How RedNote’s Commercial Nature Protects Social Progress in China

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Over the years, I’ve written quite a lot about RedNote — the platform that Chinese millennials and Gen-Zs use for Ask-Me-Anything and sharing lifestyle tips, the platform that invested in public blockchain even as Beijing banned its applications domestically, the platform that gained hundreds of thousands of #tiktokrefugees earlier this year. Thanks to this last trend, it now hosts a mix of domestic and overseas users, dictates young middle-class consumers’ attention, and remains the most interesting digital ecosystem to watch in China.

In this post, I’d like to discuss China’s social progress that is happening in a commercial context, with many examples occurring on RedNote.

Why RedNote? Because of its commercial origin—started as PDF shopping guides for wealthy Chinese female consumers in 2013—the social commerce platform hasn’t been taken seriously until recent years. In 2025, its user base is approaching 400 million, branching out to male and lower-tier cities. Still, its core audience remains female middle-class consumers in first, new-first, and second-tier cities.

I argue that RedNote’s commercial nature provides cover, that business takes precedence over everything else, so it’s ok to amplify certain messages to yield sales, and suppress others if they hurt business or bring political risks. What this brings is that both creators and brands and users knows where the boundary is—around marginalized communities, LGBTQ, feminist groups and ethnic minorities.

Here, I define social progress as raising awareness of the hardships faced by those from less privileged backgrounds, using one’s privilege to benefit those who can’t speak up for themselves, and rallying to push regulations forward.

Labor rights—The corn egg tart incident

In early May, a Douyin video featuring a female college student’s complaint about prices went viral. She entered a bakery and found out that a corn egg tart cost 28 yuan, she didn’t want it anymore and the shopkeeper gave her attitude. Later, she recreated the incident online and doubled down when netizens ridiculed her for being cheap.

“Why can’t I complain that an egg tart costs 28 yuan? Just because the price is clearly marked? Does clearly marking the price justify it being this expensive? Farmers work hard all year to grow wheat, and it sells for only 1.2 yuan per jin (500g)…”

After state media began taking her side, and many short videos appeared showing a transition from a corn egg tart to scenes of farmers toiling in the fields growing corn, with captions like:

“The corn I grew with my own hands… in the end, became a corn egg tart I can’t afford to eat.”

The larger context: This conversation didn’t originate on RedNote but on Douyin, and similar videos can also be found on WeChat and other platforms, but it speaks to the broader woke consumer culture that RedNote holds dear.

In non-commercial contexts, discussing social issues, such as the working conditions of senior laborers, is often seen as ill-intentioned. As I’ve noted multiple times in this newsletter, a 2024 NetEase mini-documentary titled “30 Years of Laboring Away,” which addressed the issue of senior migrant workers, was taken down across the internet after going viral. This is not just a Hefei issue; similar scenes are common in Henan, Guangdong, and beyond. Labor rights activist Wang Jianbing, 41, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” for hosting gatherings of workers with pneumoconiosis — a lung disease particularly prevalent among those working in coal mines—along with young activists and scholars.

The limitations of this topic are quite clear—the conversation abruptly stopped at the awareness level. A state media publication focused on rural workers shed light on the topic as well, but instead of diving deeper into their working conditions, it used the news as a hook and highlighted a positive example of how farmers benefit from smart farming.

…Read the full story by subscribing to the Chinese consumer newsletter Following the Yuan.

This is an opinion piece by Yaling Jiang, the founder of research and strategy consultancy ApertureChina and Chinese consumer newsletter Following the Yuan. The views expressed do not reflect the official stance of Jingzhi Chronicle.

Starting out her career as a lifestyle columnist and business journalist in 2014, Jiang has closely observed Chinese consumers throughout this defining decade. She now specializes in providing insights and strategies on the Chinese consumer market for brands and financial institutions. Her expertise has been featured in international outlets such as the Financial Times, Reuters, Le Monde, Les Echos, South China Morning Post, and Jing Daily. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School in the U.S., and of the University of Bath and Brunel University in the U.K.