China's Xiaohongshu lionizes America's Luigi Mangione
For US authorities, the only thing worse than Chinese censorship is free expression counter to the establishment law and order narrative.
(excerpt from article in progress)
…the Chinese app Xiaohongshu has just hit an inflection point on both sides of the Pacific. A mass conversation is taking place, a million conversations at once. Youth in the US and China have found, for the time-being, a relatively open platform, on which to communicate, and it turns out they have a great deal to say to one another.
It’s silly, and it’s not. It’s serious and unserious at the same time. It’s full of ignorant asides, crude allusions but not without moments of grace and insights. It’s raw and relatively unmediated, a broken wall that allows traffic both ways, and sets a tone that rings true to teenagers and adults. But it’s full of propaganda too, and some of it is damaging to Xiaohongshu’s positive image at the moment.
The relative ease of access to Xiaohongshu has allowed its foreign fanbase to soar, by some accounts well over a hundred million, in a matter of days. This is not a Chinese-only app, nor a bifurcated app like Tencent’s TikTok/Douyin that subjects citizens to digital segregation with a Chinese version for Chinese and a non-Chinese version for non-Chinese, but instead, one big happy (at the moment) family.
At last an app that brings people together instead of tearing them apart.
And one of the strange discoveries in testing out the app is that disaffected American youth are not alone in sharing a morbid fascination bordering on crazed admiration, for the now-imprisoned Luigi Mangione, a well-educated young man whose alleged shooting of an insurance company CEO on the streets of New York City, and the dramatic dragnet that followed, made him an instant radical star.
The initial surprise at seeing an accused murderer get any airtime in China at all was surpassed by the realization that clicking on a few links leads the viewer to more material about Luigi, produced by Chinese in Chinese for other Chinese, than one might ever have expected to exist.
With the advent of millions of young Americans pouring onto the site, tributes to Luigi are proliferating wildly, with everything from photos from his tragic, photogenic life put to music, including a particularly well-done mashup using the song “Mama” by Freddy Mercury, with whom the accused shares a passing resemblance. There is even a mini action movie fantasy that shows a Luigi lookalike narrowly escaping his Brooklyn prison by jet after a blistering attack on the police.
Luigi Mangione, accused of serious charges, is facing life in prison, but his half-life online may be one for the ages.
Links to Luigi posts on Xiaohongshu: