Red Note’s US expansion is the culmination of years of organic growth, building a global footprint through the Chinese diaspora, which already uses and loves the app.

The global nature of Red Note is not to be underestimated. Beyond its domestic Chinese user base, millions of Chinese speakers across the US, Canada, Germany1, Australia, and the UK were already living on Red Note — using it to find apartments, review restaurants, compare daycares, and navigate diasporic life in a language their daily environment didn’t provide.

Then came the TikTok refugee wave last January, which served as a proof-of-concept beyond that core base. The wave didn’t lead to a sustained spike in user growth, but what the moment affirmed was the thesis that there’s a demographic well beyond Mandarin speakers: a broader segment hungry for authentic engagement and genuine diversity of thoughts, in a register that feels calmer. Building a founding team stateside and running campus activations now, just past that one-year mark, is Red Note signaling that the experiment worked, and it’s going all in.

Why now?

We’re in a moment when media, opinions, and the business of influence are all shifting. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled the rise of the “alternatively influential” — niche tastemakers, public intellectuals, and creatives with deep community authority and modest follower counts. IRL experiences and authenticity are taking center stage in a world exhausted by AI slop and bot followers (”trendslop” is the latest buzzword). Red Note is where the alternatively influential already live natively, and that’s what makes the app so loved.

There’s also a sense of closure with TikTok. TikTok is now an American company. The playbook that TikTok ran through over the past half-decade — what to do and what not to do as a China-affiliated social media platform — has been written and has run its course across government relations, public affairs, and investor relations, all while building a business used by close to 2 billion people. Red Note is coming at a ripe time.

The emotional moat

But is the playing field already crowded? I’d argue not.

Red Note’s competitive moat against TikTok and Instagram is this: Red Note makes you feel like you’re learning, whereas endless scrolling on TikTok and Instagram comes with a creeping guilt and FOMO. A huge volume of Red Note content is user-generated, and the comments sections are a lively public square of interesting takes. The algorithm is remarkably precise at surfacing the right mix of news, personal opinion, video cuts of your past favorite shows (or shows you’ll discover next), a video podcast key takeaway, and a variety of formats and surprises.

Red Note’s blend of video and long-form text creates something that feels like Instagram + Substack + Reddit + Youtube— you scroll, but you also read and react in real time, and learn something along the way. That changes the platform’s entire emotional economy. Instagram triggers FOMO. TikTok’s endless scroll feels like a vortex you fell into. Red Note feels like personal growth, eliminating the guilt loop and reframing time spent as time invested.

As a very heavy Red Note user, that’s the magic for me — it’s genuinely fun, and the app’s culture feels original and enriching. It’s a retention edge the social media incumbents will find hard to replicate, because it’s baked into the content format and the app experience itself.

The chinamaxxing window

The conventional skeptic’s take on Red Note in the US is that the audience will be limited to “overseas Chinese and a very small minority of local people.” I disagree.

The US is going through a chinamaxxing moment. coined the term “Orientalism chic” in to describe how Chinese creators are leaning into difference as an aspirational ideal. These memes function as projections of collective dissatisfaction, and China as a symbolic contrast to a U.S. domestic backdrop that feels increasingly dysfunctional.

Chinamaxxing is more than aesthetic and memes. Just as the TikTok refugee wave was more than an act of defiance, chinamaxxing indexes a collective dissatisfaction with the status quo. It’s a signal that Millennials and Gen Z want alternatives to what the US currently offers and practical solutions that work. It’s no surprise that the latest Pew study shows Americans’ views of China have grown somewhat more positive in recent years: 27% of Americans now hold a positive opinion of China, up 6 percentage points since last year and nearly double the 2023 figure. Fewer Americans call China an enemy now than in 2025, though most still see it as a competitor. Chinamaxxing stops well short of embracing China’s political system, but there’s a thread of pragmatic envy running through it: a fascination with how quickly things get done in China and the cost of living in the country.

But if drinking boiled jujube water with goji can replace antacid medication, and qigong can make you feel healthier and more energetic, why not? More millennials are uninsured than any other demographics and dealing with the U.S. healthcare system is worse without it. That appetite for this kind of content is real, and it maps directly onto what Red Note already is. The wellness tips, the life hacks, the alternative remedies — they’re trending on TikTok. But if Red Note genuinely caters to English-speaking demographics, there’s nowhere better to find the real thing.

But before Red Note can do any of the above and hit a home run in the US, the first order of business is to get everyone spelling the name under the same brand guidelines.

RedNote? Rednote? red note? Red Note?

That’s a start.

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Calling the Shots is read by the sharpest observers and operators in communications, tech, China strategy, and media. They understand that perception and narrative create enterprise value and confer the power to call the shots.

From TikTok’s political theater to RedNote’s signals on culture and taste-making. From DeepSeek’s market shock to Pop Mart’s emotional capitalism. Whether you are trying to avoid making the comms mistakes others have made or read China news from a different lens, you will enjoy reading Calling the Shots.

Previous Red Note Signals:

In a new Calling the Shots series called The AI Script, I want to track how AI narratives shape the perception of power. From valuation gaps to geopolitical leverage, the story told about AI often matters more than the technology itself. Xiaomi’s venture into AI is the first story.

Xiaomi: An Underestimated AI Narrative in China

By Peiyue Wu

Xiaomi is undeniably China’s closest parallel to Tesla. Both began as consumer tech companies that successfully extended into cars, and now both are pushing into AI.

For three consecutive weeks, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2-Pro AI model dominated the OpenRouter leaderboards. It was a rare feat of endurance that even high-flying startups like Z.ai and MiniMax didn’t sustain. Yet while the market quickly rewards LLM breakthroughs from startups, it often overlooks Xiaomi’s AI progress. On April 2, the very day MiMo’s API traffic peaked, Xiaomi’s stock price tumbled to its lowest point since May 2025, halving its peak valuation.

The shadow of the SU7

Xiaomi’s stock struggles are tied to a lingering brand crisis stemming from two high-profile accidents in 2025. The company’s rise was deeply intertwined with Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder, and how his personal charisma converted into commercial momentum. But that kind of overwhelming attention cuts both ways. Under such intense scrutiny, such accidents can be magnified into a full-blown crisis of trust.

In that sense, Xiaomi is similar to Tesla, in that the company’s image is closely tied to its founder’s public persona. However, the founder-led communication playbook that Lei Jun and Elon Musk operate by underpins a very different logic. Musk thrives in the fray, leaning into rumor mills and opining on anything that interests him to drive traffic and cultural relevance. When a Tesla crashes, he uses his savant status to deflect blame, finding alternative explanations why Autopilot was not fully engaged, and the accidents were all drivers’ fault. His persona as a defiant disruptor fighting for the future of self-driving acts as a defensive shield.

Lei built his authority on a different archetype. He emerged from China’s first-generation of internet billionaires (think Jack Ma of Alibaba, Pony Ma of Tencent, Richard Liu of JD), watching peers achieve historic success while he spent nearly two decades searching for his moment. When Xiaomi arrived, it carried the weight of that waiting — quiet suffering, stubborn persistence, an older generation’s work ethic. That image of the persevering striver resonated deeply, and for years, his personal credibility built on that persona was Xiaomi’s most valuable asset. Therefore, when the SU7 accidents hit, Lei had to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

It’s also more than the persona they chose. In China, a high-profile consumer tech company operates with far less room to deflect or reinterpret responsibility. A direct response, often including an apology, is not optional, but a baseline requirement for maintaining public legitimacy.

This ultimately reflects a deeper cultural divide. In Silicon Valley, founders are encouraged to project conviction about a future that does not yet exist, and investors reward that narrative. In China, public expectations are shaped more by a culture rooted in thousands of years of agrarian pragmatism. A sweeping “AI+car+home” vision carries less weight in shaping opinion than a concrete incident that exposes current technical limits.

The paradox of the rising underdog

Now, let’s return to why Xiaomi’s venture into AI has not been rewarded in market value. The Xiaomi versus Minimax and Z.ai story is, at its core, a story of the Big Co. versus Challenger.

The market views Z.ai and MiniMax as pure-play AI bets, and sees their narratives as those of underdogs in an area dominated by Chinese big tech. When their models succeed, it validates their entire existence, driving valuations north of HK$300 billion. It’s worth noting that both companies are backed by Tencent and Alibaba.

Xiaomi gets no such treatment. The market sees it primarily as a hardware conglomerate, with AI as the icing on the cake. For Big Co. like Xiaomi, Alibaba, or Tencent, AI spending is viewed through the lens of capital expenditure, a defensive cost necessary to keep phones, cars, and ecosystems competitive, rather than a new revenue driver.

But this is not only a question of business model but also about how these companies tell their stories.

When Alibaba releases a model, the announcement often reads like a KPI report dressed up as a press conference. Take the latest Qwen 3.6-Plus: it highlights refreshed SOTA results across 215 tasks and claims to outperform Gemini-3.1 Pro on multiple core metrics. The language is designed more for managing up and investor relations, but it doesn’t necessarily help win users’ hearts. By contrast, MiniMax builds its reputation through real-world testing and organic word of mouth from its community. Z.ai adopts the register of a top-tier academic lab. In both cases, the communication feels closer to peer-to-peer sharing than to a grand narrative such as a “cloud + AI” closed-loop ecosystem.

Xiaomi is caught in an awkward position between the two modes.

It is no longer the underdog people want to root for. In his 2025 annual speech, Lei returned to the hardship narrative that once moved his audience, comparing building cars and chips simultaneously to a family putting two children through university at once. The metaphor was meant to humanize the challenge. Instead, people read as performative. The kind of relatable-struggle framing that works for a scrappy startup founder, but rings hollow coming from one of China’s wealthiest men.

Meanwhile, Xiaomi is also too traditional to be seen as a worthy AI player in the arena. A well-known private equity investor wrote on Weibo on April 1 that Xiaomi has entered many industries, but rarely ranks among the top three in any of them. “Now that its auto growth is slowing, it is turning again to AI and robotics.” He went further, saying it has no edge in AI and questioning whether it has a long-term strategy at all.

Xiaomi’s hesitation is visible in its media and marketing approaches. Over the past year, both Lei and Xiaomi have noticeably dialed things down. When MiMo first appeared on OpenRouter, it was listed under the alias “Hunter Alpha” with no indication of its origin, and Xiaomi only stepped forward to claim it six days later, after it had already held the top spot for three consecutive days. Earlier, during its Leica-branded phone launch in Europe, Xiaomi even removed its own logo to let Leica take center stage. Both moves aim to avoid drawing attention to the breadth of Xiaomi’s business, as too many bets could dilute efforts and increase capital expenditure.

From a purely technical standpoint, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2-Pro holds up against models from MiniMax and Z.ai. Developer community discussions suggest that all three are well-regarded, each with its own strengths. Yet the market tends to underestimate Xiaomi.

Xiaomi has potential in AI hardware integration and in building an ecosystem across phones, vehicles, and home appliances. Few companies can actually deploy AI at that scale in real-world scenarios. Therefore, if it can change the market’s perception of its narrative, there is significant enterprise value to be accrued once it proves itself a worthy challenger.

Calling the Shots is read by some of the sharpest observers and operators in communications, tech, China strategy, and media. They understand that perception and narrative create enterprise value and confer the power to call the shots.

From TikTok’s political theater to RedNote’s signals on culture and taste making. From DeepSeek’s market shock to Pop Mart’s emotional capitalism. Whether you are trying to avoid making the comms mistakes others have made, or read China news from a different lens, you will enjoy reading Calling the Shots.

Chinese Open-Source Has Quietly Entered America’s AI Products

By Peiyue Wu

Director Chloé Zhao said in an interview about her new production, an adaptation of Hamlet. When asked why she wasn’t working on something “original,” she pushed back on the premise outright.

“The word original, the root of that word, orīgō, it means old,” she said. “Original doesn’t mean new. We have a sort of misunderstanding of what the word original means.”

She was talking about Hollywood. But she could have been describing the AI industry.

Back in February, OpenAI and Athropic accused DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI of “free riding” their models through distillation. Chinese labs allegedly spun up thousands of accounts to scrape US models, and used the outputs to train their models without paying the full cost of building from scratch. It neatly fits into a well-worn narrative: American innovation versus Chinese imitation.

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Then two weeks ago, the dynamic flipped and Cursor, a leading US AI coding startup, was caught building its newly launched model Composer 2 on top of Kimi K2.5, a Chinese open-source model from Moonshot AI. Cursor initially did not disclose it, and the issue came into light after an X user claimed the model was essentially Kimi K2.5 with reinforcement learning layered on top. The post quickly went viral, amplified by Elon Musk’s blunt reply: “Yeah, it’s Kimi 2.5.”

Moonshot AI’s Head of Pretraining posted a technical breakdown showing Composer 2’s tokenizer was identical to Kimi’s. The now deleted post demanded a response from Cursor on why the company had neither credited the model nor followed its license terms. The terms require any product exceeding $20 million in monthly revenue to display “Kimi K2.5” in its interface. Cursor’s annualized revenue reportedly exceeded $2 billion.

By contrast, DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen do not impose similarly strict requirements on large-scale commercial use. Qwen, which had been releasing open-weight models well before DeepSeek’s V3 launch, has been one of the most widely used base models on Hugging Face

Under pressure, Cursor’s VP of Developer Education, Lee Robinson, acknowledged Kimi K2.5 had been used as a base and admitted the lack of attribution was a mistake, while emphasizing “only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training.” He said Kimi was chosen simply because it was “the strongest” among evaluated models.

