The week before the TikTok ban in the US came into effect, Desteny Flerillien, a 25-year-old Christian TikTok influencer, followed thousands of other users in downloading the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote.
At first, she scrolled through the videos learning about Chinese food, culture, fashion, and traditional medicine. On January 14, she posted a short introduction with a picture of herself and the caption “Hello from America.” She started posting about her skin-care routine, hair tutorials, and enthusiasm for the app, but didn’t mention her Christian faith, as she was unsure if the app would censor religious posts. By the end of 10 days, she had gained 500 followers.
One of the followers was a 22-year-old Chinese man named Jing Shijie who messaged her with the help of a translation app. He welcomed her to the app, offered to answer any questions she had, and asked her to add him on the Chinese messaging app WeChat. They started discussing cultural differences between Chinese and Americans.
In one message, Flerillien mentioned that she made YouTube videos about her faith.
“What religion do you follow?” Jing asked. When she shared that she was a Christian, Jing surprised Flerillien by responding that he was also a Christian. He began to ask Flerillien questions about the faith, as “a lot of people in our church are saying things that aren’t true, so I have been longing to know the real Christ.”
That led to a deep conversation with a believer on the other side of the world that would never have happened if not for the TikTok ban and the ensuing migration to RedNote.
The TikTok ban lasted only 12 hours before President Donald Trump announced he would delay enforcement of the law banning the app and TikTok flicked back to life. Still, many “TikTok refugees” had already created accounts on RedNote, a popular Chinese social media app for sharing videos, photos, and conversation topics. With the internet in China behind the Great Firewall—which blocks access to international social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, X, and even TikTok—the migration created a unique space for people in the US and China to interact.
Yet cybersecurity experts raised concerns that the app is subject to the same Chinese data laws as TikTok, “which may grant government authorities access to user data without the privacy protections expected in the US,” according to Adrianus Warmenhoven at NordVPN. Back in 2023, a former executive in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, said in a legal filing that the Chinese government had used data from TikTok to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong and has access to US user data.
Many Americans seemed unphased by those concerns as they downloaded RedNote, making it the No. 1 app in the Apple store the week of the ban. American and Chinese users shared cat photos, compared working hours, and gave each other names in their respective languages.
When Courtney Alexandra Laliberte first downloaded the app, she was intrigued by the images of the “beautiful people and places, just things that we as Americans were not really privy to.”
But the 29-year-old Christian content creator from Melbourne, Florida, also felt uneasy. Knowing how the Chinese government has control over Christian practices in China, “I did get a sense of being watched,” she said. “Like a feeling of someone looking over my shoulder and everything I was doing.”
After two days, she felt strongly convicted that she needed to delete it. She noted that if RedNote is not a place where she can freely share the gospel, “then that is just not a place where God wants us.”
Laliberte posted a video on TikTok as a pinned post with the caption “Christians pray before you download RedNote” and shared her thoughts.
“Good to see China is not as bad as they make it seem,” one commenter pushed back. “You are allowed to be a Christian over there.”
But others told her they felt the same urge to delete the app, as their religious posts had been placed under review then deemed illegal.
Flerillien saw the app as an opportunity for evangelism, noting that she felt safer talking to Chinese people about faith than Americans because they seemed more curious and willing to listen. Besides Jing, she has also been talking with another Chinese woman who mentioned it felt like “God’s plan” that they met through RedNote. Now that they’ve built a friendship, she plans to eventually start having deeper faith conversations.
“Ultimately, I just see it as an opportunity for more people to learn about Jesus, even if [only] seeds were planted,” she said.
Flerillien, who lives in Orlando, Florida, started posting Christian content on her YouTube page five years ago after a 40-minute video of her testimony coming out of New Age spirituality went viral. The video was viewed nearly 50,000 times, including by her mother, who renounced her own New Age practices after watching it.
Then, in 2021, Flerillien “got hooked” on TikTok after a friend introduced her to a TikTok dance. Seeing the Christian community on the app, Flerillien started to post her own inspirational Christian videos with captions like “Scriptures for when your faith is low” and “Mood after spending time with God.” Today she has more than 14,500 followers.
“It’s always a mission,” Flerillien said. “It’s always an assignment.”
Although she knew the app was owned by a Chinese company, Flerillien saw TikTok as “just another social media platform.” Yet as the deadline for the ban drew near, she began to feel distraught, as TikTok had become a place for her to laugh, learn, and engage with others. So she decided to move to RedNote. (Since the ban has been reversed, Flerillien still posts on TikTok.)
Meanwhile, Jing, a 22-year-old in Jinan, China, heard about the foreigners flooding to RedNote and created an account, as he was interested in international e-commerce. That’s when he met Flerillien.
Jing told CT that he had been raised by his grandmother, who became a Christian after Jing’s father was miraculously healed from brain inflammation. She took Jing with her to the government-sanctioned Three-Self church where she worshiped, but she never forced Christianity on him.
Jing said that Christianity became real to him two years ago when his grandmother was diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor. For the first time in his life, he prayed on his knees for hours as his uncle took her to the biggest hospitals in the province for multiple opinions on whether the tumor was malignant. He begged God to save her.
“I was completely overwhelmed at that time, feeling helpless, and that’s when I turned to God,” he said.
When the family learned the tumor was benign and his grandmother recovered quickly, Jing said his faith in God began to take root.
Yet challenges persisted. His startup furniture business was struggling, as customers were few. A leader from his grandma’s church urged him to quit his business and find a factory job, claiming that continuing “would be going against God’s will.” Jing said he felt that the leader was calling his desire to run a business a sin, yet Jing had wanted to make money to provide for his family and contribute to his grandmother’s church, which rented its meeting space from a worn-down school building.
Then his roommate, whom he had hired at his business and lent money to, began to lash out at him and accuse him unfairly. In despair, Jing spiraled into severe depression. Several months later, Jing gave up on his business and returned home to work as a food delivery driver.
As he started talking about faith with Flerillien over WeChat, he asked her about some of the questionable teachings he had received from his church, including whether it was a sin to try to earn more money and whether Christians were allowed to go the hospital when they were sick instead of waiting for God to heal them. She responded by pointing him to different Bible verses and speaking from her own experiences.
Once Jing used his Chinese Bible—a gift from a church summer camp—to look up a verse Flerillien had shared, and he was excited to see that God’s Word remained the same across languages.
He then opened up to Flerillien about his rage against his roommate who had wronged him, which weighed down on his heart like “an unbearable lock.” He noted that when he sought advice from the leader of his grandmother’s church, he was told that Christians should be “weak” and that he should swallow his anger and endure.
“Bitterness and unforgiveness doesn’t have an impact on the person who did us wrong,” Flerillien wrote in her message. “It only hurts us.”
When she pointed to Jesus’ ultimate forgiveness and reminded him that vengeance belongs to the Lord, Jing said he realized that forgiveness wasn’t a sign of weakness; rather, it took strength to let evil done to him go.
After that conversation, Jing said he finally felt his heart was free from anger: “It was full of light, [in] one switch of a moment.” He began to find a purpose behind his failed business and the criticism from his church when Flerillien explained that God uses suffering to build up the character of believers so they can do work for the Lord. She encouraged him to not give up on his business.
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that you met me on Red note?” Flerillien asked. “God is still calling you.”
“It must be God’s plan for us to know each other and become good friends!” Jing said.
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