My Two Cents on TikTok Refugees

Published: 2025-01-17

The trend of foreigners on Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and Clubhouse from a few years ago demonstrates that in our modern technological era, what truly prevents communication between people of different countries isn’t language barriers, spatial distance, or even the “Great Firewall,” but rather the deliberate cultivation of ignorance, indifference, and hatred through ideology.

This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode “Men Against Fire.” A soldier’s AI combat system malfunctions, leading him to suddenly realize that the mutant monsters he had been zealously eliminating were actually just ordinary people speaking different languages.

Similarly, I believe many people have seen the film adaptation of Heinlein’s sci-fi classic “Starship Troopers.” When watching this movie as a child, I simply viewed it as sci-fi popcorn entertainment about “humans fighting back against alien bugs.” Watching it now, I realize it’s actually a clear-cut satirical work against war and authoritarianism. Were the bugs really attacking and destroying humanity, or did human propaganda make people firmly believe that if they didn’t eliminate the bugs, human survival would be threatened?

In Qian Zhongshu’s “Fortress Besieged,” the protagonist Fang Hongjian said something classic: “In the past, the policy of keeping people ignorant was to deny them education; the modern policy of keeping people ignorant is to allow them only one type of education. Uneducated people are deceived because they can’t read; educated people are deceived because they can read printed materials.”

Ultimately, the appearance of TikTok refugees on Xiaohongshu, whether fleeting or not, is a good thing. It proves that there are still groups of people in the world who haven’t completely accepted everything that ideology has instilled in them, and their minds still retain vestiges of tolerance, curiosity, and friendliness. And this, perhaps, is humanity’s last hope for civilization to gradually develop in a better direction.