In a surprising reversal, Moonshot AI responded graciously, reframing the episode as an “authorized commercial partnership.” For the Chinese lab, the episode lands as a near-perfect branding moment.

Both Chinese distillation and Cursor building on Kimi are forms of learning from someone else’s work, which is in the spirit of open source; but the key difference is who gets the upper hand at owning the narrative.

Who Gets to Define “Copying”?

Cursor’s reluctance to disclose its use of Kimi K2.5 reveals competing priorities: investors’ obsession with original ideas and speed to market, and the discomfort of admitting dependency on Chinese technology and the geopolitical risks that come with itwith. Cursor is purportedly targeting a $50 billion valuation in its next round. “Built on Chinese open-source” doesn’t fit neatly into that pitch deck.

But before accepting the idea that building on someone else’s work slashes enterprise value, it’s worth asking what really counts as copying.

When OpenAI trained GPT on the entire internet without compensating the individual authors, was that not also a form of extraction? When every major model ingests the creative output of millions and then monetizes the result, who is truly free riding on whom?

Accusations against Chinese labs rely on defining a model’s outputs as proprietary. Applied consistently, that logic would implicate any large model trained on copyrighted human work without consent. When the things making a model powerful — its architecture, its weights, its training algorithms, the chips running underneath — have been fiercely protected as proprietary intellectual property. But the billions of data points that actually teach the model how to think — every article ever written, every piece of code ever shared, every question a user typed into a chat interface, every creative work fed into a training pipeline — that, apparently, belongs to no one. This kind of framework protects creation only once it becomes corporate infrastructure.

The messages behind China’s open-source

Kimi K2.5 is certainly not the first Chinese model adopted by Silicon Valley. It might just have attracted the most attention. Earlier versions of Cursor had already shown traces of DeepSeek, and just weeks ago, Rakuten’s flagship AI model in Japan was found to be built on DeepSeek V3, despite being presented as domestically developed. DeepSeek, however, did not require the same “credit” in its licensing policy.

Chinese labs open-source their weights for developers to download and self-host. But for smaller companies and individual developers who lack the infrastructure such as computing power to run models locally, the commercial API remains the practical option. Chinese model APIs are priced dramatically below their US closed-source equivalents. Open-source release thus builds familiarity and trust, which ultimately leads to customer acquisition. The results are measurable. On aggregation platforms like OpenRouter, Chinese models have begun to overtake US models in total API call volume. Take Kimi as an example, its overseas revenue has exceeded its domestic revenue.

We may soon see more Chinese models embedding themselves into global products and, in cases like this, becoming the invisible layer inside companies that are still publicly positioned as their rivals.

Unlike goods subject to tariffs, or apps subject to data sovereignty concerns, Chinese models earning dollars through API calls have not yet attracted significant U.S. regulatory attention. That window won’t stay open forever. But for now, it’s open.

The geopolitical reality: the perception of abandonment from China’s perspective is now a deal breaker.

My editor Peter Cowan sharply stated the broader condition:

Shein’s long-running attempt to position itself as a “global company” may have reached its breaking point. As geopolitical tensions rise, firms built on Chinese industrial ecosystems are finding it harder to sustain that strategic ambiguity.

With New York and London off the table, Hong Kong has emerged as Shein’s most viable and likely only IPO option. That path comes with its own logic. If Shein lists in Hong Kong after years of presenting itself as a Singapore-based global company, the listing itself becomes an admission: offshore restructuring has limits as a strategy for escaping political scrutiny.

Shein is now in the most Chinese moment of its corporate lifetime. While its core manufacturing ecosystem has no real Western equivalent, sustaining that advantage depends on continued access to China’s industrial base, which rests on political trust and careful signaling.

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For a company that spent years performing China-shedding, the market will expect a cleaner answer to the question of identity.

The pattern is now spreading across the sectors. Global Chinese companies like Shein, Manus, and TikTok spent years distancing themselves from China to access Western capital and prove they were American enough. The Chinese government is now making that calculus increasingly untenable.

This week, the New York Times reported that the Chinese government is taking actions to penalize people linked to Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, in an apparent effort to discourage Chinese AI executives from moving businesses offshore to Singapore and other places. The message is loud and clear: the relocation playbook now has consequences.

Meta’s statement to NYT was notably blunt :

“The transaction complied fully with applicable law,” the company said. “The outstanding team at Manus is now deeply integrated into Meta. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry.”

That last line reads like an ultimatum (almost certainly drafted by lawyers) and signals that Meta is treating this as a matter to be managed, not a negotiation.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission, a high-level ministry that oversees economic planning including AI, called in Meta and Manus executives for a meeting late last week to express concerns about the deal. And the Chinese Embassy was drawn into the inquiry. .

In the midst of all this, Manus announced that Meta has connected it to Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, and the deeper integration across Meta’s marketing stack is already happening.

The question is whether Beijing reads that as defiance, or whether the product-level work is proceeding with some form of quiet blessing, or Manus is simply proceeding as if the warnings don’t apply to the product roadmap. That ambiguity cuts both ways.

Shein has spent years cultivating a global persona while quietly signaling loyalty to the Guangdong government, careful to keep that news from traveling too far. Manus is moving ahead with its product integration roadmap while simultaneously managing an active investigation in China. Both companies are running two tracks and counting on each audience not looking too closely at the other.

That calculation is getting harder to sustain. Strategic ambiguity, it turns out, is not a strategy. If we learned anything from TikTok, Manus, and Shein, it is that China-shedding satisfies no one.

On why China-shedding is an untenable strategy in 2026, please read Calling the Shots Field Guide #1. Send me a message and I will send you the full deck.

Dian Dian was first publicly mentioned in December 2024, when Red Note began a small-scale beta test of an "Ask Dian Dian" feature near the search bar. The company behind Dian Dian, incorporated in August 2024, was effectively an internal incubation from the start and “acquired” by the end of 2025, according to Chinese media. The standalone app, which it launched in November 2025, had accumulated 2.51 million Android downloads as of early December — respectable, but not a breakout consumer AI product by any measure. But the effort to push Dian Dian has ramped up recently in my feed, and that's how I came across it for the first time last week.

The Distribution Play

I first encountered Dian Dian through Ma Jiahui’s (马家辉) Red Note video. Ma is a well-known literary and cultural opinion leader whose career spanned traditional TV to digital media over the past 20 years. I grew up watching him and hearing him talk about Dian Dian felt like a recommendation from an old friend.

And this is how Red Note markets its own product: through the influencer base that relies on the platform to monetize their influence. When Red Note gives a topic like Dian Dian official traffic support, creators have every incentive to lean in, produce content around it, and tag it. The promotional effort feels quite organic: traffic flows naturally to wherever the platform puts its weight, and creators follow because that’s where the audience is.

The numbers bear this out. The hashtag #DiandianAI has 3.4 million notes and 257.7 million views on Red Note; #RedNoteAI has 1.7 million notes and 203.7 million views. The content ranges from artsy short films shot on Venice Beach，where creators used Dian Dian to plan an itinerary, to users sharing how it helped them through a mental health rut, to creators mining the comment section to generate new content ideas. Dian Dian can also be downloaded as a standalone app, though its sweet spot is clearly in the integrated experience

In terms of technical stack, Dian Dian is built on Red Note's proprietary large language model, Zhujī (珠玑). By February 2025, Dian Dian had integrated DeepSeek's deep thinking mode, reducing response times to roughly 3 seconds and adding multimodal input—image, text, and voice.

Dian Dian, Red Note, AI

To understand why Dian Dian matters, we have to understand what Red Note has become. My obsession with the app is well documented on Calling the Shots, and comparing it to any single Western equivalent doesn’t do it justice. Red Note is Instagram, YouTube, Yelp, Pinterest, and X fused into a single scroll. But longtime users stopped treating it like a social app long ago. As Baidu, Weibo, and WeChat became more commercialized and their content moderation more stringent, Red Note filled the vacuum. To a large Mandarin-speaking base in China and globally, it is a search engine, a decision-making tool, and the go-to knowledge base.

Recent China media and industry tracking put Red Note’s monthly active users in the 350 million range, a number that puts it firmly in the conversation with the country’s biggest platforms.

In the past year, Chinese and international celebrities have joined Red Note in force, recognizing it as the best remaining channel for reaching the Chinese audience. Weibo, which once served as the free expression town square of Chinese internet life in the late 2000s and early 2010s, has largely devolved into a celebrity gossip mill. WeChat’s deletion and censorship mechanisms are more erratic than ever.

The latest Red Note high-profile joiner: Jackie Chan, who at 70+ is fully embracing the platform’s norms, including disclosing that he has ADHD, which is by now a full Red Note meme (and something wrote about in the inaugural Red Note Signals piece).

If I had to name Red Note’s single most important moat compared to its peers, it’s the comments section. The high-engagement audience feedback is the last bastion of crowd-sourced truth-testing. Red Note users add context, help each other make decisions, and push back on lazy or biased takes. And now, Dian Dian is learning from all of it.

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Not a Chatbot. A Companion.

On Dian Dian‘s official Red Note account, it positions itself as a companion to “spark curiosity and love for life by making planning more efficient.” When I asked Dian Dian in the app to describe itself, here’s what it said:

“Think of me as an AI assistant that lives inside the Red Note app. My core capability is helping you get more out of Red Note, summarizing massive amounts of notes and comments into clear, useful information to help you make decisions. I’m positioned as a life companion, not a general-purpose chatbot.”

I asked Dian Dian whether it was designed to leapfrog WeChat and Baidu in search. Its answer was more interesting than a simple yes:

“The logic isn’t about running faster on the same track. It’s about opening an entirely new one, the lane of life decisions.”

According to Dian Dian’s answer output, 90% of Red Note users say their purchasing decisions are influenced by what they find on the platform’s search results. That’s an extraordinary figure if true, and it’s the foundation Dian Dian is building on. Red Note is often used as a travel-planning, product-review, and lifestyle-recommendation platform. From making Düsseldorf cool and a foodie destination to swapping AI intel, users trust it because the answers are real, recent, and human. Dian Dian plugs directly into that trust and optimizes the search process.

I tested Dian Dian by asking it to plan a day on the Upper East Side in New York City, and the recommendations went well beyond the predictable stops like the Met or Central Park. Part of what makes it work is that Dian Dian already has a granular profile of its users through connected Red Note accounts: interests, preferences, location, and even inferred socioeconomic signals based on the brands and topics they engage with. It’s as if Alibaba’s e-commerce intelligence combined with DeepSeek to create truly tailored recommendations.

And that tailoring points directly to where Red Note wants to go commercially. AI search is the way to realize Red Note's e-commerce ambition. The traditional content-to-commerce path on Red Note has been: content > seeding (种草) > transaction. A long, browse-heavy funnel with other e-commerce platforms often reaping the benefits. With AI search, Red Note can actively capture the commercial intent that has always been latent in its search behavior. Last month, Red Note acquired a third-party payment license, the final piece to complete the e-commerce ecosystem puzzle.

The source material that drives AI search matters, too. When you ask about a restaurant, Dian Dian surfaces what users actually said in the comments to validate. Unlike the black box of most AI tools that pull from online articles, Dian Dian links directly to the Red Note posts it draws from, so users can click through and judge for themselves. This transparency matters more in the Chinese context than it might elsewhere. For one, online articles in China are often paid-for commercial placements or government-affiliated channel content, and their credibility varies enormously compared to real user feedback.

Search is experiencing the AI shift: Doubao, Kimi, and others are increasingly where younger users go when they want an answer synthesized rather than a list of links. Red Note’s daily search volume approaching 600 million queries in Q4 2024, AI search is the next natural step up.

Red Note has something no one else has: hundreds of millions of real people actively debating, recommending, and correcting each other in real time on topics that directly affect how they spend their money and time. Dian Dian is built to mine that and turn it into a recommendation to act on.

That is the opportunity. But the same data that makes Dian Dian useful also makes it powerful in ways worth thinking about. The more it knows about the users, the better its recommendations and search results get. But a platform that can profile a user’s interests, infer income bracket, and track purchasing behavior also has everything it needs to stop serving and start steering. There is no bright line between a helpful recommendation and a paid one.

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In five livestreamed minutes, he announced a RMB 10 billion investment to build Shein's smart supply-chain system in the province. He closed with a line that, read against the last two years of Shein's global communications strategy, landed like a confession:

“广东是希音的根，也是我们奋斗的起点“

““Guangdong is Shein’s root and where we began.”

It was a remarkable thing to say because Shein has spent years trying very hard to make the world forget it.

The China-Shedding Years

For anyone who has tracked Shein’s trajectory, the Guangdong speech is the end of a story that was always going to end this way.

In 2022, Shein relocated its headquarters to Singapore and hired its Executive Chairman Donald Tang. Shein cultivated a global brand identity built around fashion, youth culture, and individual expression and adopted language and aesthestics deliberately chosen to feel Western. Donald Tang became the public face of the company’s ambitions in the United States and Europe. When Tang publicly framed Shein through “American values” language in 2024 and later attempted to damage control, FT reported that Shein discouraged China-based columnists from writing about it, adding fuel to fire.

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The internal and external narratives were already out of sync and even back then while Shein understood it should not irk officials, but it kept going with its dual narratives. Shein ran two parallel stories, one for Western audiences that positioned it as a global fashion platform unburdened by its Chinese origins, and another for Chinese stakeholders that required a very different kind of reassurance.

