I’m one of those assholes who when to 小红书 in the past week, except I was never a member of TikTok; I just really wanted to breach the Great Firewall and be somewhere and see something I’d never been or seen.
Anyway, now I have a simplified Chinese keyboard in my Gboard & Duo has taken a break from threatening my life over lapsed Japanese lessons to instead guilt me for forgotten Mandarin lessons.
I have found a little measure of happiness in a (cyber)space wherein people are generally very kind to me as long as I follow basic rules and don’t cause trouble, which is frankly rare in my personal lived experience.
Given a lifetime in poverty, this might be the closest thing I come to emigrating to anywhere. 
With that in mind, I’d be grateful if y’all would forgive that this isn’t a 1:1 expat thing, and help educate me in what my options might be, with regards to what I feel will be an inevitable rush to patch this hole in the wall and put everyone back into their separate gardens.
Thank you.
Backup of the post’s body: I’m one of those assholes who when to 小红书 in the past week, except I was never a member of TikTok; I just really wanted to breach the Great Firewall and be somewhere and see something I’d never been or seen.
Anyway, now I have a simplified Chinese keyboard in my Gboard & Duo has taken a break from threatening my life over lapsed Japanese lessons to instead guilt me for forgotten Mandarin lessons.
I have found a little measure of happiness in a (cyber)space wherein people are generally very kind to me as long as I follow basic rules and don’t cause trouble, which is frankly rare in my personal lived experience.
Given a lifetime in poverty, this might be the closest thing I come to emigrating to anywhere. With that in mind, I’d be grateful if y’all would forgive that this isn’t a 1:1 expat thing, and help educate me in what my options might be, with regards to what I feel will be an inevitable rush to patch this hole in the wall and put everyone back into their separate gardens.
Thank you.
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You’re looking for “回国VPN”. I think Transsocks is still the most popular one.
Not sure what you are trying to achieve / protect yourself from.
And its not clear where you are from.
Quickfox but you have to watch an advert or pay, also the main barrier to entry for the Chinese internet is needing a Chinese id number or phone number
Sinapass is not IP gated, it’s phone number gated. You need a +86 phone number.
There’s been strong rumors that they’re going to be separating 小红书 into domestic and foreign servers with interaction limited between the two, in order to re-establish the strict firewall between Chinese and international Internet, since foreigners posting on 小红书 represents one way to undermine the control of information.
But I don’t want to leave 小红书 as I currently know it. The social expectations are different, with less tolerance of griefing or trolling, and I like the experience much better than on American social media, where there’s a lot more bickering due to the hyper-individualistic attitude that tends to favor asserting ones worldview over all else.
I want to stay on the Chinese “half” of 小红书 if they do divide the servers because I expect that an English RedNOTE would just be a miserable lovechild of TikTok and Twitter.
I am in the United States, at present.
Yeah, I’ve already bumped up again the phone number thing. I’ve noticed a few sites will allow Google log-in, I guess because they trust the Google handshake enough, but I’ve only done that once, to access a Chinese AI someone on 小红书 showed me.
Out of curiosity, if one gets a Chinese SIM (like from the airport) while visiting or living in China, can one continue to reload it to keep it active after leaving?
Interesting that they’d opt into phone numbers rather than IP, but I suppose it makes sense. Harder to fudge a phone number than an IP in this day & age, and it technically allows for Chinese citizens travelling abroad, as long as they maintain their local phone number.
Thats a rumour and nobody knows how its going to be implemented.
It could be implemented by using a Chinese simcard or using the physical location like douyin… which will probably not work even with a VPN.
Depends on the simcard you get and the type of subscription you get.
Yes, you only need SMS messages, so if you are on China Unicom like me you can switch to the 8 yuan plan and still get SMS abroad. You don’t reload, what you do is deposit money into the unicom account and every month they will auto deduct.
It’s mostly because the entire Chinese app ecosystem revolves around mobile devices so verifying based on phone number is much more secure, since everything is 2FA with SMS
When you say a VPN wouldn’t help with fudging physical location, do you mean they would be trying to pull data straight from the phone’s GPS rather than from the IP telling them the (false) locale?
TBF this is also increasingly the US market within the past five or ten years. Makes sense.
No I mean that a VPN may not work.
- because they know which addresses are related to VPNs
- because they rely on Simcard and not IP for localization
- or indeed GPS
- or anything else
Many things are possible and it depends how much they want to fight it
Yeah but the Chinese internet ecosystem is much newer. It’s like the electricity network of the European Union vs the US. Former got bombed to hell during WW2 so when they reconstructed it it was much newer and much more modern.
I sincerely don’t want to sound like some rubbernecking MURICA tourist but just piddling around on XHS I’ve realized their economy has had an insane amount of growth in the past decade or two and – crucially – most mass media on this side of things never really speaks to it. I almost feel like I’ve been lied to by omission and while I expected as much from Washington, I did expect marginally better from CNN. Marginally.
It’s not like I’m a total cretin that assumed a country of 1.4B all lived in thatch huts or some stupid shit like that, but like… if you told me in December of 2024 that China has a stronger and more stable mall culture than the US, I’d have needed convincing. The economy has exploded since my last accurate point of reference, assuming any of my points of reference were ever accurate to begin with.
Having a good time on Little Red Book though. I’ve managed to avoid moderator action so far despite the entirety of the rules and guidelines (understandably) being in a language I can’t read or speak, just by operating on vibes and common sense. I’m slowly picking up Mandarin vocabulary and for the first time since finishing my linguistics MA at the peak of lockdowns, I’m actually doing SOMETHING productive with it. (Assuming you consider trying to use foreign social media productive.)
I’m glad you’re having fun. If you’re fiddling around with Chinese social media you might try going to B站 if you don’t mind ACG culture. It’s one of the places where most of the internet culture of China is formed along with Douyin. I think they’re also like XHS in that you don’t need a +86 phone number to register but there is a short anime quiz you need to pass at registration though it’s not hard and you can mostly find all of the answers on any search engine these days (it’s old af).
It’s originally kind of an ACG site but it’s grown beyond that. They had a big event at Wuhan International Plaza on New Years; there were so many people there that it was basically impossible to get a rideshare in or out.
I’m a big ACG fan myself so I could vibe, though I’m still shell shocked from trying to discuss comics on Xitter, lmfao.
In general, are most social media platforms moderated as thoroughly as XHS? Because on the rare occasion I’ve had to make a report, I got a response on the status usually within minutes, and usually favorably. This is quite a welcome change from my experience on western social media, where we’re all just feral animals bickering over nothing.
Honestly, the fact that XHS probably wouldn’t hesitate to banhammer me has been a very powerful incentive to not indulge my douchebag side; at risk of sounding like a Hallmark special, it sort of brings the best out in me. 
As a user, I can post videos on Bilibili right? My understanding is that it fills a similar niche to YouTube, currently.
With that in mind, I’d be grateful if y’all would forgive that this isn’t a 1:1 expat thing, and help educate me in what my options might be, with regards to what I feel will be an inevitable rush to patch this hole in the wall and put everyone back into their separate gardens.