Similarweb, and the numbers have since risen. That's still a tiny fraction compared to TikTok's 170 million U.S. users and Xiaohongshu's 300 million users.

New U.S. users could pose problems for the app, which like other Chinese social media platforms is tightly controlled by government censorship agencies and is not equipped to moderate English-language content. The situation has been compared to the Clubhouse app, which was blocked in China in 2021 after a brief period in which Chinese users freely discussed politically taboo topics in its chat rooms.

Xiaohongshu has yet to comment publicly on the influx of new users. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

At the same time, Americans may be annoyed by China's online censorship.

“There is a very naive group of users in the United States who don’t know anything about this. They are just upset that TikTok is going to be banned,” said Christine Lu, a 48-year-old Taiwanese American in Los Angeles who lives in China Lived for 10 years.

On Tuesday, Lu's RedNote account was banned five hours after she registered it because she deliberately posted tags and images related to topics China considered sensitive. She said she started testing the app after seeing some American users complain that some of their posts, including those showing cleavage or the Taiwanese and Tibetan flags, were being blocked.

"These posts are perfectly normal topics of conversation in a free society," she said.

Not all Chinese users are excited about the influx of Americans into their online communities. Some who rely on RedNote as a source of income say they may face unfair competition from their U.S. counterparts, whose TikTok videos are much shorter than typical videos on the Chinese app.

“It only takes two seconds and they get hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of likes,” said Becca Wang, a Beijing-based lifestyle vlogger.

Others said new U.S. users need to learn to play by the Chinese app's rules of the game and should respect the culture of existing users, including by using the app's Chinese name, "Little Red Book."

"If they can't pronounce it, they should learn it," one comment read.

It's unclear how the app will handle the influx of U.S. users, said Yu-Lan Ma, a journalism lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. For example, live broadcasts must be in Chinese, while English and other languages ​​are considered inappropriate and subject to warnings.

She said in an email that if the company decided to expand its user base, the best approach would be to develop a separate app for international users, "both to ensure that content on the platform is controlled and to keep new users on board." on the platform". After the excitement of the first few days, the platform. "

Discussions between American and Chinese users on RedNote revolve around what they eat for breakfast, how they make coffee in the morning, what their front yards look like and how they make a living. Jia Qinglin saw an American fisherman asking if there were any fishermen in China.

“In the comments section, everyone is sharing their catches and fishing equipment,” she said.

Users also asked more deeply about each other's wages, debt and health care systems to compare their living conditions under American capitalism and China's socialist system.

"The conclusion is that ordinary workers are basically the same," Jia said. "They are all struggling for life and yearning for a better life."

Diego Obando, a new RedNote user who lives in Pasadena, California, said the app is fairly easy to use and has a "better" community than TikTok. Obando, 19, said he's not really worried about security because "there's always someone watching you on any app you use."

So far, Beijing seems open to the idea of ​​Americans using RedNote.

"We believe that using social media is a personal choice," China's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

Spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular briefing in Beijing, "As a matter of principle, China has always supported and encouraged strengthening people-to-people and cultural exchanges and enhancing people-to-people bonds with other countries around the world."

Chinese state media coverage was also positive.

"The move to RedNote can be seen as defiance of the U.S. government's claims that Chinese apps pose security threats," People's Daily said in a commentary on Wednesday. "By embracing RedNote, users challenge the assumption that Chinese platforms are inherently dangerous."

Jia said Beijing's openness to new Red Note users is consistent with its efforts to attract more foreign tourists as the economy struggles to recover from the epidemic. Starting from 2023, China will implement a visa-free policy for tourists from all over the world, but the United States has not yet implemented it.

Others are skeptical, saying the Chinese government will inevitably step in.

"I don't think this will last forever," said Wang, a lifestyle blogger. "It will be short."

Mithil Aggarwal and Jennifer Jett reported from Hong Kong, Larissa Taka reported from London, and Janis Mackey Frayer reported from Beijing.