It was Shein’s China-shedding strategy: the attempt by Chinese-origin companies to dilute or obscure their identity in order to access Western capital markets, reduce regulatory scrutiny, and sidestep the growing geopolitical cost of being perceived as a Chinese company. Under Donald Tang, Shein became something more specific: a jurisdiction chameleon. American company when pitching to Wall Street. UK company when courting a London listing. A French op-ed when timely. The identity of the moment was always the identity that served the goal of the moment.

Shein’s biggest competitive advantage is not its app, its marketing, or its influencer strategy. It is the Guangdong supply chain: the density of garment factories in Panyu, the logistics infrastructure in Baiyun, the test-and-reorder model (“小单快反”） that compresses design-to-delivery to two or three weeks. That speed is not replicable elsewhere, not at Shein’s price points and not at Shein’s volume. Singapore can host a holding company. It cannot replicate 10,000 partner suppliers and tens of thousands eager workers embedded in one provincial ecosystem.

So the China-shedding strategy was always asking the market to believe something that Shein’s own operations contradicted daily. You cannot be a Singapore-based global fashion platform while depending entirely on a supply chain infrastructure so deeply embedded in one Chinese province.

The IPO process made the contradiction impossible to manage. By late 2024, no amount of PR charm offensive stopped journalists from asking plainly “how Chinese is Shein?” People saw the Singaporization of the company as risk engineering rather than Shein’s genuine identity. This is part of a broader pattern of Chinese-linked firms relocating HQ functions offshore while operational gravity stays in China.

Early 2025 brought more pressure: Tang wrote an investor letter trying to reassure markets after Trump’s crackdown on low-value imports, while Bloomberg and UK press quoted him leaning into language about public trust, accountability, and transparency. That kind of reputation-repair rhetoric typically appears when a company knows scrutiny is coming and hasn’t yet built the credibility to withstand it.

Then came the moment of reckoning. Chinese regulators did not approve the proposed London IPO. Shein pivoted to Hong Kong. Bloomberg and Reuters then reported that Shein was weighing moving its base back from Singapore to China entirely, to ease the path to Beijing’s sign-off.

The dual narrative was beginning to break down. Beijing read the Singaporization and Shein’s external posturing as a loyalty question. Western regulators and investors read the IPO rerouting to Hong Kong as prove that Shein was never global enough to begin with. There was no version of the story that satisfied both sides at once.

What the Guangdong Speech Actually Says

Read Xu’s remarks carefully and the tone has completely shifted and it spoke as if it were a local player just happened to do billions of dollars in global sales.

The East is Read

SHEIN's elusive founder Xu Yangtian makes rare public remarks in Guangdong: a transcript

Xu Yangtian, also known as Chris Xu or Sky Xu, is the rare sort of billionaire who has built one of the world’s most talked-about retailers while leaving barely a public footprint and is better known through second-hand anecdotes. Little is known about him but that he is Chinese-born, honed from an early career in search and online marketing, and the ar…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · Yuxuan JIA

Xu thanked provincial and municipal leaders for visiting Shein personally when it first arrived in Guangzhou, for coordinating supply-chain resources, for ensuring support policies were implemented. He described the government’s approach as “no unnecessary disruption, but a quick response when help is needed” — which is, in the language of Chinese political economy, about as warm an endorsement of a local government as a private entrepreneur can offer at a formal Party event. He announced the RMB 10 billion investment not as corporate expansion but as a contribution to Guangdong’s high-quality development goals.

Xu spoke in the the language of a Guangdong company that knows where its obligations lie and is saying so clearly, to the right audience, at a politically meaningful moment.

The Lesson for China-Shedding Strategies: The Four Pillars of Global Trust

To understand exactly where it went wrong, it helps to run it through a framework I use when advising companies trying to build credibility on a global stage. There are four pillars of global trust, and China shedding by Singapore-stamping is no longer enough.

The first pillar is governance clarity. Who is running the show? Ownership structure, board control, data custody — these are not details to be managed reactively when a reporter starts asking questions. For any company with Chinese affiliation, the stakes of governance ambiguity are especially high, because the logic in Washington is a short and well-worn path and at any moment the conversation can tip into national security risk framing. Shein never got ahead of this. Its governance story emerged through reporter inference and regulatory pressure, not through deliberate, proactive explanation.

The second pillar is execution credibility. Trust is built when you say what you mean and do what you say. Shein’s positioning as a Singapore-headquartered global fashion platform was contradicted daily because most of its goods were “made in Guangdong.” Investor letters about transparency and accountability land very differently when the company has already demonstrated that its comms posture shifts with whoever is applying pressure.

The third pillar is narrative consistency. I have written about the dangers of the dual narrative: appearing to be one thing in China to appease the relevant parties, and something entirely different on the global stage. It was not a good look to reject the source of its success while exploiting the market in an opportunistic way, and it read as deeply ungrateful at a moment when the Chinese government was trying to bolster real economic productivity and job creation. The “American values” rhetoric was the last straw.

The fourth pillar is cultural fluency.

Cultural fluency does not mean knowing how to use chopsticks or running a Lunar New Year campaign. It means understanding that Chinese political culture expects a level of respect — and expressed loyalty — toward the source of a company’s success. This is one of the sharpest distinctions between how the United States views its private sector and how China expects its private sector to behave. In America, a founder who built a company through hard work and market insight owes little to the state. In China, success at scale is understood to have been enabled by the state, and gratitude is not optional.

This is why Donald Tang’s “American company” framing was such a damaging miscalculation; it was a loyalty signal sent in the wrong direction, at the exact moment Shein needed Beijing’s approval to proceed with its IPO.

Xu’s Guangdong speech is the correction. And it is important to read it precisely. This is not a pivot — Shein is not suddenly becoming a different company. It is an acknowledgment: Guangdong made this possible, the provincial government’s support was essential, and Shein’s success is inseparable from the ecosystem that Guangdong built. That acknowledgment is what cultural fluency actually requires.

After three years of shapeshifting, Xu Yangtian's first public appearance was a homecoming in every sense. The title next to his name at the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee conference read: Founder of Guangzhou Shein International Import and Export Co., Ltd. Guangzhou.

Manus is the latest example, and the cleanest break yet. As I explained in this post, most of the conversation around China-shedding focuses on the companies themselves. What structure did they use? Where did they relocate? How did they cut ties? But what Manus did right was understand the power of influence.

What was the communication strategy that made it credible? Because even with the perfect legal structure, if the narrative doesn’t hold across different stakeholder groups, the structure doesn’t matter.

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So I wrote a field guide on how to build global trust. Effective global communication is built on reputation, market trust, and geopolitical context. For this one, I’m focusing on Singapore as the destination for companies with Chinese roots.

This guide is written for investors, financial and operating partners, and legal, compliance, and advisory firms working with companies with China affiliations. The deck is not a thought piece and focuses on how those relationships are communicated, including how due diligence is articulated without sounding defensive and how exposure is credibly explained.

A China affiliation is a variable most stakeholders evaluate upfront. It is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but something that needs to be understood and managed.

You can download the full Field Guide by becoming a supporter of Calling the Shots.

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CNBC reported that the daily average of U.S. users deleting the TikTok app has increased nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months.

Last week, before the TikTok U.S. joint venture announcement, I made a TikTok about the one-year anniversary of the Red Note refugee moment, and the close to 200 comments became a live focus group of TikTok users who are also on Red Note.

My favorite comment came from someone who said she moved to China because of Red Note.

There were a few recurring themes from the refugees/Red Note users :

1. a shared sentiment that Red Note feels calm, peaceful (I don’t know about that…)

2. Red Note: U.S. user verification is inconsistent, accounts get locked, and recovery is close to impossible.

3. The feed is also getting noisier, more obvious AI slop. (I’m not seeing that in the Mandarin side of Red Note)

But as Peiyue writes, Red Note has not replaced TikTok as the go-to app; the irony is that, after TikTok has become a true American app, users are once again looking for an alternative, like the swallows who migrate to warmer locales when winter comes.

Once a Year on RedNote: Are TikTok Refugees Becoming Digital Migratory Birds?

By: Peiyue Wu

Just as the first wave of “TikTok refugees” on RedNote reached its one-year mark, another wave arrived. Last Thursday, American users once again crossed the Pacific in digital form. They set up new accounts, posted awkward bilingual introductions, and greeted Chinese users with photos of their pets.

On January 22, ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations was officially transferred to an American entity. That morning, U.S.TikTok users were greeted with new terms to accept. The language in the new policy was more sweeping, and TikTok would now collect more precise location data from its users.

Technically, this wasn’t unprecedented. Instagram, X, and other major platforms track similar information. Yet when those companies updated their policies, few people reacted. With TikTok, panic spread almost instantly.

Since the U.S. government announced last September that TikTok would change ownership, the internal adjustment has been read through a political lens. The timing of this update also worked against the company. Public anxiety was already high following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota amid heightened ICE raid activity.

Under the new policy, TikTok claimed the right to collect what it called sensitive data, which included race, religious beliefs, and citizenship or immigration status. New rules also covered sexual orientation, gender identity, and mental or physical health diagnoses

For many users, especially minorities and undocumented immigrants, the new reality felt like data was being weaponized to be used against them.

Last year, the TikTok refugee trend was a protest against what many saw as the U.S. government’s hypocritical claim to protect data security. This time, the outcome struck users as almost darkly ironic. “They are doing exactly what they accuse China of doing, ” one user commented on an Instagram post warning of the risks behind the policy change.

As if to add fuel to the fire, TikTok began glitching. On Sunday morning, users reported trouble logging in. Videos failed to upload or publish. Some said their For You pages kept recycling content they had already watched, even after marking it as not interesting. TikTok blamed the problems on a power outage at a data center.

For others, another major concern about the platform had surfaced earlier. Censorship.

On January 5, Dylan Page, better known as News Daddy, announced that he was temporarily leaving TikTok. With more than 18 million followers, he is one of the platform’s most influential news creators. Page pointed to increased censorship and a sharp drop in views during coverage of major geopolitical events, including the U.S. government’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. According to him, some posts were delisted or deemed ineligible for recommendation.

Despite his announcement, Page continued posting on TikTok. An account widely believed to be his Red Note profile was created during the first refugee wave last January. After uploading four posts adapted for Chinese audiences, it went quiet. Over the past few days, even as a new wave arrived, the account remained inactive.

That’s part of the reason the TikTok refugee movement didn’t seem to last beyond the initial hype last year. A few major TikTok creators have fully committed to Red Note to make the transition meaningful.

Compared with a year ago, this new wave feels quieter on the Chinese side. Red Note has not aggressively pushed refugee content to Chinese domestic users. In comment sections, only scattered Chinese users appear (one comment jokes that these foreign visitors seem to return once a year, like migratory birds).

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Are the TikTok refugees birds or here to stay?

Most interaction happens among the refugees themselves on Red Note. They find one another, talk in the comments, and explain why they have grown attached to a calmer and less performative online space. Longtime users share what they have picked up over the past year, from basic traditional Chinese medicine concepts to recipes they now cook at home.

Has Red Note changed much for the U.S. market in the past year? Not really. Monetization tools such as livestreaming are still unavailable to American users. The platform does not reward constant self-expression as U.S. creators expect.

That limitation may explain why many TikTok refugees remain invisible.

The ones who stick around aren’t always the ones posting. They mostly observe, and without a clear monetization pathway, there’s little reason to engage. Over time, Red Note just became a new habit.

In recent weeks, memes like “You met me at a very Chinese time of my life” have gone viral across Western social media platforms, often accompanied by ironic performances of drinking hot water or wearing the now-iconic Adidas Chinese jacket. These moments spread fast, but they just scratch the surface. By contrast, the TikTok refugees who remain on Red Note point to a different kind of cultural encounter, one built gradually through lingering rather than spectacle.

Taken together, the two waves of TikTok refugees tell a broader story. They are not really about China. They reflect a growing unease among U.S. social media users about surveillance, censorship, and the government that oversees them. In seeking refuge from one system, users drift into another not because it promises freedom, but because it offers an alternative that keeps up with the dopamine reward loop.

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Amy and I talked a lot about Red Note feminism, which can be understood as a collective search for meaning in a reality where women express independence by rejecting traditional gender roles and values. One reason I think Red Note is so sticky is that it creates subcultures and a safe space where expression feels natural and authentic. At the same time, in the gaps once filled by real humans, technology increasingly steps in to provide emotional connections.

After a few hours with Love & Deepspace, I think I get it. It’s a hybrid of a dating sim and a light action RPG. I am a female “hunter” in a near-future world battling interdimensional creatures called Wanderers, while part of a storyline to build relationships with impossibly handsome male leads: Xavier, Zayne, Rafayel, Sylus, and Caleb. Each is tied to different factions and storylines I can influence, and the experience is not linear: I can like and leave comments on their WeChat Moments-style social feeds, text them, hang out at a cafe, or go battle some Wanderers together.

The game simulates how love develops in real life, and the relationship deepens as the storyline attemps to create shared progress and meaning. The difference is that instead of experiencing the ups and downs, and the fickleness of real world relationship, this entire process now plays out inside an app, with out-of-this-world perfect men with six-pack abs, perfect jawlines, and undivided attention that no human can compete with.

