Tiktok Refugees: Potential Foreign Policy Impact

Could American citizens trolling Congress change to foreign policy playing field?

Abbey Heffer is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She specialises in Chinese local governance and authoritarian policy-making. Her research has been published by The China Quarterly, the London School of Economics, and the European Consortium for Political Research. She also shares her research on Tiktok and Instagram.

If you ever wanted to witness a foreign policy case study in action, look no further than American "Tiktok refugees". The great migration was triggered by the now-confirmed Tiktok ban, passed due to national security concerns over a "hostile" foreign nation handling American citizen data. American Tiktok users responded in the most hilarious and potentially-world-changing way possible: They took themselves and their data to “Rednote” or Xiaohongshu (小红书), another Chinese social media giant.

As most authoritarian governments know, repression is an infamously double-edged sword. It costs the repressing government not only resources — police funding, equipment, technical costs, surveillance — but also legitimacy. Ordinary people tend not to respond well to infringements on what they perceive to be their legitimate rights and interests.

As amusing as this stick-it-to-Congress response is, it could have larger implications for foreign policy in both the US and China — if the two governments continue to allow their citizens to interact on the platform, that is.

The China Side: Keeping citizens separate from foreigners

Tiktok as we know it does not exist in China. The Tiktok we know (and love?) exists in a parallel internet universe to the Tiktok (抖音) used by Chinese citizens. This is because the Chinese regime — the centre of political power in China, otherwise known as the party-state — puts extraordinary policy effort into keeping foreigners away from its citizens. The Chinese regime, much like the American regime, does not like foreign actors interfering in domestic affairs.

A cartoon posted on a Beijing subway warning Chinese women about potential foreign spies.

Unlike traditional “diplomacy”, which deals exclusively with state-to-state relations, Chinese “foreign affairs” (外事) deals with controlling all interactions with foreigners and the foreign. Since the founding of the People’s Republic, foreigners have occupied a “hyper political” position within Chinese politics, particularly when they come into contact with the nation’s “internal affairs” (内事). More recently, “internal affairs” has become an all-encompassing fear over foreigners accessing Chinese data—from the personal data of Chinese citizens to empirical research on a wide-range of topics. Yes, I am aware of the irony.

The foreign affairs system as a whole was designed to either keep foreigners and Chinese citizens separate or to “make the foreign serve China”. In pursuit of this aim, the system has an entire portfolio of policy tools. The “softest” approach is cultural diplomacy, otherwise known as “soft power”. Following the Soviet Union, China’s soft power strategy began by leveraging socialism as “a cause which ordinary people could identify with.”

Brady, Anne-Marie. (2003). Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic. Rowman and Littlefield: Oxford.

Across social media platforms at home and abroad, China’s influencers are promoting an image of “authenticity” through highly-aesthetic videos of the Chinese rural idyll. At the same time, a growing corpus of foreign influencers have joined the cause, identifying with “the power of the victimised [China] while maintaining their privilege as guests”. As part of the party’s “polyphonous communication” (复调传播) strategy, more than 100 “foreign mouths” speak out against any criticism of China, accumulating large domestic and global audiences. Following the same logic as the spirit of Yan’an approach, in which influential foreigners were offered a heavily curated snapshot of Chinese revolutionary life, foreign influencers are made to “serve China” by transmitting digital cultural diplomacy messaging. Though these foreigners serve the Chinese government, they are still kept at arm’s length as “foreign friends” (外国朋友). As Anne-Marie Brady argued back in 2003:

“[T]he principles of hosting them and winning their support are little changed [...] To be a friend has implications of moral superiority over other foreigners [...] they are made to feel their input is useful and valuable”.

