The challenges of conducting open-source research in China are well-documented. Consistently named one of the most digitally oppressive countries in the world, China blocks some of the world’s largest social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Those that are still accessible are mostly Chinese-owned, strictly regulated and monitored in real time by AI systems as well as tens of thousands of “internet police”.

But despite these strict controls, Chinese apps – which boast more than a billion estimated users – remain an information goldmine for investigative journalists covering stories both within and outside China.

Since most foreign sites are banned, Chinese platforms are the largest resource available to journalists and researchers interested in what’s going on in the world’s second-most populous country. Even when a topic is being censored, patterns in the censorship can themselves serve as investigative leads: a 2020 BuzzFeed News investigation, for example, mapped out detention camps in Xinjiang by examining areas that had been blanked out on China’s Baidu Maps.

With millions of Chinese people living overseas, social media activity by members of the diaspora can also turn into global stories.

Serial rapist Zou Zhenhao, a Chinese PhD student, was jailed in London last year after one of his victims posted a warning on Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book or Rednote, an app popular with young Chinese women living abroad. Another woman Zou had raped reached out to the original poster, who put her in touch with the police – leading to the conviction of a man described by police as possibly one of the worst sexual predators in British history.

Founded in 2013 as a Hong Kong shopping guide, Xiaohongshu has evolved into a lifestyle and e-commerce platform that has been compared with Instagram, Pinterest and Amazon. Last year, it reported about 300 million monthly active users, rivalling some of China’s largest social media platforms.

The app’s 600 million daily searches by the end of 2024 also accounted for half of market leader Baidu’s search volume, demonstrating that it is emerging as a critical search and discovery engine, not just a social platform.

Although primarily a Chinese-language app, Xiaohongshu gained attention in the English-speaking world last year, when millions of American TikTok users flocked to the platform in anticipation of a TikTok ban under US President Donald Trump.

Responding to the surge of international users – sparked by the #TikTokRefugees trend – Xiaohongshu rolled out an AI-powered translation feature, making the app more accessible to non-Chinese audiences. This also meant that journalists without Chinese language skills can more easily communicate on and navigate the platform.

Despite its growing popularity both within and outside China, the app is relatively new and underexplored compared to more well-established platforms such as Weibo.

This guide aims to provide a starting point for those looking to explore Xiaohongshu for open-source investigations, including an overview of its main user demographics, potential topics to explore and strategic search methods specific to the app.

User Demographics and Topics

According to Xiaohongshu’s official data, the platform’s demographic profile is mainly young, female and urban. As of 2024, 70 percent of its users were women, with half of all users belonging to Gen Z and living in China’s largest cities.

As previously mentioned, the app has also gained popularity with the Chinese diaspora. Many Chinese nationals living abroad use it as a search engine for local information, posting and searching for content related to their daily lives, from restaurant recommendations and apartment hunting to navigating foreign bureaucracies and finding community resources.

This demographic profile makes Xiaohongshu particularly well-suited for investigating stories about consumer fraud and urban livability issues. For example, Chinese outlets like Jiemian have used Xiaohongshu posts to expose the grey-market ecosystem of paid reviews and fake endorsements tied to the platform’s e-commerce model, while in 2022, International Financial News traced a mother-and-baby store scam that defrauded over 400 parents back to product recommendation posts on the platform.

Given its predominantly female user base, Xiaohongshu has also evolved into one of China’s most important spaces for feminist discourse and women’s issues. Academic researchers have used content on the platform to analyse local discussions on menstrual shaming, sexual harassment, and the controversial “divorce cooling-off period” introduced in 2021. As Rest of World reported, women have increasingly congregated on Xiaohongshu, where they outnumber male users and have found ways to trick the app’s recommendation algorithm so their posts are shown mostly to other women.

The Relevance of Censorship

Political content and current affairs about China are largely absent from the app – a result of both active censorship and platform design.

All Chinese social media platforms, including Xiaohongshu, operate under strict content moderation requirements from the Cyberspace Administration of China. A leaked 143-page internal document published by China Digital Times in 2022 revealed how Xiaohongshu censors respond to government directives in “real-time”, blocking content related to politically sensitive topics such as criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, labour strikes and student suicides. Xiaohongshu’s commercial focus also makes it less likely that these topics would be discussed on the platform: as Rest of World reported, the platform functions less like Weibo – a public square for current events – and more like “a giant mall, where shoppers tell each other what to buy”.

Coverage of international affairs is also tightly controlled: only state-owned or state-controlled news organisations can obtain licences to publish original news content. However, content about life abroad, particularly stories about the cost of living, healthcare, or social problems in Western countries, circulates more freely on platforms including Xiaohongshu, and provide journalists with insight into how Chinese diaspora communities engage with local political systems.

For example, when the 2025 Miss Finland was accused of making anti-Asian gestures, searching for “芬兰小姐” (Miss Finland) and “投诉” (complaint) on Xiaohongshu revealed a trove of collective action: users shared different complaint pathways, posted templates for filing reports, and documented various outcomes from their complaints.

For such large-scale public events, Xiaohongshu can be both an organising platform and a rich source for tracking how diaspora communities coordinate responses to discrimination, providing journalists with insight into grassroots activism and transnational advocacy networks.

Getting Started

Xiaohongshu is available for download on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play worldwide, or can be accessed via a web browser. In international app stores, the app appears under the name “RedNote,” but this is the same application as Xiaohongshu – content and accounts are shared across both. The key difference is that RedNote users who register with overseas phone numbers are automatically tagged as international users, which affects the content the algorithm surfaces to them.

For users who download the app outside mainland China, Xiaohongshu automatically detects the device language and location. Upon first login, international users are prompted with an option to automatically translate all content into English (or their device language). If enabled, posts and comments will display with translations by default, and the algorithm will prioritise English-language content and posts created by or for international users, such as expat influencers.

For researchers and journalists seeking to observe the platform as Chinese users experience it, consi