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When Chinese Virtual Boyfriends Go Global, Fans Dispute Their Chineseness

By Peiyue Wu

In 2023, I wrote about Chinese women who fell in love with virtual boyfriends and attempted to bring those relationships into real life by hiring cosplayers to embody them.

The trend took off shortly after China lifted its zero-COVID policy and was largely organized on RedNote, where otome game players share screenshots, write emotional diaries, and openly recruit cosplayers.

In cities, it became increasingly common to see an ordinary young woman walking through shopping streets beside a carefully constructed “anime man,” often played by a female cosplayer wearing platform shoes and artificial chest muscles.

Many players deliberately chose female cosplayers to avoid the physical risks they associated with interacting with men.

To outside observers, the scenes were easy to misread as an extension of anime fandom. China has long been influenced by Japanese ACG culture, and cosplay itself is nothing new. What was new was how these “leisure hobbies” are reshaping a generation of women to imagine intimacy, romance, and emotional labor.

At the time, I interviewed players ranging from teenagers who had never dated men at all to women in their thirties often labeled as “leftover women,” many of whom were exhausted from trying to make real-life heterosexual relationships work. Across age groups, the shared sentiment is disappointment with how men in China fail to meet their romantic expectations.

Recently, I decided to revisit the topic after realizing that Chinese-developed otome games such as Love and Deepspace had gained a far larger overseas audience than I had anticipated, particularly in the U.S.

While these games were initially targeted for Asian markets – especially Japan –, the U.S. has become one of their largest growth regions. As they moved beyond anime circles and reached players unfamiliar with Asian pop culture, a peculiar debate began to surface on both Chinese and Western social media: Are these male characters Chinese, or are they white?

One viral post even used AI tools to analyze character portraits, assigning percentage breakdowns of imagined racial “bloodlines.”

When these discussions appeared on Chinese platforms like Red Note, they sparked nationalist sentiment almost immediately. Chinese fans expressed a strong sense of ownership over the characters, frustrated that overseas players would enjoy the games while denying the characters’ Chineseness. A common complaint was “even when they like the game, they still don’t want the men to be Chinese.”

Even as interest in real men declined, pride in nationality remained intact.

Personally, I find it strange that so much energy is invested in arguing over the ethnicity of fictional characters. But it is also clear that real-world anxieties about race, geopolitics, cultural hierarchy, and recognition are being projected onto these virtual romances.

To better understand this tension, I reached out to an African American player named Mari, who goes by the online name “Fangirl Travels,” with whom I had been in contact since my 2023 article. Back then, she had found the piece circulating in a Twitter fan group and contacted me to introduce herself as a player. Until then, I had barely been aware that these games had meaningful non-Asian player bases at all.

When I asked her about the ethnicity debate, she acknowledged that it exists, but offered a nuanced distinction. She sees two very different behaviors among overseas fans.

The first group playfully assigns different ethnicities to characters in an affectionate way. These fans fully understand that the characters are Chinese and have no issue with that. Calling a character “Brazilian” or “Black” can function like a joke of intimacy, she said. “Like how someone might introduce their boyfriend of a different race to their family, and he is called ‘an honorary (insert ethnicity here)’.” She also points out that this can also stem from a lack of romance games with certain races and ethnicities, such as Black and Latino.

The second group, however, actively tries to erase the Chinese ethnicity altogether. That, she said, felt wrong and unsettling.

Mari herself plays Love and Producer (also known as Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice). Her favorite character is Lucien (Xu Mo). “I love that he is Chinese,” she told me.

When I looked up Lucien, I was struck by how closely he resembled a popular Chinese social media archetype: the “hot nerd” – intellectual, restrained, quietly intense. I asked Mari which aspects of his attraction felt universal, and which felt tied to specifically Chinese masculinity. I explained that traits like emotional restraint and diligence are often framed in Chinese discourse as uniquely Chinese forms of desirability.

She admitted that she didn’t feel qualified to identify “Chinese masculinity” as such, having had limited contact with Chinese men in real life. Instead, she described Lucien as a rare hybrid archetype: flirtatious yet reserved, dark-haired, intelligent, glasses-wearing. “Those traits don’t usually coexist in one character,” she said. It was the combination, rather than the nationality, that captivated her.

Her answer led me to a broader question. As Chinese otome games expand overseas, they are often framed as “cultural export,” a label that carries political value. In China, gaming is a heavily scrutinized industry due to concerns about addiction and youth influence. Otome games, in particular, can be seen as threatening traditional values surrounding marriage and gender roles, which leads to a low birth rate. A similar title, Glow, an AI companion app developed by MiniMax, has already been banned in mainland China. (Unlike AI companion apps, most otome games are not built on open-ended artificial intelligence but rely primarily on scripted narratives.)

But if these games are packaged as “cultural export,” they gain legitimacy. Overseas success becomes a shield, helping them survive at home.

Yet are these games truly exporting Chinese culture? Or are they primarily adapting to global tastes?

Many of the male archetypes presented in those games and short dramas, such as the powerful, emotionally dominant “CEO-type” lover, are often assumed to be uniquely East Asian. In reality, they resonate strongly with Western female audiences as well, even though their society has higher levels of feminist consciousness. That makes me realize these traits are not strictly “Asian”, but are broadly universal. Meanwhile, the characters themselves are deliberately racially ambiguous, designed to allow players wide latitude in interpretation.

Mari’s perspective also highlighted another blind spot. When Chinese discourse talks about “the West,” it often implicitly evokes a narrow Anglo-Saxon racial archetype. In reality, Western societies are racially and culturally diverse, encompassing Black, Latino, Eastern European, and many other communities whose desires are far from fully served by existing romance games.

That diversity is more an opportunity than a complication. And it may ultimately matter more for the future of Chinese games abroad than the question of whether a virtual boyfriend is really Chinese at all.

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To read previous editions of Red Note Signals:

Nikkei rounded up a set of surprisingly useful AI innovations at CES 2026; Wired reported that VR glasses are suddenly everywhere. Robot vacuum brand Dreame is even rolling EVs onto the floor—while both the EV company and Dreame try very hard not to acknowledge the connection.

Meanwhile, Kuaishou, China’s TikTok Douyin competitor, is pushing into AI video via Kling AI, aspiring to be China’s answer to Sora—or to grab a slice of the microdrama boom by using AI to compress production time.

But as you’ll see in Peiyue’s reporting, CES didn’t just feature Chinese companies—it felt like a party hosted by them. Beneath all the spectacle, do we really need three dozen AI eyewear products when Meta has just sold over 2 million pairs? Is the TAM worth the involution?

That’s the tension that will keep surfacing as this wave of Chinese companies going global continues.

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CES 2026 Shows the U.S. Market Still Fuels China’s Tech Dream

By Peiyue Wu

Flying halfway across the globe to exhibit in the United States, many Chinese startups and tech companies arrived at CES only to find themselves surrounded by familiar faces. On the show floor in Las Vegas, it sometimes felt less like leaving China than wandering through an overseas extension of Shenzhen’s Nanshan Science and Technology Park.

Despite a noticeably higher U.S. visa rejection rate for Chinese applicants compared with last year, the Consumer Electronics Show, held from January 6 to 9, still drew a strikingly strong Chinese presence. The annual trade fair, widely seen as a bellwether for global innovation, was jokingly referred to within China’s tech circles as the “Chinese Electronics Showcase.”

While the number of mainland Chinese exhibitors fell from 1,212 last year to 942 this year, Chinese companies remained the backbone of several emerging categories. Among the 38 humanoid robot exhibitors, 21 were from China, accounting for 55 percent. In AI smart glasses, Chinese brands made up nearly 70 percent of the field, with 16 out of 23 exhibitors.

CES has come to resemble a pilgrimage. On RedNote, one AI-powered smart gardening startup even boasted about exhibiting at CES on a budget of just 70,000 yuan (roughly $10,000). Company size and capital strength mattered less than the act of participation itself. Simply showing up had become a signal of ambition.

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This enthusiasm for “going global” appears oddly out of sync with the still-frozen political climate between the U.S. and China. Yet for Chinese entrepreneurs, geopolitics often feels abstract compared with more immediate pressures at home. A slowing domestic economy and intense competition have made earning U.S. dollars and accessing overseas markets one of the few remaining sources of momentum. Ironically, it might be precisely the distance and unfamiliarity of the U.S. market that allow Chinese founders to project bigger ambitions and imagine wider possibilities.

Major Chinese brands were trying hard to cut through the noise. Lenovo went big this year, renting out Las Vegas’ landmark Sphere to host its own keynote event. Meanwhile, at TCL’s booth, a Chongqing-based influencer known for mimicking Donald Trump’s accent in English-language parody videos made an appearance. Nicknamed “Chinese Trump” online, he was already familiar to many U.S. audiences even though this trip marked his first visit to the country.

Skepticism followed closely behind the hype. Critics on Chinese social media argued that CES is becoming an influencer-driven destination. Small content creators flock to the show to capture traffic, while exhibitors polish their brand image rather than seriously pursuing overseas markets, only to return home and refocus on China.

Seen this way, CES resembles a Chinese social media carnival. Even as official tech outlets hailed the strong Chinese turnout as proof of rising global influence, individual bloggers struck a more cynical note. Some pointed out that Korean companies swept most of the major CES awards. Others mocked products they felt were half-baked or embarrassing exports, such as a “smart hair clipper” that claims to sense speed, tilt, and angle in real time to prevent uneven fades or overcuts.

Yet even amid the noise, there are signs of genuine evolution. Compared with last year, product thinking has matured. Rather than awkwardly grafting AI features onto existing products, more companies are designing hardware around AI as the core logic. For example, Lenovo’s laptops with expandable screens that are able to rotate based on facial recognition to track movement during video calls treat the laptop as a quasi-robotic system.

Whether CES ultimately delivers Chinese exhibitors meaningful U.S. connections, genuine customer interest, and solid orders, or merely another social media badge to show off back home, remains an open question. What is harder to dismiss is the momentum on the ground. The enthusiasm to test the U.S. market, to be seen, and to compete on a global stage is still moving forward.

To read more previous editions of Red Note Signals:

By China shedding, I mean the deliberate effort to reduce or remove perceived China ties in order to lower political, regulatory, and reputational risk in global markets. Meta’s decision to buy Manus for $2.5 billion is a definitive vote that China shedding is an exit strategy that can clear at scale, at least on the U.S. side of the U.S.–China AI competition.

To understand why, it helps to define “reverse CFIUS” in plain terms. If CFIUS is the U.S. process that worries about foreign buyers taking control of sensitive American companies, reverse CFIUS flips the direction of concern.

Instead of asking, “Is China buying U.S. tech capabilities?” it asks, “Are we helping China build?” That is why a U.S. investment into a China-linked AI startup triggered scrutiny in the first place. Washington was trying to stop American money, talent, and technical know-how from strengthening AI capabilities that could end up inside China’s ecosystem.

That was the Benchmark story. When Benchmark invested, the political framing was straightforward: why should American capital subsidize an AI company with roots in China?

Meta changes the story because it changes the end state. In the Benchmark case, the headline was “American capital flowing into a China-connected AI company.” In an acquisition with a clean cut with China, the headline becomes “a China-origin capability being pulled into U.S. ownership and control.”

If Chinese ownership is bought out and China operations are shut down, the asset ends up on the American side, it’s not a problem. TikTok is the closest analogy: the de-risking outcome in Washington is not a promise; it is a change in control. Meta went straight to the point: this deal delivers that change, so the transaction removes China-linked exposure rather than extending it.

Meta’s PR strategy around the Manus acquisition

Meta executed the messaging with almost surgical precision, and Manus checked off many boxes in advance by moving to Singapore. Meta left little room for ambiguity, and DC China hawks have not mounted a sustained objection since the announcement.

A Meta spokesperson said there would be no continuing Chinese ownership interests after the transaction, and Manus would discontinue services and operations in China. Reporting also highlighted steps that sounded enforceable rather than rhetorical, including shutting down the China-facing AI assistant Monica.cn, restricting incoming Manus employees from accessing prior customer data, and geo-gating model access.

Timing helped too. The announcement landed in the holiday dead zone, when reporters are away and lawmakers are harder to mobilize. But timing only works when the messaging is already airtight. Meta understands the DC game and has spent decades building a Hill operation for a rainy day. In this case, the rainy day arrived as a China-origin AI acquisition, and Meta came prepared with exactly the language Washington wants to hear.

Why now, and why Manus?

Like many, I listened to Manus’s last long-form interview (CN) before the acquisition. In one of the most illuminating moments from the three-hour conversation, co-founder Peak Ji was asked how a small company competes with OpenAI. He answered with a line that is less a quip than a directional strategy for this AI era: “小公司怎么和大厂竞争，就是赶紧成为大厂.” A small company competes with a giant by quickly becoming one.

He did not mean matching headcount. He meant achieving concentrated superiority in a domain that a platform cares about, then attaching distribution, compute, and compliance to a larger balance sheet through acquisition. Sounds to me like a very clear roadmap to getting acquired as a way of competing. The exit becomes a scaling mechanism.

My biggest takeaway from watching the interview is how Manus approaches PR and comms with a long-term view. From the initial launch video—which was scripted by the co-founders not outsourced— the company was founder-led and designed for long-tail relationship value in the tech community on both sides of the Pacific.

Peak used the phrase 广结善缘, “broadly sowing seeds of goodwill,” to explain why Manus blew up at launch and why it attracted genuine interest and coverage quickly. He named dropped Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) and Jack Dorsey as early users of Manus.

