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Comment by metacritic12 | Hacker News Reader

for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:

The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).

The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.

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On Wikipedia, it says he chose red because:

> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.

I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.

Chinese in general love the color red, and the number 8. Luck, wealth, love connotations.

Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics

Reality is stranger than fiction. That’s the reason I would expect to be reported by The Onion aha

> I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.

Yeah, I mean "Every Chinese citizen has a Little Red Book in their pocket!" is pretty compelling for a social media app.

It's not necessarily political beyond that, but the connection is obviously there.

As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.

Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.

And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to do with each other as constipation and constitution.

Then he picked a truly terrible name.

The guy went to university in the US and his name is literally Mao.

He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book. He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who would have an obviously perfect product name like that and not use it would be dumb.

There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and not spelling the number googol differently.

> his name is literally Mao

The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.

Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.

But for a lot of people, the character 红 / red is already enough to trigger the association with communism and Mao.

Red is the "good," lucky color in Chinese culture. It's the color of the new year, of weddings, and of other auspicious events

However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious.

I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.

> an actual Chinese person

None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.

However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.

It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.

I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.

The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.

> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.

Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.

It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.

he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting away the prior government and foreign invaders

washington is still liked even though he was a notable slave owner

Mao Zedong should not be revered even if George Washington is worse than Hitler.

What you're doing is called "whataboutism."

Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.

When your own government is more of an adversary than a foreign government, the equation solves itself.

This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at the end of the day only creates a void in government that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.

In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest, no matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.

On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...

The people who want to unite Americans might find more success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?

> What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?

Real change will come when those who actually put work into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump, not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act, they created that coalition themselves. This is level political organizing that actually gets things done, and likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through as well.

Sorry, but I fought and lost. If I have to be under someone's boot, at least I get to choose the boot.

If that's your attitude, you can't be surprised when your side continues to lose. Meta "fought and lost" their first attempt to ban TikTok.

Thanks for blaming me. I give up :)

What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the Chinese government looks out more for your interests as an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the reverse claim in China without being censored speaks volumes.

When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.

the chinese government doesn't care about you one way or another; the US one is actively hostile towards you.

Not true

it probably isnt, and is just a random name, but it feels like the name is a joke about the red scare

..did you only learn chinese academically or something? anyone in china would think of Mao if you said 小红书 (well, at least before the app)

So they're moving to a video site named "Red" plus a four-letter word?

TikTok, you've changed! But maybe not that much.

I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"

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