One day in mid-January, California-based social media influencer Candise Lin woke up and found that hundreds of thousands of so-called TikTok refugees were suddenly flocking to Red Note, a Chinese social media app she uses every day. Lin doesn’t want to claim the whole thing happened because of her, but the trend is a good example of how her videos have become an essential link connecting the parallel worlds of Western and Chinese social media. For many people who don’t otherwise know much about China, Lin has become the country’s de facto ambassador of internet culture.

Starting in December 2023, Lin, who has more than 2.3 million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, uploaded a series of viral videos introducing Red Note (known as Xiaohongshu in Chinese) to Western audiences as a destination for people searching for brutally honest makeover suggestions. The videos prompted beauty influencers to begin downloading the app, resulting in its first traffic bump from non-Chinese speakers. When TikTok was close to being banned in the US in January, it was beauty creators who suggested people should move to Red Note instead.

But long before Red Note offered millions of Americans an opportunity to directly experience the Chinese internet, Lin had been providing them a rare glimpse into it. “Dr. Lin’s content is like a magical portal to the other side of the world, where everyone is just like you but a little different,” says Lucy White, a 22-year-old Scottish bartender who follows Lin on Instagram.

In return, Lin has become a minor celebrity and earns a stable income from TikTok that subsidizes her day job as a Cantonese tutor. But her online presence also opens her up to controversies and hatred from both pro- and anti-China voices online. “If I say something nice about China, I’m called a CCP bot, but if I say something bad about China, I’m called a CIA spy,” Lin tells WIRED. As a result, she tries to stay clear of politics and focus on more innocuous and funny trends.

Every day, Lin scours the Chinese internet looking for a new celebrity feud, the hottest meme, or perhaps a viral college dorm challenge, which she then translates into English and explains in a minute-long video. Each clip features her giving the camera the same signature deadpan look. Lin is often asked why she doesn’t laugh in her videos, and she explains it’s because she needs to film four or five times to get the best take. No matter how funny the jokes are, they are getting old by the end of that. “That’s why I’m like a robot,” she says. Still, sometimes Lin can’t help but break into a smile, which delights her fans.

Lin’s audience loves learning about what hilarious things so-called Chinese “netizens” have been up to lately. Chinese social media is a world that Westerners don’t have access to because they don’t speak the same language or use the same platforms as people in China, says Josef Burton, a 39-year-old writer and former US diplomat who follows Lin on Instagram. “I can’t interact with it or reach it, but there is an ‘all men are brothers’ kind of fondness [in knowing] this ridiculous thing is going on online,” he says. “China is presented as this completely othered place where no one jokes around, this censored, barren hell space that’s all hyper propaganda … But no, people joke around. Daily life exists. Memes exist.”

Fun Facts about Cantonese

Candise Lin was born in the Chinese city of Guangzhou and immigrated to the US with her family when she was in middle school. She received a doctorate degree in educational psychology and later worked as a postgraduate lecturer, and at one point tried opening an online skin care shop.

Then the pandemic lockdowns hit, and while bored at home scrolling on her phone, Lin decided to start posting on TikTok. In April 2020, she made a 24-second video listing six English names that sound horrible in Cantonese: The name “Susan,” for example, sounds like “god of bad luck.” The video unexpectedly blew up, garnering 5 million views and over 10,000 comments. “So I kept making it into a series, and I realized there’s an audience for this,” Lin says.

Lin later expanded to covering Chinese celebrity gossip, TV shows, beauty trends, and absurd internet memes—all the things that an average young, super-online person in China would be scrolling and posting about on a daily basis. Hundreds of videos later, it’s clear that there’s an insatiable appetite in the West for this kind of content.

Selene Bai, a 22-year-old sales representative based in Beijing, is one of Lin’s unofficial advisers. After discovering her videos on Instagram, Bai reached out to send Lin ideas for which internet trends she should cover next, and they later became friends on WeChat. “Becaue she has lived out of China for a long time, sometimes she consults me whether a topic is actually popular in China so she can balance the interests of Western and Eastern audiences,” Bai says.

Lin says she often leans on her experiences in academia and as a teacher to ensure her videos resonate with Western audiences. She’s always thinking about the most relatable words that young people in America use so she can make comparisons and analogies to what’s happening in China. “I’m doing thorough research to make sure everything I say is correct. I’m putting my PhD degree to good use, so my adviser wouldn’t be disappointed in me,” Lin says.

Above the Fray

In the current political environment, discussions about China can quickly become hostile. Relations between the US and China have significantly worsened over the past decade, and people in both countries sometimes have strong and heated opinions of each others’ governments. Lin, however, has largely managed to maintain her little oasis in a sea of polarizing narratives.

That’s partially because Lin made a deliberate decision to stay as apolitical and as neutral as possible. She’s frank about the fact that she specifically focuses on innocuous topics, like dance trends, instead of, say, China’s human rights record. “I don't mind if [people] unfollow me because I don't talk about those topics, because that means my content is not for them. So I don't really care. There are so many accounts out there talking about those things that they can follow,” Lin says.

Lin knows that no one can be perfectly neutral, and her views are understandably shaped by her upbringing in China. But she tries to keep her personal perspectives out of her videos as much as possible.

Bai, her fan in China, thinks she has struck this balance well. “Some influencers like to show China’s worst sides in a sensational way, while other influencers oversimplify complex political issues and claim China has never done anything wrong. But Candise is different. She just stays true to the text and communicates the different perspectives,” Bai says. One of the other things that draws Bai to Lin’s content is the fact that the comments on her videos are usually civil and friendly, rather than intense and overtly political.

Still, Lin often receives fire from both sides of the political spectrum. She says one of her critics made an account impersonating her called “Candise Lin is racist.” On Red Note, she says she’s seen Chinese users reposting her videos and complaining that she’s smearing China’s image.

Burton says that Western viewers often demand that anyone who talks about China online pass a litmus test: “Do you condemn the Chinese government?”

“If you are saying that sharing daily life stories from China is somehow a statement of allegiance to the Chinese government that must be repudiated, there’s an authoritarian in the room and it’s not Lin,” he says.

In some ways, Lin’s videos are like a screenshot of a funny tweet that has been reshared endlessly on Tumblr or Instagram, unbeknownst to the original author. But in this case, the hilarious commentary is coming from a random Chinese person on the other side of the world, who is probably totally unaware that their quick wit is also being appreciated by millions of people who speak a different language.

Despite their deep ideological and cultural differences, Lin has proven that one thing people in the US and China can agree on is humor. In January, Lin posted a video recapping the Red Note trend and what Americans were discovering on the Chinese app. One of the top comments read, “I hope this is the final push that combines the Chinese and English netizens into one unholy snarky union.”