The premise is quite simple but rarely done well: build goodwill over years by consistently showing up for other builders, sharing insights without immediately extracting value, and treating reputation as compounding capital. This mindset, unfortunately, isn’t the norm. Many AI startups in China, and many U.S. startups with Chinese founders, misread influence as a commodity and confuse press releases with real endorsement. Manus treated earned validation as relational, and also hyper selective about choosing opportunities to engage. In the process, Manus cultivated relationships with technical opinion leaders with meaningful followings on X, model ecosystem partners, and journalists who actually shape taste inside the community. Influence becomes a distribution network instead of outsourced to the GTM or growth marketing function.

That focus on influence showed up in how Peak talked about the company’s leverage over model providers. In the interview, he spent significant time describing Manus’s influence on feature development across model vendors like Google and Microsoft. He attribute that influence less to charisma and more to bargaining power: Manus was, by his account, a meaningful paying customer and feedback partner, which created real pull with providers.

tl:dr Manus treated influence as an asset, and that is the kind of reputation asset Meta bought.

China shedding in 2026

I have been tracking China Shedding as a signal since early 2024, from Temu trimming parent-company references, to TikTok trying to prove it is American enough, to VCs restructuring to sever China exposure.

My thesis then was that attempts at a dual narrative (to be one thing in China, and another globally) to fix perceptions in the United States carry a different long-term risk. The more a company distances itself from its Chinese identity, the more it can invite suspicion from Beijing that it is exporting talent, technology, and legitimacy away from China.

The Meta–Manus deal does not disprove that thesis. It updates it for the AI era. China shedding and Singaporization work as long as the narrative fits neatly inside “American tech leadership” framing and the company over-communicates separation so hawkish rebuttals can’t gain traction. Meta’s decades of DC lobbying turn that communication into a shield. Manus’s founder-led clarity turns it into a story that can travel and a playbook to emulate.

What makes Manus feel like a turning point is also what makes it feel like it could be the last of its kind. In China, the reaction is already politically and emotionally charged because it signals a path for ambitious Chinese AI companies to follow.

Manus also exposes an uncomfortable truth: for young AI companies, the market, the validation, and the exit pathway increasingly sit outside China, and the price of entry is a thorough China-shedding posture.

If more companies try to replicate the Manus playbook, Beijing has every incentive to raise the cost of that choice through export-control and tech-transfer enforcement. The U.S. side may treat China shedding as a compliance success. The China side may treat it as a strategic and reputational risk.

That tension is the next chapter of the story.

According to my ChatGPT Wrapped, this year, “I built meaning through strategy, owned the narrative, and turned press releases into philosophy.”

But if I’m being honest, the most meaningful moments of my year were the quiet and uneventful ones: reading through A–Z dog names in the index section with my four-year-old; channeling my inner Mel Robbins and giving my tween the pep talk before his archery competition, debating the societal ramifications of AI with my engineer-turned lawyer husband. Long walks in the park. Eating good butter.

1.FAV pasttime 2. Direct 3. Archery 4. I feel seen by my 4 yr old 5. aforementioned good butter 6. hosting fds 7. I know so many dog breeds now 8. don’t be 心不在焉 9. Important words of 2025 according to my Gen Alpha (sans 67, because parents ruined it)

The moments I return to most are the ones I spent alone with myself—journaling, reading books that strengthen my mind with no obvious payoff for work, no immediate utility for understanding the world.

This year, I started a new ritual—I’ve been tracking the readings that are thought-provoking and emblematic of the times we live in, week by week. One that stayed with me came from an April New York Times op-ed: “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.” TL;DR: live with intentionality and intensity—make yourself the master, not the passenger.

As I look ahead, these are the signals I’ll be watching closely in 2026:

• Empathy, coddling, and the accountability reckoning: what counts as “deserving” and “fair” when resources are allocated, and geopolitics play into the calculations.

• The loneliness epidemic: mental health, romantic withdrawal, and the renewed search for meaning will be an important theme in 2026. The economic impact and political urgency as society grapples with all these issues in a post-AI era.

• Emotional capitalism will be everywhere we look. See above.

• AI, tech, and regulatory lag: how policy debates fixate on intent while outcomes keep compounding—and what it means when governance chronically trails deployment, and regulation is seen as an innovation hurdle in the race of AI hegemony. China and the U.S.’s approaches will diverge.

• Motherhood and women’s roles become even more politicized: in both China and the U.S., where reproduction, choice, the institution of marriage, and identity are increasingly treated as public battlegrounds.

• Communication and PR’s role in the Media landscape further shifts: less performative pitching and more relational dynamics; fragmentation continues, and the rise of the corporate editorial content is here to stay. EARNED media will be even more difficult, and more brands/companies will confuse paid influencer strategy with actual influence.

In 2026, I want to focus more on the signals that deserve analyzing—and on a few personal goals: doing fewer things better in the spirit of slow productivity, embracing stillness, and being fully present for myself and for the people I love.

Calling the Shots will continue to be free to read on all posts, but there will be more reasons to become paid subscribers for worthy perks and access in 2026. Join the club.

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Lastly, a reminder:

Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.

—Age of Extinction

May we all, in 2026, defy drift—analyze the signals, spot the trends, and choose intention over autopilot, so we can step into the year clear-eyed, steady, and ready to ultimately call the shots.

Politics aside, Red Note has become a governance headache in Taiwan precisely because it functions as a networked public where meaning is produced bottom-up. For Taiwanese authorities, that matters because once content circulates through peer-to-peer ties and platform-native behaviors—reposting, stitching, parody—it becomes harder to attribute intent, enforce boundaries, or contain spillovers.

This is even more true when the platform sits outside local jurisdiction and compliance mechanisms. As content travels across communities, it gets re-contextualized. The “same” message can be read depending on the audience’s cultural and political frame, especially once it crosses borders.

In #3 of Red Note Signals, Peiyue analyzes Red Note’s precarious position in Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Red Note Ban and the Politics of Safer Targets

By: Peiyue Wu

On December 4, the interior ministry ordered telecom operators to block the Chinese social media app for one year, citing rising online fraud and “lack of cooperation” from its Shanghai-based operator. On the eve of the ban, Taiwanese users flooded Red Note with farewell posts, while mainland Chinese users quickly shared VPN tips. These were the same tools they had long used to access overseas content or to “re-enter” China’s internet to stream domestic platforms while studying or working abroad.

Within hours, Taiwanese users began testing their new digital locations in comment sections. Some appeared as Australia or Japan. Others suddenly showed up as Shandong, Anhui, or Liaoning. This visibility was made possible by a 2022 rule introduced by China’s Cyberspace Administration requiring major platforms to display users’ IP-based location, a measure originally designed to curb misinformation.

Taiwan’s own Digital Development Ministry data highlights the inconsistency of the ban. Facebook remains the largest conduit for scams, with over 51,000 cases in the past 30 days, followed by Threads and Instagram. Red Note recorded just 1,706 cases over two years, far below what Meta platforms see in a single month. If fraud were the only criterion, Red Note would not be an obvious target.

That disparity has fueled public skepticism. Within days of the announcement, Red Note’s download ranking in Taiwan surged to the top of app store charts, despite the platform already having roughly three million users on the island – nearly 15% of the population – before the ban.

This echoes what happened earlier this year when TikTok faced a potential ban in the United States. Red Note unexpectedly benefited from a spillover effect, and the influx of users from TikTok to Red Note became known as the “TikTok refugees.” Each attempt to restrict the platform seems to reaffirm its cultural value, reframing it into a symbol of digital autonomy.

Why Red Note Instead of TikTok

Taiwan has long debated banning TikTok, largely due to concerns that Beijing-backed information campaigns could influence elections and spread disinformation. During the past election cycle, research from RFA suggested that TikTok’s viral recommendation system may have contributed to the spread–and in some cases the amplification–of conspiracy narratives around vote-counting irregularities.

Yet banning TikTok outright carries political risk. For a government that prides itself on democratic values and freedom of expression, doing so during or around elections could easily be criticized as self-serving censorship.

As a result, Taiwan opted for a softer approach toward TikTok. Authorities restricted its use on government devices, expanded funding for fact-checking networks, and invested in public media literacy to counter information warfare.

Red Note occupies a different position in the cultural zeitgeist. It plays a much lesser role in electoral mobilization, which makes it politically safer to target as a platform. More importantly, it presents a different kind of challenge for the Taiwanese government. It is one of the few platforms where ordinary users from mainland China and Taiwan interact directly.

The Uncomfortable Bottom-up Familiarity

What makes Red Note uniquely sensitive is not top-down propaganda from Beijing, but the intimacy of everyday interactions among its users. The platform facilitates exchanges on travel tips and consumption habits. Viral moments often emerge from cultural remixing, such as a Taiwanese lawmaker’s dramatic speech line being transformed by mainland musicians into a meme-like internet anthem.

Other mundane topics include dating norms, gender expectations, or why some Taiwanese women perceive mainland men as more traditionally “masculine,” including differences around paying for meals.

These interactions cultivate non-political bonds that are difficult to regulate precisely because they unfold through everyday life. They humanize the “other side,” not as a looming geopolitical threat, but as millions of individuals with distinct accents and cultural references.

One widely circulated post asked whether mainland slang and linguistic habits are quietly slipping into everyday Taiwanese speech. Hundreds of comments followed, with users listing phrases they have unconsciously adopted.

After all, language is not merely a means of communication, but a carrier of shared context and identity. It can form a basis for mutual recognition that is far harder to counter than any explicit political message.

For many Taiwanese users, Red Note also serves as a window into professional and lifestyle opportunities on the mainland, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai’s tech and advertising sectors.

This may be precisely what makes Red Note more threatening than TikTok in the eyes of policymakers. Ironically, attempts to suppress curiosity and limit recognition of this quiet soft power can backfire, making the platform even more desirable. Once users realize the value of these connections, banning the platform only strengthens its allure.

In the recent WSJ Exchange front-page feature, “Arc’teryx Won Over China With a $1,000 Jacket. Now It’s Popping Up Everywhere,” the brand essentially gets a beautifully packaged replay of its own talking points:

• China is the growth engine.

• Arc’teryx can charge 20% more in China than in the U.S., even in a deflationary economy.

• The Cai Guo-Qiang Tibetan Plateau outrage “hasn’t stopped its growth in China,” and “a widespread boycott didn’t materialize.”

• Amer Sports’ stock is up 28% this year.

  

This is exactly the investor thesis from Amer, Arc’Teryx’s parent company: Greater China as the growth engine, Arc’Teryx as the hero asset, differentiated from luxury names like LVMH and Kering that are supposedly struggling to unlock Chinese demand. The WSJ piece doesn’t interrogate that story; it reaffirms it, at length, with some colorful anecdotes layered on top.

If you don’t follow the brand or the crisis closely, you walk away thinking: Arc’teryx is one of the rare brands winning in China while the Chanels and Guccis sputter; the Tibet thing blew over; management knows what it’s doing.

The piece misses the mark in a few areas:

1. Contradictions within the WSJ narrative itself

2. A very confident conclusion about Tibet and “no boycott” built on pre-crisis numbers

3. Missing ownership context, and what that implies for Arc’teryx’s future

4. A misleading portrayal of the Chinese consumer

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“High value is the new high end” – on whose terms?

One of the article’s core claims is that Arc’teryx has nailed the mood of the Chinese consumer, and “high value is the new high end.”

At the same time, the piece gives you this line from Stuart Haselden, Arc’teryx’s CEO:

“We sit in between sport and luxury,” he said in an interview. “It’s helped us to do well as the consumer environment has been challenging in China.”

And right alongside that, WSJ tells you that:

• Arc’teryx prices its products about 20% higher in China than in the U.S.

• China delivers wider profit margins than other regions.

High value for whom? The Chinese consumer—or Amer’s gross margin line?

The implied picture—that logo-conscious Chinese consumers are now trading LVMH and Gucci for Arc’teryx as their new expression of “high end”—is a big stretch. More likely, a thin upper slice is simply adding Arc’teryx to an existing roster of aspirational logos, not graduating from luxury to a higher plane of performance virtue. Wealthy Chinese shoppers haven’t “pulled back” from flashy luxury at all; they are buying Arc’teryx for the logo, as most of the Chinese consumers cited in the piece make clear. And if those same consumers are paying roughly 20% more than Americans for the privilege, it’s hard to argue that “value” is accruing anywhere except on Amer’s margin line.

2. “Boycott didn’t materialize” – based on a mostly pre-crisis quarter

The strongest reassurance in the WSJ piece is this: Arc’teryx’s sponsorship of a Cai Guo-Qiang fireworks display on the Tibetan Plateau “hasn’t stopped its growth in China,” and “a widespread boycott didn’t materialize.”

The first problem is simple: Q3, by definition, cannot fully reflect the aftermath of the Tibet event.

The WSJ piece leans on Amer’s Q3 results to argue the crisis passed with little impact on Amer’s earnings. To back that up, it notes that Amer reported Q3 results on November 18, with revenue up 30% to $1.76 billion and Greater China sales up 47% year over year. On the surface, that sounds like proof.

But the timing makes those numbers a poor test of the claim. The Cai Guo-Qiang × Arc’teryx fireworks event took place on September 19, followed by days of condemnation and calls for a boycott on Chinese social media. Amer Sports runs on a calendar fiscal year; Q3 2025 covers July 1 to September 30, 2025.