The same logic applies to “foreign friends” made to serve China during the reform era, in which the foreigners seen as most “useful” for soft power work were those promoting investment opportunities in China. The traditional model for rewarding these reform-era foreign friends is through consultation fees and access. Like today’s influencers, external foreign consultants are “friends” in a political sense. Foreigners that deviate from the party “song sheet” or try to “set the pace” (带节奏) of discussions about China are quickly cut off in terms of access and privilege. We can see this reflected in issues of academic autonomy today. However, the experience of “foreign friends” from the past teaches us that, even if what we write now offends the current administration, it may later be used as proof of our academic worth and fortitude. Anna Louise Strong, for example, whose overtly pro-Chinese stance caused offence in the Moscow-sensitive foreign affairs context of 1948, found herself and her work made “useful” again following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.

This begs the question: What kind of foreign-affairs context do we see under Xi Jinping and has this changed the game for “foreign friends” working in foreign investment? A large part of Xi-era foreign affairs is the idea of “rejuvenating” the nation, which Jonathan Sullivan and colleagues describe as an orientation infused with “historical legacies and contemporary grievances”. Just as the first part of Mao’s “make the foreign serve China” phrase is “use the past to serve the present”, management of the foreign in China is defined by the past threat of western colonialism and contemporary grievances associated with its modern incarnations—United States’ hegemony and European neo-colonialism through foreign investment. Both in the context of foreign power, economic “liberalisation”, and potential foreign immigration, the foreign has long been framed as a “polluting” influence in China. Recent survey-based research has found that the pervasive priority for both Chinese officialdom and the public is that “the behaviour of foreigners” be regulated and controlled—foreign footballers, celebrities, influencers, websites, journalists, and, of course, foreign companies.

The US Side: Fear of the unknown?

The news coverage of the US Tiktok ban has focused on protecting Americans from potential Chinese propaganda and protecting American citizens’ data from a “hostile” foreign government. China scholars in the US frame the country’s China policy in terms of “managing competition without conflict”. For comparison, their European Union counterparts use “strategic partnership and systemic competition”. There is very little give-and-take in the US-China relationship. There is also, from the US side at least, very little understanding.

One of the starkest realisations of the Tiktok ban’s journey from threat to implementation was the ignorance of top US officials when it comes to China. Whether this is politically-motivated “ignorance” rather than actual ignorance is up for debate, but it speaks to a public with next to no conception of China and Chinese people. The treatment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as some kind of Cold War boogie man is just one aspect of this:

Keeping the American public separate from and ignorant of China and Chinese people is an integral part of US China policy. And, if you read The China Side above, you might have noticed the parallels. Both countries rely on the other to act as an external threat to legitimise domestic policies that may not be in the best interests of ordinary citizens. American economists found that, in the US-China Trade War, ordinary consumers “have borne the brunt of the tariffs through higher prices, and that the trade war has lowered aggregate real income in both the US and China”.

The People's Side: Undermining national interests

People-to-people relations can subvert and undermine national policy in very real ways. My PhD supervisor, Professor Gunter Schubert, is a Taiwan specialist. His research on cross-strait relations is instructive here. Official relations between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland are notoriously tense. However, people-to-people relations operate in a parallel universe to official relations. As such, Schubert suggests distinguishing between the “high politics” of cross-strait relations (兩岸) and the “low politics” of trans-strait relations (跨岸). Doing so undermines the emphasis on state-to-state cross-strait “divide” and refocuses our attention on how actual people operate and understand one another. The shared interests of trans-strait commuters — like businesspeople, students, local government officials — often override official national policy.

Extending this logic, My recent video asks whether interactions between ordinary Chinese citizens and foreign Tiktok “refugees” on Rednote could change the foreign policy playing field.

Hot Take: What comes next?

Unfortunately, the Tiktok “refugee crisis” is likely to be short-lived. There have already been some suggestions of an IP-address based split being brought in to separate Chinese domestic users from American interlopers. The Chinese side will likely wait for an opportunity to ban foreigners and create a parallel foreigner-only Rednote app, much like the two-app approach to Tiktok (international) and 抖音 (domestic).

