Xiaohongshu—known internationally as RedNote—is gaining traction across Southeast Asia as a new generation of Chinese tech firms attempt to expand beyond their home market. The Southeast Asian country of Malaysia is the second largest platform market except for China. Other Chinese tech giants, such as ByteDance and Tencent, are also expanding the country’s digital offerings in the fields of e-sports, e-commerce and artificial intelligence.

By 2025, China’s trade surplus from digital services jumps to a a record high of $33 billionaccording to data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Southeast Asia has become an important testing ground for Chinese tech companies, offering young, mobile-savvy consumers and lighter regulatory pressure than Western markets.

The experts say luck The country’s tech companies tend to adopt a more low-key approach in Western markets like the US, where officials are more wary of Chinese platforms, due to concerns about data privacy and national security.

This is the clearest in the long saga about TikTok, as US officials argue that the platform can send US user data back to Beijing, and interfere with recommended content to spread disinformation. Last month, TikTok finalized a deal to create a new entity based in the US on the social media app, ending the threat of a ban that has been looming on the platform since 2024. A new joint entity, in which ByteDance will hold a 19.9% ​​stake, will now hold US user data and retrain the recommendation algorithm.

“While Chinese technology platforms may aspire to commercial success similar to TikTok, they are also wary of attracting the same level of political and regulatory scrutiny,” Jian Xu, an expert on Chinese media studies at Australia’s Deakin University, said. luck. Instead, they may choose to focus on select regional markets instead of pursuing global popularity.

Southeast Asia, made up mostly of emerging and middle-income economies, is also more open to adopting Chinese tech than mature Western economies like the US or Europe. That’s because of proximity: Trade and migration gave Chinese culture and a Chinese diaspora a cornerstone of the region.

RedNote, for example, has been widely adopted in Malaysia and Singapore, mainly because of their large ethnic Chinese communities, added Wang Zheng, a visiting fellow in the Media, Technology and Society program at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

The rise of Chinese tech

China’s tech ecosystem is undergoing a “structural change”, moving from an export model “rooted in the history of manufacturing and hardware” to one that is “increasingly defined by platform management, service coordination, and socio-technical systems,” said Xu, adding that the country is increasingly exporting service-based infrastructure that can shape global flows of ideas and commerce.

In June, Xiaohongshu opened an office in Hong Kong, its first outside mainland China, to begin its overseas expansion. Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Temu and Shein have also found considerable success beyond its shores. By 2025, Temu’s share of the global e-commerce market jumps to 24%—same as the American delivery giant Amazon.

The TikTok Shop, an in-app feature that allows creators to display and sell products directly within the TikTok app, has also become a global e-commerce juggernaut. Momentum Works, a research firm based in Singapore, estimates that The gross value of TikTok Shop sales last year hit $64.3 billion, almost double the previous year. Southeast Asia GMV, in particular, also doubled annually to hit $45.6 billion.

However, the TikTok Shop has its own problems in foreign markets, and not only in the US: In 2023, Indonesia ordered social media platforms such as TikTok to stop providing e-commerce services, forcing the short suspension of the TikTok Shop in Southeast Asia’s largest economy. TikTok solved the problem by opening its wallet, buying a 75% stake in the local e-commerce platform Tokopedia.

Besides pushing the private sector to go global, government officials in Beijing have also promised support for Chinese tech firms to export their digital offerings.

“We must follow the opening, promote win-win cooperation in many sectors, (and) expand exports while also increasing imports to maintain the development of foreign trade,” Han Wenxiu, the deputy director of China’s Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, said. said at a conference last December.

Security concerns and language barriers

However, some experts have noted the potential security risk of using Chinese technology platforms, as some China-based applications, such as Xiaohongshu, must comply with Beijing’s data regulations, including the storage and processing of user data within the country.

Zheng of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute says these claims are not completely unfounded. Xiaohongshu, for example, uses the same platform for both local and international users. (Many Chinese apps, such as Douyin, offer a separate international version for foreign users, which is not subject to the same “security risks”.)

Language barriers may be another barrier to the adoption of Chinese platforms, if only temporarily. “As media exposure grows and the translation function removes language barriers, the growth of non-Chinese users may increase in other regions,” Zheng said.