Those Q3 numbers are real—but they are overwhelmingly pre-crisis. Q3 tells you Arc’teryx was on fire in China before the event; it tells you almost nothing about the long-term consequences of the outrage that followed.

For the period where any real impact would show up—Q4—the article relies on a single piece of management guidance: Amer’s CEO acknowledges an “initial slowdown at the start of the fourth quarter,” but says sales growth has since rebounded “as the weather has cooled.”

A more balanced approach would have been:

• Q3, mostly pre-Tibet, was very strong.

• Management claims that Q4 is recovering after an initial dip.

• It is too early to know what the longer-term effects on the brand, pricing, and community will be.

Instead, the piece moves quickly to close the loop: Tibet happened, there was outrage, an apology, a cancelled academy, some restoration payments, and then sales and stock bounced back. End of story.

What’s missing is any real curiosity about what Chinese online outrage actually does over time—how it can erode moral authority, push core outdoor users toward other brands, or leave a lingering sense that something about the Arc’teryx story no longer rings true, even if that doesn’t show up as an immediate collapse in quarterly revenue.

3. Who owns Arc’teryx, and what future is it optimizing for?

The article does at least name the key players behind Arc’teryx: Anta, Amer, and Lululemon.

What it doesn’t do is connect those dots to Arc’teryx’s risk appetite and long-term direction.

Public filings show that entities affiliated with Anta hold an effectively controlling stake in Amer, making Anta its dominant shareholder. Under that structure, Amer’s ties to China have deepened—operationally, commercially, and strategically—and the reasoning in the piece why Arc’teryx can still win in China while the LVMHs and Kerings of the world struggle.

The WSJ piece conveniently replays and refreshes this thesis for a broader readership.

But to tell a whole story about how Arc’teryx is a “conquering China” case study, you can’t stop at “Anta owns a big chunk.” You also have to ask:

• How does Anta’s China-first priority shape the kinds of risks Arc’teryx takes—like a high-profile fireworks spectacle on the Tibetan Plateau for publicity?

• When the aforementioned controversial stunt blows up, what guardrails, if any, does Amer put in place to make sure it never gets that far again?

• How does the brand reconcile those pressures with the values Arc’Teryx claims—mountain respect, technical integrity, and environmental stewardship?

On that last question, the WSJ piece actually hints at another future: Amer wants North America to “catch up” to China in sales by 2030. That’s a big ambition. It raises some apparent tensions that the story doesn’t even poke at:

• If the most significant growth so far has come from logo-loving, wealthier Chinese consumers paying a premium, and the brand's founding story is about hardcore outdoor athletes, what will Arc’Teryx’s product assortment and production system look like in 2030?

• How will Arc’teryx prioritize R&D, store locations, and marketing when Anta-style volume growth in China and “salvaging the outdoor sporting community” in North America may not always pull in the same direction?

They aren’t theoretical governance questions; they go to the heart of what Arc’teryx becomes over the next decade. In such a long feature that positions itself as a look at Arc’teryx’s future, the absence of these types of questions is conspicuous.

4. The fantasy civil servant and teacher Arc’Teryx consumers that are so NOT the Chinese middle class

The most revealing part of the WSJ story is the closing anecdote.

We meet Zhao, a 28-year-old civil servant, and Lu, a 28-year-old teacher. Ahead of their first “outdoorsy” vacation to Iceland, they walk into an Arc’teryx store, and each buys an approximately $800 waterproof jacket. One reason they choose Arc’teryx: “everyone can recognize the logo.”

On the page, it’s a charming little scene. In the piece's structure, it does much heavier work: it serves as the image of the “new Chinese middle class” on which the China growth narrative rests.

Anyone with a realistic sense of what teachers and civil servants earn in China will recognize this as an exception rather than a representative snapshot of the middle class. Two $800 jackets plus an Iceland vacation is a major financial event even for many private-sector professionals.

What their story actually demonstrates is something much narrower: that a thin, relatively affluent slice of young Chinese can and will buy Arc’teryx as a status symbol, alongside other global luxury brands, when the brand’s story and social signals align.

But by presenting this couple as emblematic, the piece doesn’t just generalize about “Chinese consumers”; it elevates them into an aspirational fantasy that flatters Arc’teryx’s investor story. They become the emotional proof point that a 20% China premium is reasonable, twenty-somethings are spending thousands on jackets, and that investors can rejoice.

The missing step in all of this

If I put on my PR consultant hat for a second, I can almost see the sequence inside Amer and Anta. You watch the Tibet outrage run its course. You ride out the first wave of anger and boycott calls. You see that Q3 is still strong. By late autumn, you decide the worst is over, and it’s time to repair confidence. You line up a WSJ Exchange feature, put forward an eloquent CEO to talk China growth and global ambitions, acknowledge the controversy briefly, show contrition, and make sure two lines land clearly:

“A widespread boycott of Arc’teryx didn’t materialize.”
“The stock is up 28% this year.”

As a communications strategy, it’s solid. I’d advise a version of it myself.

What’s missing—and what the WSJ piece never really pushes for—is the step in between: a strong, specific commitment that foreshadows real change. Something closer to:

“As a mountaineer brand by DNA, we will protect the mountain and the brand at all cost. Here is how we will make sure a Tibet-style stunt never gets green-lit again.”

Instead, the closure is a short paragraph in passing: the academy was cancelled, a GM stepped down, and local authorities ordered restoration payments. There’s no real discussion of how decision-making has changed, what internal guardrails are now in place, or how Arc’teryx plans to rebuild trust with the outdoor and environmental communities it offended.

From a PR standpoint, timing a big WSJ Exchange hit to a strong Q3 and using it to underscore “no boycott” and “stock up 28%” is a textbook way to stabilize sentiment. No PR team gets punished for reassuring the market. But for a company that constantly invokes its “mountain DNA,” this was also a rare chance to say something concrete about values and the future—and that chance was mostly spent proving that Tibet didn’t dent the quarter.

That may be comforting for investors, but it is a narrower story than the brand is capable of telling. If Arc’teryx truly wants to sit “between sport and luxury” and still be taken seriously by climbers, hikers, and mountain towns, it has to show that a Tibetan Plateau fireworks stunt is more than a footnote that happened to leave Q3 intact. The brands that endure treat moments like this not as blips to wave away, but as chances to prove their DNA is something deeper than a logo and a line on an earnings slide.

I first came across GIADA’s mini art-history series while scrolling on Red Note. I lived in Florence for a year, so Renaissance art has a permanent claim on my heart. When I mentioned this campaign to — my partner in tracking Red Note signals, and an art history major (she’s endlessly cool) — Peiyue immediately saw it as a fascinating example too.

Below is a deep dive into how GIADA — a Chinese-owned, Italian-positioned brand — courts the minds and hearts of Chinese consumers, and the tensions that come with it. The brand is also waging a second, almost contradictory fight: staying aspirational for China’s middle class just as Western luxury fatigue sets in, budgets tighten, and “China-pride” guochao narratives start to rewrite what status looks like.

Below is the second installment of Red Note Signals, our series tracking how Red Note’s feed captures China’s shifting consumption trends and social mood.

You can read our first post on self-diagonosing ADHD on Red Note below.

How an “Acquired” Italian Luxury Brand Stays Milanese in China

By Peiyue Wu

The new playbook for attracting China’s middle class is no longer about gigantic billboards of scantily clad caucasian models or signing A-list Chinese actresses as brand ambassadors. The new formula is subtler, more cerebral: hire an art curator to produce art history mini lecture series on Red Note, or launch a podcast hosted by a celebrity journalist, and invite women with polished international credentials to talk about career development, personal growth, and ambition.

This is how GIADA, a Chinese-Italian brand that sits comfortably on the ground floors of China’s high end malls such as Wangfujing, right next to Chanel, Dior, and Gucci, is engaging with China’s increasingly sophisticated consumer base. You won’t find many Giada stores outside of China. For years, Chinese shoppers walking past GIADA’s boutiques and campaign posters probably just assumed it was yet another obscure European label they simply weren’t cosmopolitan enough to pronounce. Few realized the brand is actually controlled by a Shenzhen-based luxury mogul.

Technically, GIADA is Italian. Founded in 2001 by Rosanna Daolio, a former Max Mara designer, the brand was taken over in 2011 by its Chinese partner, the Redstone Group – though the company is careful to describe the transition as a “partnership,” not an acquisition. The brand continues to emphasize its “Made in Italy” credentials, with Gabriele Colangelo as creative director, while China HQ, the company says, oversees marketing and operations. Under a similar arrangement, Redstone now operates several other Italian labels.

That Italian identity is the brand’s core currency. Without it, GIADA risks being dismissed as just another domestic label merely posing as European – a suspicion that frequently surfaces on Chinese social media.

Yet the brand is also fighting a second, seemingly contradictory battle: how to stay desirable to China’s middle class at a moment when Western luxury excitement is cooling, wallets are tightening, and the rise of “China-pride” Guochao narrative is reshaping consumer psychology.

GIADA’s answer is a carefully curated form of emotional capitalism, one that China’s middle class, especially women, finds hard to quit. Those women are drawn to the brand’s promise of valuing culture and depth. These aspirational qualities are what highly educated, career-oriented, ambitious women want to be respected for as they navigate a male-dominated society in China. Even as “made in China” climbs the global ladder, the allure of Western art history and elite education continues to exert a powerful pull.

The Rednote Art History Academy

Launched on Xiaohongshu in September, “GIADA Academy (GIADA 迦达学苑)” has already posted more than a dozen short videos hosted by Ivy Li, an art-history creator. In four-minute episodes on the Medici family, Botticelli, or Renaissance Florence, Ivy layers ornate art-historical vocabulary over rapid-cut sequences of classical paintings and architecture.

Ivy is not Italian – which itself underscores that GIADA is not simply casting her for a look, but foregrounding her depth of knowledge. She is not just an influencer, Ivy runs her own curatorial and art advisory practice; GIADA is, in effect, borrowing her intellectual and professional credibility. She speaks with a soft, almost hypnotic warmth, with a precise articulation on the topics of art and beauty.

The Red Note account now has over 27,000 followers. For a young account barely over three months old, the numbers are strong.

A Luxury Podcast and a Journalist CEO

GIADA’s most effective campaign to date has been its podcast series “Take Bloom on the Rock (岩中花述).” Engagement surged after the brand brought on veteran interviewer Chen Luyu in its third season and the branded podcast has more than 2.5 million subscribers.

The guest list signals cultural prestige: Harvard Law graduate and debate champion Zhan Qingyun, for example, spoke about her years at Harvard and her admiration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who as controversial as she was, the second woman – and first Jewish woman – to serve on the Supreme Court. The female podcast guests are dressed in GIADA clothing and the aesthetics speaks louder than any advertisements.

Other luxury houses such as Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Prada among them have experimented with podcasts, either in advertorial format, or produced podcasts but only to abandon the format after a few episodes. GIADA remains one of the rare brands that has managed to turn podcasting into sustained cultural capital.

Perhaps it has something to do with GIADA’s journalist-turned-operator CEO. GIADA’s CEO Zhao Yizheng began as a journalist and photojournalist in the 1980s before shifting into luxury-focused investment in the 1990s. He describes the brand’s mission as conveying Italy’s culture, aesthetics, and intellectual heritage “through the careful lens of a reporter, the eye of a journalist.”

After consolidating its presence in China and keeping its Milan flagship, GIADA opened a Boston store in 2020. Zhao said in an interview at the time that they are “planning to open in New York in 2021, then in London, Paris and then in Italy, Rome, Venice and Florence to bring Giada into the world.”

So far, none of those plans have materialized. But using cultural capital to sell clothes seems to still be an important pillar of the brand strategy.

A Narrative Trap?

This raises a question: can GIADA ever speak with the same authority beyond China’s borders.

GIADA’s unique strength is its near-magical fusion of Italian heritage with a feminism interlaced with admiration for Western-educated, culturally influential Chinese women, a blend that simultaneously defines the brand at home and complicates its ability to translate that identity globally.

In a way, GIADA feels like a treaty between two aesthetics: Italian discipline wrapped around a Chinese sense of narrative.

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Since I wrote this, XPENG has deleted both the LinkedIn posts and videos I mentioned below. That, in itself, is a case study in what not to do. When a CEO has already posted something publicly, pulling it down later doesn’t erase the message — it just makes you look like you’re trying to walk it back. If it’s out in public, deleting it from your own channels is about as effective as hiding a screenshot-era mistake.

When I first saw Chinese EV brand XPENG CEO He Xiaopeng’s LinkedIn post about flying an unhappy customer from Australia to Guangzhou, I thought: this is exactly what happens when crisis PR is reimagined as influencer content.

“When I learned about Vanessa’s unpleasant experience at one of our stores, I was determined to invite her to Guangzhou, China from Australia. This time, I stepped in as her sales consultant to create a brand-new, exclusive experience for her personally.”

On paper, it sounds heartfelt and almost humbling. But the video tells a different story.

A “dissatisfied” customer from Australia, Vanessa, is flown all the way to Guangzhou. The CEO personally greets her. Cameras are already rolling. She’s all smiles. There is an entourage that looks like press, XPENG employees, and a polished production setup.

Vanessa also happens to be a fashion blogger, which means she fits neatly into the “influencer for hire” template. On camera, she looks slightly nervous, but goes along in that eager-to-please way you see when someone knows they are part of a brand shoot. She mentions that she owns a Tesla, but cheerfully adds that XPENG’s full self-driving feature is included, “which is great!”