The opportunity will be couched in liberal terminology, I expect an instance of racism by an American Rednote user against a Chinese host user. I expect the racism will be, by white American standards, trivial — perhaps reacting to an unfamiliar Chinese food with disgust. It will be trivial enough to trigger outrage and a sense of having been "wronged" for many white Americans. Yet it will reflect the very real, racist micro-aggressions that Americans of Asian descent have had to deal with their entire lives. It will be real, believable, and utterly predictable.

The Chinese internet is saturated with both genuine and paid-for patriots, ready and able to respond to any perceived slight against China or its ruling Communist Party. Responses on both sides will be authentic. White Americans will be split into the "good" ones and the racist apologists. Chinese at home and abroad will oscillate between raising up examples of "good" white Americans (if only to better criticise the "bad" ones) and sharing examples of Asian Americans facing racism and very real racially-motivated hate crimes at home.

None of this is to say that this kind of backlash is objectively good or bad. The public "debate" might even help raise awareness of anti-Asian hate crime and the pervasive nature of racist micro-aggressions. However, the overarching goal, from the perspective of both the US and Chinese regimes, is to once again separate American and Chinese citizens.

It is simply not conducive to the national interest to have ordinary citizens interacting regularly with the ordinary citizens of the nation's primary competitor.

So, Americans, especially white Americans, especially those who see themselves as the "good" ones, be on your absolute best behaviour. But be prepared for this to disappear. Exchange emails, download WeChat, connect with your new Chinese friends across multiple platforms. Do not let your country's foreign policy goals prevent you from learning about China from the perspective of its citizens.

References

Brady, Anne-Marie. (2003). Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic. Rowman and Littlefield: Oxford.

Brussee, Vincent. and Kai von Carnap. (2023). “Amended anti-espionage law aims to curate China’s own narrative”. MERICS. Accessed at: https://merics.org/en/comment/amended-anti-espionage-law-aims-curate-chinas-own-narrative.

Du, Guodong 杜国东. (2019). “试析如何发挥洋网红在中国国际传播中的作用” (A tentative analysis of how to leverage the role of foreign internet celebrities in China’s international communication). Cited in Ryan, Fergus., Matt Knight and Daria Impiombato (2023). “Singing from the CCP’s Songsheet”, Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Accessed at: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/singing-ccps-songsheet.

Ellery, Ben. and Tom Knowles. (2021). “Beijing Funds British YouTubers to Further Its Propaganda War”, The Times, January 9. Accessed at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beijing-funds-british-youtubers-to-further-its-propaganda-war-x5gqp5fg0.

Habich-Sobiegalla, Sabrina and H. Christoph Steinhardt. (2023). “Debating academic autonomy in the German-speaking field of China Studies: An Assessment”, ASIEN, 162/163.

Li, Xiufang. (Leah), and Juan Feng. (2022). “Influenced or to be influenced: Engaging social media influencers in nation branding through the lens of authenticity”, Global Media and China, 7(2), 219-240.

Mao, Zedong. (1956). “同音乐工作者的谈话“. See: Brady (2003) and 山尔. (2010). “《同音乐工作者的谈话》阐述的文化观”,. 中华医史杂志, 40(02), 76-76.

Schubert, Gunter. (2021). “Position Paper: Delimiting ‘Cross-Strait Studies’: Kua’an (跨岸) vs. Liang’an (兩岸)”, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 4, 163-191.

Sullivan, Jonathan, Tobias Ross and Chaojin Wu. (2023). “Representing the nation: exploring attitudes towards naturalized foreign football players in China”, Soccer and Society, 24(5), 593-606.

Yu, Cindy. (2024). “Life on the margins pt II: Li Ziqi and the phenomenon of the rural influencer”, The Spectator, March 18. Accessed at: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/life-on-the-margins-pt-ii-li-ziqi-and-the-phenomenon-of-the-rural-influencer/.