BEFORE WE GET INTO this week’s book review – Eva Dou’s engaging House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company – let’s pause for a moment and consider the American “TikTok refugees,” flocking to RedNote
That’s 小红书 in Chinese – once better known as Mao’s Little Red Book .
As Rest of the World puts it:
Ahead of the short-lived U.S. TikTok ban on January 19, so-called TikTok refugees flocked to popular Chinese social media app Xiaohongshui. In the U.S., the app was number one on Apple’s App Store from January 13 to January 23, and it’s stayed in the top spot on Google Play since January 14. New data shows that the explosion in the popularity of Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, stretched well beyond U.S. borders.
A Rest of World analysis of App Store and Google Play ranking data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower found that Xiaohongshu’s popularity skyrocketed in non-Western countries, too. In 42 of the 63 non-Western countries tracked by Sensor Tower, the app ranked in the top three spots on the charts at some point between January 13 and January 21.
And it’s making people think:
For a U.S. TikTok user migrating to RedNote, the experience will be novel but not necessarily jarring. OK, there’s the “cat tax” – cat pics will win you a place in RedNote heaven – while TikTok’s all about entertainment through short, viral videos. RedNote on the other hand is a community-oriented platform with product reviews and lifestyle content. Think social media integration with e-commerce, enabling direct shopping through user recommendations – TikTok, Hey, look at me!
Another thing, for those who are used to TikTok's fast-paced and entertainment-focused environment, RedNote’s community-driven and informative nature can offer a refreshing change, particularly for those interested in beauty, fashion, and lifestyle products.
But, truth is the average Chinese RedNote user and the average American TikToker are not a match made in heaven.
And that’s the half of it. There’s a collision in the making:
Chinese internet companies and investors are increasingly caught between their authoritarian government at home,” as the New York Times recently put it, “and suspicion, even hostility, abroad.
That’s why it’s highly unlikely that RedNote, or XiaoHongShu, is going to scale the heights of popularity enjoyed by TikTok, even if TikTok wriggles out of being banned in the US. The TikTok culture and the RedNote culture are diametrically opposed to the point of being mutually exclusive. But for the time being RedNote is reportedly hard at work recruiting teams of English content moderators.
Who knows what a US- or European-educated foreigner might say left to their own devices, after all?
Over to Wired:
Social media platforms in China are legally required to remove a wide range of content, including nudity and graphic violence, but especially information that the government deems politically sensitive. Platforms like Xiaohongshu rely on large teams of contractors managed by outsourcing companies to do both routine enforcement as well as respond to emergency situations.
“RedNote—like all platforms owned by Chinese companies—is subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive laws,” wrote Allie Funk, research director for technology and democracy at the nonprofit human rights organization Freedom House, in an email to WIRED. “Independent researchers have documented how keywords deemed sensitive to those in power, such as discussion of labor strikes or criticism of Xi Jinping, can be scrubbed from the platform.”
But to be sure, China has high-speed trains and your government has been hiding them from you. Oh, and no crime or guns – in fact, China might just be heaven … Providing they can hire enough English-language content moderators to ensure that we don’t get to see too much of what’s going on in the Middle Kingdom.
Book Review
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, by Eva Dou
ASIN: B0D6QMZZTP
Publisher: Portfolio (January 14, 2025)
Print length : 448 pages
SOME OF the most harrowing sections of House of Huawei by Eva Dou, a journalist at the Washington Post, involves Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s “wolf culture,” which can demand extraordinary sacrifices from its employees.
By that I mean, it’s not unusual for frontline staff – particularly those in the hard-boozing sales teams – to undergo punishing regimes that put them on death’s door. The reader might be forgiven for wondering whether some of them did end up being “toasted” to death –ganbei, or clink glasses, if you’ve ever been subjected to this form of torture.
The protocol … involved getting drunker than your clients to show your respect for them. One early Huawei executive wrote about having to excuse himself for a vomit break while entertaining customers—not an uncommon occurrence. Others developed stomach or liver ailments. This seemed to happen particularly often in the far northeast, which had a reputation for heavy drinking. “The key staffer for this account is currently suffering hepatitis but refuses to come back to Shenzhen for medical treatment and insists on fighting on the front line through the ice and snow,” Ren said in 1995 about a Huawei salesperson based in Yichun, close to the northeastern border with Russia.
But, then, as Dou makes clear in her very readable account of an Arbeit Über Alles telecoms giant that’s deeply intertwined with the Chinese Communist Party's interests, this is no ordinary company. It’s ownership is opaque, the government dexterously jiggles strings behind the scenes and Huawei is obligated to act in state interests.
In fact, Huawei founder Ren’s expectations of his staff remind the reader at times of Xi Jinping himself:
After Huawei made an overseas stint a requirement for promotion in 1998, it became a rite of passage for Huawei executives to do hardship postings in distant corners of the earth. When they returned to headquarters, they would swap stories from the trenches. Some had dodged bullets in war zones. Others had caught malaria or typhoid fever in swamps and hills. Or they had hobbled on frostbitten feet over desolate tundras. Some projects in sanctioned nations were cloaked in secrecy and code names. One staffer posted to Burundi reported frequent power cuts, a T-shirt shortage due to the lack of a nearby market, and a close call with a hippopotamus. Another recalled sticking it out through an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, including offering to take a customer’s sick employee to the hospital.When civil war broke out in Libya, Huawei’s staffers divided themselves into two teams so that they could keep the phones running on both sides. “We must always remember,” Ren told his staff following a deadly earthquake, “when phone service is down, we must run toward the switchrooms as fast as we can.”
Most of us would reconsider a job position that foisted a T-shirt shortages upon you, but add to that a potentially dangerous encounter with a hippopotamus, ebola, and hobbling on frostbitten feet over desolate tundras and it would be fair to say you might begin to consider applying for another job.
But this is messianic stuff, and it’s Huawei prominence as China’s national telecoms champion that were here for – that’s the book we want to read.
Says Ren himself:
A country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army.
Those are words that will pull at the heartstrings of any zealous politburo member and leading politburo members, sure enough, weighed in and funds for Huawei were made available with the aim of breaking the Western telecom monopolies. Cheap credit played no small role in that, with the China Development Bank allocating $10 billion for Huawei’s overseas expansion in 2005.
Money was not an issue. And nor was a lack of superhuman drive.
Ren, in Dou’s reading, is more than a company man; he’s an ex PLA nationalist who survived a hard-scrabble youth foraging for food during the Great Famine, his college principal father beaten by his students during the Cultural Revolution. He was a bold survivor who jumped from an iron-rice bowl job in the PLA into private enterprise in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms.
It’s difficult to imagine a more emblematic hunger-to-entrepreneurial-giant modern China story.
To recap, in 1987 Ren founded Huawei in Shenzhen, a special economic zone (SEZ) opposite Hong Kong, with the goal of developing digital phone switches, he and his staff sleeping in snatches between brainstorming on mats.
Huawei, like it or not, is nothing short of a triumph. The only disappointment is that too often the book is flatter than this reader would have liked. Dou, the author, cannot be blamed. Is there a company more secretive than Huawei? And that secrecy costs us the kind of color that would have made the House of Huawei the juicy read it deserves to be.
Is Huawei an agent of the Chinese government. Of course it is. Should that surprise us? No. Should it be laying out the 5G, 6G and beyond backbone of global communications?
No, but does any nation state want their communications owned and operated by non-home players?
In other words, a “No” to Huawei, except for those nations – and that’s most of them these days – who can’t afford the alternative.