She then asks what should have been a queue-up question: “How many stores do you have globally?”

That is where the mask slips a little. Instead of answering directly, the edit cuts to b-roll of the XPENG model gliding down the road. The CEO’s voiceover in Chinese (he had been speaking English up to this point) comes in, boasting that XPENG is number six in the global sales ranking and that the G6 accounts for most of those sales. The shot snaps back to the CEO as he speaks to (probably) his colleague.

From there, the “apology tour” unravels and drifts over to flying cars, XPENG’s IRON robot (like, as in Iron Man?), and the high-tech showroom XPENG really wants the audience to see. The CEO never actually answers the question about store count.

The Comms Playbook that wasn’t

The original “unpleasant experience” barely exists in the video narrative. It functions as a pretext, a hook. The story is no longer “we heard you and fixed it,” but “look how impressive our ecosystem is.”

Founder-led communications are all the rage these days, but in the XPENG CEO’s case, this is almost a textbook example of how not to do it:

• The hero of the story is the CEO, not the customer.

• The arc is not “here’s what went wrong and how we fixed it,” which is how a brand builds trust with the most critical audience: potential customers watching.

• The tone is not one of accountability, but a self-promotion show-and-tell with a human prop.

XPENG in Australia

All of this would be strange enough if it were just a one-off human interest story. But the context matters. Why a customer from Australia specifically?

Australia is not a random sideshow for Chinese EV brands. It’s a right-hand-drive, high-income, safety-conscious market where Chinese brands like BYD and MG are already gaining share and trying to prove they can match or surpass Japanese and European incumbents. For XPENG, Australia is supposed to be a credibility market: a place to demonstrate that the brand can deliver reliable cars, functioning after-sales service, and basic service in an English-speaking environment, to gear up for other right-hand-drive markets like the UK and Singapore.

On Whirlpool, one of Australia’s big tech and EV forums, the comments on XPENG’s local rollout are not about flying cars. They are about basic execution: long waits for cars, confusion about delivery timelines, lack of clarity on parts and servicing, and a messy website.

One comment calls out the problem:

“XPENG has made a lot of announcements, but doesn’t seem to be too good at following through on the basics.”

It’s a brutal line because it captures the asymmetry so cleanly. On LinkedIn, XPENG is showing off a CEO flying customers across continents, humanoid robots, and dramatic robot demos. On forums, real customers are asking whether spare parts are available in-country and why their car hasn’t arrived yet. And XPENG has been courting Australian consumers with incentives like lowering deposits, and offering zero-percent financing or cashback.

Which leads to an obvious question that the LinkedIn post never acknowledges: Out of all the customers in Australia who have complained, how did XPENG pick Vanessa? By the end of the video, I still don’t know what her complaint is. How was she chosen? To be the one flown to Guangzhou, given the CEO treatment, and turned into content.

Was she picked because her case was the most serious, or because she was the most on-brand—a camera-friendly, English-speaking fashion blogger whose presence reinforces XPENG’s aspirational image in Western markets?

Good crisis work, when something actually goes wrong, is boring on camera. It is about listening, acknowledging the problem, and explaining in concrete terms what broke in the system. The company shows what has changed for everyone, not just for one person flown in on a sponsored trip. It empowers frontline staff, changes incentives and processes, and monitors whether the fixes work.

“Blind driving” without a real third party

Less than a day after the Guangzhou–Vanessa reel, XPENG’s CEO posted a second video, this time to showcase XPENG’s AI driving capabilities.

The video shows a car with its windows fully covered, running what is described as a “blind driving” test. A host—clearly not Chinese, not once named, positioned as an international voice—narrates the experience and jokes about his “dangerous” job riding along. There’s a playful dig at Tesla, and he says on camera that Xpeng’s system is “probably better than Tesla’s FSD.”

On the surface, this looks like a third-party endorsement: look, a foreign host is saying our system is safer and better than Tesla’s. But again, the fundamental questions any serious viewer would ask are never addressed:

• Who is this host? What is his background?

• Why should we care about his opinion?

This “international host explainer video” format only works if the person comes in with independent credibility: a CNBC anchor, a BBC correspondent, a well-known safety tester, or a YouTuber serving as a trusted third-party voice.

The test itself is conducted in a closed, controlled area on a track Xpeng has built, with prearranged obstacles laid out in front of the vehicle. As a proof-of-concept demo, that setup is reasonable; companies have to start somewhere. But the way it is framed (“100% safety,” “full confidence”) asks the audience to make a leap from controlled environment to real-world safety without evidence.

Even the “dangerous job” joke undermines the seriousness of what they are supposedly proving. If the whole point is that the system is trustworthy, why is everyone still half-treating it like a stunt?

Earned influence vs. paid influence

Both posts share the same underlying confusion: mistaking paid or controlled influence for earned authority.

Hiring influencers to do a segment about your AI driving safety is, structurally, an advertisement. Putting a fashion blogger who had a bad experience into a glossy “VIP redemption” storyline is also, structurally, an advertisement. An ad is not PR.

There is nothing wrong with paid or staged content. Brands do it every day. The problem comes when companies expect these pieces to be received as fair and objective third-party opinions—as if the audience will treat the influencer like a neutral journalist or a safety authority.

They won’t. People see the “hard sell” and recognize when a “host” is there to deliver talking points rather than to interrogate claims. They notice when, at the end of the video, he is essentially reading out a recap that sounds like the brand deck.

Earned influence works differently:

• In crisis: you earn trust by being specific about what went wrong and what you changed.

• In product and safety: you earn trust by working with credible third parties—engineers, testing agencies, researchers, skeptical reviewers—and letting them design or at least seriously interrogate the tests, even if the results are not purely flattering.

Paid influence can create awareness, reach, and a short-term boost. But it is not the strategy for building a long-term reputation. The moment the audience senses that what they are seeing is over-produced, over-managed, and under-explained, the credibility falls off a cliff.

The algorithm vs. the audience

If these two LinkedIn posts are XPENG’s way of “getting a head start” and being aggressive in external comms—one emotional, one technical—they should probably rethink how they deliver the strategy.

Looking at the comment sections reveals a familiar pattern: waves of positive but hollow support, the kind of generic praise that reads more like people trying to ingratiate themselves with the CEO than offering genuine engagement. That is not a measure of real persuasion; it is a measure of internal power dynamics and LinkedIn politeness.

The danger for any company, not just XPENG, is that leadership begins optimizing for the wrong audience. The stories are crafted to play well inside the company and within the executive’s own social graph—the visionary CEO, the fearless AI, the human-like robot—rather than to build durable trust with the people whose lives and safety are actually affected by the products. Even Chinese media 36Kr has called on Chinese EV brands, including XPENG, to stop “avoiding problems” in a piece aptly titled: “Domestic brands are still one 'recall' away from foreign brands.”

Earlier this month, Xpeng showcased a new humanoid robot and discussed its self-developed Turing AI chips. The rebrand as an “AI company” is timely. The humanoid robot’s eerily human-like gait went viral, and Xpeng even cut it up live on stage to prove there was no real person inside.

XPENG Co-President Brian Gu told CNBC that the “company has been developing some technology before Tesla but has not been as vocal in promoting it.”

It sure is now.

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Our inaugural piece focuses on mental health and the wave of people informally “diagnosing” themselves with ADHD on Red Note. It’s not that different from the old habit of cross-checking every rash on WebMD—and now asking ChatGPT about every symptom—but it points to something larger. As the outside world feels stagnant, this becomes an extension of the logic of 躺平 (“lying flat”) by turning inward: if you can’t move the system, you start scanning and reinterpreting yourself, trying to make peace with what you can’t change.

For an older generation in China, anxiety didn’t really have a psychological vocabulary; it was something you absorbed, carried, and called “real life.” On Red Note, that same unease gets labeled, broken into symptoms, turned into aesthetics, and pushed into the feed. It’s the “anxious generation” narrative Jonathan Haidt writes about, but adapted to China—shaped by family expectations, the long grinding slowdown of the Chinese economy, and how people are coping. Red Note is simply where it surfaces first, and where we get to watch it evolve in real time.

China’s New Way of Coping with Anxiety: Self-Diagnosed ADHD

On Chinese social media these days, ADHD and bipolar disorder have drifted from medical jargon into the vocabulary of self-identity.

People aren’t just “cyber diagnosing” themselves. They’re diagnosing their parents.

In the past few months, I’ve heard some version of this at least three times from different friends:

“After going home and observing my mom for a week, I’m like 90% sure she’s bipolar (or ADHD). All my childhood trauma finally makes sense.”

This wave of self-pathologizing is the newest hotspot in China’s ongoing pop-psychology boom. The last big trend was avoidant personality disorder. Before that, it was MBTI.

This whole phenomenon signals how deeply psychology has permeated China’s popular culture. From early bestsellers like The Enneagram and The Courage to Be Disliked. Then came several rounds of pop-psychology booms across podcasts, short videos, and public-intellectual talk shows. Later, after China’s biggest stand-up show was taken down for political jokes, its star Li Dan reemerged on Xiaohongshu, running therapy-like livestreams where callers often begin with, “Well, it’s my toxic family issues…”

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Psychology quickly moved from fostering independent, self-aware individuals in a society shaped by collective norms to becoming a kind of currency in the online content economy: zodiac signs, 16 personalities, avoidant attachment, now the ADHD craze. This change reflects more than just a hunger for the latest trending concept; it also exposes how social moods are evolving.

And it’s not just China. A 2024 survey in the U.S. found that 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

The easy explanation is that we’re living through an era of unprecedented attention slaughter. Our focus is shredded by notifications, by work chats pinging at random, by the endless scrolling. Our brains have been retrained for hopscotch reading and skim-surfing thinking. No wonder everyone feels like they have ADHD.

Of course, there’s serious online discussion about medication and proper treatment. One trending Xiaohongshu post features a clip from U.S. psychology expert Gabor Maté’s appearance on the Joe Rogan show, where he argues that immediately prescribing medication to someone with ADHD is often the wrong approach.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data from 2019 to 2023 shows a similar concern: among U.S. children prescribed ADHD medication, one in five later ended up taking additional psychiatric drugs to manage the side effects. Just 37% had behavioral therapy beforehand, largely because it’s so hard to access.

Maté suggests that ADHD isn’t a disease, but an adaptive mechanism. Infants, for example, often appear restless, inattentive, or hyperactive under stress, such as during parental conflict. They can’t fight or flee, so their “distraction” is a coping mechanism: they simply disconnect.

And that brings me to what I really want to discuss.

Beyond the attention economy, there are larger structural forces at play — an increasingly high-pressure political environment, rising unemployment, anxieties about an aging society. Yet these are questions we rarely confront.

So instead, we turn inward, reducing every feeling to a diagnosis, even for issues like romantic dead-ends. On Xiaohongshu, posts frame cheating or serially fickle behavior as ADHD. People even ask which “partner type” is best for someone with ADHD, instead of asking the deeper questions: Why can’t I imagine a future anymore? Why does long-term stability feel impossible? Why does everything collapse into living only in the immediate present?

In a heavily moderated environment — where activism is discouraged, and public-interest voices risk consequences — talking about collective issues feels unsafe and often futile. It’s easier to retreat into the smallest, safest psychological space possible.

In a way, maybe we’re all avoidant now.

Treating every trait as a symptom of a disorder may well be the best coping mechanism.

But can we truly face ourselves if we refuse to face the world shaping us?

Perhaps, for now, living as an “ADHD person” is the most comfortable way to survive in this environment.

The Harvard Crimson’s story on Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein exposes how power, geopolitics, and gender still really work in 2025. In newly released emails and texts, Summers turns to Epstein as his “wing man” while pursuing a woman he repeatedly calls his “mentee”—a woman who appears to be the Chinese economist Keyu Jin.

In the messages, Summers frets that she might want to cut him off, but “wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.” Epstein reassures him, “She is doomed to be with you,” urging Summers to keep her in a “forced holding pattern.”

The woman they call “peril” is no junior grad student. Keyu Jin is a Harvard-educated economist, formerly tenured at LSE, now at HKUST. She’s published in top journals and a book, The New China Playbook. She sits on global corporate boards, advises governments, and has become the go-to interpreter of China’s economic rise. Her father, Jin Liqun, is one of China’s most powerful financial officials: former vice minister of finance, former vice president of the Asian Development Bank, and founding president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

“Peril”—that’s what a former Harvard president and a convicted sex trafficker called her.

The nickname itself carries violence. It echoes “Yellow Peril,” the racial panic that cast Chinese as civilizational threats to justify exclusion laws and lynchings. That same propaganda that demonized Asian men also fetishized Asian women as exotic, hypersexual conquests—Dragon Ladies and China Dolls for white men to possess. When Summers and Epstein code a Chinese economist as “peril” while calculating odds of getting her “horizontal,” they’re not being clever. They’re reenacting America’s oldest colonial script, in cavalier Gmail texting instead of government memos.

Summers casts her as “confused,” someone who “maybe wants to cut [him] off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.” Built into that framing is the mentorship trap: he controls the network; she manages his expectations as the price of entry. When Summers tells Epstein her “best shot” is deciding she “can’t have [his professional value] without romance/sex,” he spells out the deal: in this system, consent is never really free.

What makes “peril” so jarring is who Keyu Jin actually is. She’s positioned as the bridge between New China and global elites. Recently on Lex Fridman’s podcast, she pushes back against Western caricatures of monolithic Beijing. She explains China’s market-driven ecosystem, where local leaders are heavily incentivized to compete aggressively while operating under an overarching political framework that demands social cohesion and limits individual political influence. A Davos regular, she frames U.S.-China tensions as realignment rather than decoupling. Keyu Jin represents a particular vision of China to the world: confident, reform-minded, and understood by Western CEOs.

Yet in Summers and Epstein’s framing, she is the “peril”: “assertive and gorgeous,” with a father whose status adds intrigue, and the back-and-forth with her is dissected like a high-school dating game.

If Keyu Jin, with her Harvard credentials, LSE tenure, corporate boards, and a father in high office, can be reduced to “peril,” treated like a conquest, then credentials aren’t shields; they are just more assets for gatekeepers to price.

The Epstein files reveal an elite world where politics, finance, and academia function as different rooms in the same house. They have the Treasury jobs, the networks; younger women must be grateful mentees and game if relationships drift. Research shows male-mentor/female-mentee pairs emphasize career sponsorship above all—exactly what makes walking away impossible. Summers saying she “understands the tradeoff” just states the quiet part out loud.

The outrage has been swift. Harvard faculty called his Epstein relationship “disgraceful.” Elizabeth Warren demands Harvard cut ties. At the time of writing, Larry Summers retains his tenured position at Harvard.

But notice who’s silent: the women at the top who navigated these same dynamics. The senior economists, tech leaders, and companies that built brands around women’s advancement and the feminism narrative.

Where’s Sheryl Sandberg—Summers’ most famous female mentee, whose Lean In empire promised that brave, strategic women could climb the same ladders men did?

If prominent female leaders can’t say clearly that these emails are wrong, sexist, and depressingly common, the message to younger women is brutal: you’re on your own. Excel at the work, yes, but also calculate how much discomfort you’ll swallow to stay inside the bubble.

For those watching China’s rise and attempting to interpret it, “peril” carries extra weight. Keyu Jin translated China’s complexity while maintaining credibility in both worlds. That she is reduced to “peril” in their texts exposes the uncomfortable: to these men, Chinese women remain conquests to collect, not colleagues and voices to respect.

Jin didn’t ask to become the symbol of this moment. But how two of the West’s most notorious power brokers talked about her tells us something devastating about who the real peril has always been.

The White House would like the TikTok chapter to read as closure. It isn’t. The executive order did something narrower: it set up a U.S. vehicle fronted by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX at roughly half ownership, pushed ByteDance below twenty percent, and kept the app running by licensing a copy of the recommendation engine to be retrained and audited in the United States. Enforcement is paused for 120 days to December 16, even as the Supreme Court has upheld the 2024 sale-or-ban law. This is not a clean break; it is a political workaround. The vector of influence is just rearranged, not removed.

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That conditionality is the headline. On the very day the EO landed, I went on the BBC to make the point that TikTok’s five-year saga shows that in the U.S. market, success can be achieved and then renegotiated.

The licensing workaround ultimately hinges on China’s export-control decisions and Ministry of Commerce review. After years of asserting its Americanness, defying, then compromising by paying billions for Project Texas to Oracle, TikTok has been repackaged under a new cap table.

A spin-off backed by politically connected U.S. investors, plus MGX, invites the obvious question: Is it simply swapping one vector of influence for another? The administration opted for a structure that is politically acceptable in the U.S. for now: American local control and an American-dominated board, paired with a deal that China can approve—so both sides can spin it as a win in their respective echo chambers.

But the national-security framing belies a deeper us-versus-them logic and is further escalated by politics.

The cap table is packaging; the mechanic is the same—attention converted into micro-transactions and sold as culture. They are different formats of the attention economy we live in. That’s why I see TikTok and Pop Mart as the same model in different wrappers.

TikTok and Pop Mart’s scale explains the stakes. About one in five American adults now say they regularly get news on TikTok, and among adults under thirty the share rises toward half. A third of U.S. adults use TikTok; and it takes just 260 videos, which could be as quick as 35 minutes, to form a habit on the app.

Pop Mart’s latest half-year results was superb: revenue expanding at triple-digit rates, profits surging, and Labubu “Monsters” line contributing a material share of sales and a meaningful lift to the bottom line. In the first half of 2025, the sales contributed by Pop Mart members represented 91.2% of total sales, with repeat purchase rate over half. The stock has come off its highs, but the Labubu craze continues. The tapering is a signal that the product has moved from hype to mass availability. The curve flattens, units broaden to the mainstream—not just reserved for the it girls and fashion icons—and the community widens.

In a recent conversation with Asia Society’s Lizzi Li, we tried to trace the source of Labubu’s soft power: it is emotional consumption that becomes part of identity. Pop Mart’s appeal is precisely that it feels therapeutic and low-stakes. Open a blind box as a reward after a grinding day and gather enough morale to step back into the involution battlefield tomorrow. Scroll on TikTok and let the dopamine rush quiet the emptiness. It is the lowest-hanging fruit of escapism.

Sociologist Eva Illouz uses “emotional capitalism” to describe a culture in which economic and emotional logics mutually shape each other: economic relations grow deeply emotional, while intimate life is reorganized in market-like terms of bargaining, exchange, and choice. The therapeutic discourse, which promises authenticity and healing, puts psychology at the core of identity and turns the self into a project of continuous management and improvement.

The result is plain: feelings are commodified and commodities are romanticized. Authenticity functions less as a state than as a performance validated by an audience. Identities flatten into marketable traits, reinforced by metrics like follows and likes. This is the operating system that makes Pop Mart feel therapeutic and TikTok feel intimate while both optimize for engagement.

It is fitting, and a little ironic, that Cal Newport, a computer science professor and productivity guru who thrives in that same marketplace of therapeutic betterment, has a superb explanation on the technicalities of TikTok’s system and why a change of hands will not fix TikTok. His thesis points to the fundamental issue of TikTok: it is a large-scale recommender that embeds users and videos and learns purely from behavior. Change owners, license the code, add auditors; the objective remains engagement, so the output remains whatever keeps people watching. The systems do not share our values and do not know what values are. They learn the full range of human patterns, including our darker impulses, and exploit bright and dark alike if it moves the metric. The problem is baked into the math, not the org chart.

Both companies are conduits to younger consumers whose priorities already run faster, more visual, ritualized, and socially legible. You can restrict a feature or tighten a disclosure, but you cannot regulate away the appetite for short hits of recognition and sense of belonging.

Emotional capitalism has taken hold because it feeds on a wider shortage of identity, connection, and meaning, and turns that shortage into commercial opportunity. You can rotate the board, license the model, and buy all the Labubus; however, unless the objective shifts away from raw engagement and the loops that monetize it are slowed and made accountable, the output will not change. Changing hands does not change the engine. It only changes who collects the toll.

Instead of the what and how, I’m focusing on two things:

1. why Chinese netizens are furious (hubris, status signaling, a conquer-nature posture) and

2. how Arc’teryx’s global vs. China messaging split made the crisis worse, compounded by Cai’s lack of an English statement on his own channels.

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Quick recap

The fireworks display, “Ascending Dragon,” was staged Friday by Arc’teryx and Cai Guo-Qiang at roughly 18,000 feet in the Himalayas—an extremely fragile alpine ecosystem in southwest Tibet (NBC News). After footage of the activation spread, backlash in China centered on sacred land and environmental risk. Local officials first said the materials were eco-friendly and no environmental impact assessment (EIA) was needed, then quickly announced a task force to investigate.

On September 21, both the brand and the artist apologized. Public expectations hardened around verifiable process, transparency, and honest disclosure of long-term impact.

Why are Chinese netizens so angry?

Ecology and sacred-land norms reduced to commercialization. High-altitude reserves are sensitive both environmentally and culturally. A gunpowder spectacle presented as a “tribute to nature” reads as using nature, not respecting it. In many such zones, access is tightly restricted; even holiday fireworks are often banned. This isn’t about everyone suddenly becoming environmentalists; it reflects a shift: consumers are no longer buying thinly veiled eco-marketing to sell more product.

Luxury posture vs. stewardship. Arc’teryx is positioned as a luxury brand in China on price, but its brand DNA is hardcore outdoor credibility. Founded in 1989, and now under Amer Sports (with Anta acquiring and taking Amer IPO last year. Anta is now the largest shareholder).

In China, Arc’teryx evolved from technical performance to status symbol. It still makes technical outdoor gear, but it has expanded beyond its core base to status-seeking consumers. As one widely shared online joke puts it, “the three treasures of middle-aged men are Moutai, fishing, and Arc’teryx.” Marketing spectacle without robust safeguards alienates the purists who built the brand’s credibility; courting a broader audience who buy for the brand prestige risks diluting the core brand value.

Tone and hubris. Many read the activation as a man-versus-nature, conquer-nature message—self-importance dressed up as tribute to nature. A big brand budget doesn’t make an activation relevant; here, it backfired. A younger audience increasingly rejects staged “representation,” whether it comes from corporate power or artistic authority. Arc’Teryx X Cai Guo-Qiang is getting all the bad press and backlash because they fundamentally misreads the current mood of “emotional capitalism,” which rewards connection and substance over grand gestures.

Fragmented comms: dual narrative at the core

Here is how the affected parties all responded:

Arc’teryx

The global response on Instagram (“A message from Arc’teryx”) effectively frames this as a project executed by “a China team and a local artist.” The signal: a rogue act over there, not us over here. That framing lands badly in China. It echoes a familiar trope—enjoy the China business, outsource the blame—and suggests the brand is defying or distancing itself from its Chinese parent owner. The ripple effect was swift. The drama remained on Weibo’s top search throughout the weekend.

• Overseas (e.g., Instagram): just a note casting the incident as an isolated deviation from values—“we spoke to the artist and our China team; we’ll change how we work to avoid it from happening again.” That is distancing.

• Domestically (Weibo, Red Note, Wechat official account): framed as an “apology,” much longer explanation promising process remedies—regulator-guided reviews, third-party assessments, and remediation based on findings. That is make-good homework.

Across China and the United States, the strategy reads as a double standard, and consumers and reporters take notice. U.S. and Chinese coverage flagged the communications gap, which in turn amplified anger inside China.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai apologized on his studio’s WeChat and Weibo, but not on his personal Instagram in English. His international footprint is significant—for instance, just this month an anonymous donor gave his 1991 work “Bigfoot’s Footprints: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 6” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yet apologizing only inside China intensified backlash on international platforms. His Instagram filled with protests and comments citing from China’s Wildlife Protection Law and the Regulations on Nature Reserves. On Chinese platforms, the questions echoed: Was there an assessment? By whom? When will results be public?

Chinese reporting indicates that staff at Cai’s Beijing studio said other departments executed the event; they reiterated that materials were “environmentally friendly,” could not speak to flora-fauna impact, referred inquiries to the New York studio, and ended the call.

Cai’s value to Arc’teryx is his blue-chip credibility: recent collaborations with Saint Laurent (Tokyo exhibition and daytime fireworks) and Lancôme; long-term support from the Asian Cultural Council, Fondation Cartier, the Getty Foundation/PST ART, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, the Museo del Prado, and P3 Tokyo. With that pedigree, Arc’teryx helped him “realize a dream” on a high-risk project. The same prestige that once helped win core enthusiasts can flip quickly when the narrative breaks.

Amer / Anta

Anta’s social accounts were flooded with negative comments; its official Weibo restricted follows and comments, and multiple Douyin videos were hidden. As of publication, there was no public statement from Anta. Amer Sports has not issued any media statements.

According to Chinese reporting, Anta told reporters to refer to Arc’teryx’s releases. Amer Sports’ share price fell more than 5%. Arc’teryx is Amer’s flagship and the engine of technical-apparel growth; China provides both the highest premium and incremental growth. Anta is the largest shareholder and, post-listing, still holds about 43%.

Arc’teryx’s brand health and China performance flow directly into group profits—turning a brand–artist PR mess into a bigger governance question: can Anta operate overseas high-end brands well and unlock long-term value?

In February 2024 when Amer listed on the NYSE (Yaling and I wrote about it last year)

Following the Yuan

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Today, Anta-owned sporting goods company Amer Sports (NYSE: AS) is officially listed in the U.S. on an initial public offering of around US$1.37 billion…

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touting “leading ESG performance,” which attracted sustainability-focused funds. The stock wobbled afterward, and the group leaned into high-profile environmental marketing—Arc’teryx ReBIRD™, Salomon’s “zero-waste factory,” and similar campaigns clustered around the listing window. The Tibet fireworks fit that pattern: marketing-led environmentalism—a spectacle to juice exposure while underestimating ecological risk. An expensive mistake.

Global communications: the baseline and the fix

The takeaway is straightforward. First, consistency is the starting point for global communications: one brand, one incident, one narrative. Local execution can adapt; the storyline cannot. Second, cultural fluency is non-negotiable. In sensitive natural or cultural settings, aesthetics give way to process and evidence that can withstand outside scrutiny. Third, credibility requires compliance from day one—and a promise to publish. Build the environmental assessment, material-residue testing, wildlife-disturbance thresholds, monitoring cadence, and disclosure channels into the brief; name the third party; set a timetable and milestones; and keep reporting while protecting legitimately sensitive information. That’s how you create durable public oversight—and the fastest path to rebuild trust.

The same bar applies to the artist. If the work and its impact cross borders, the explanation and accountability should, too. Even a concise English post laying out the facts and timeline would meet the baseline expectations of a global audience.

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