The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok.

上周，约50万美国用户为抗议美国政府即将对TikTok实施的禁令而跑到中国社交媒体应用小红书上后，该平台充满了可爱、温馨的时刻。

Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions from their new Chinese friends: Is it true that in rural America every family has a large farm, a huge house, at least three children and several big dogs? That Americans have to work two jobs to support themselves? That Americans are terrible at geography and many believe that Africa is a country? That most Americans have two days off every week?

这些自称“TikTok难民”的用户为加入小红书交“猫税”——在上面发布猫的照片和视频。他们回答了新的中国朋友们提出的许多问题：在美国农村，每家都有一个大农场、一栋大房子、至少三个孩子，以及几只大狗，这是真的吗？美国人必须干两份工作才能养活自己吗？美国人的地理很糟糕，很多人认为非洲是一个国家？大多数美国人每周休息两天吗？

Americans also posed questions to their new friends. “I heard that every Chinese has a giant panda,” an American RedNote user wrote. “Can you tell me how can I get it?” An answer came from someone in the eastern province of Jiangsu: “Believe me, it’s true,” the person deadpanned, posting a photo of a panda doing the laundry.

美国人也向他们的新朋友提了问题。“我听说每个中国人都有一只大熊猫，”一名美国小红书用户写道。“你能告诉我怎么能得到一只吗？”江苏省的一名用户用冷幽默回答道：“相信我，这是真的，”还发布了一张熊猫洗衣服的照片。

I spent hours scrolling those so-called cat tax photos and chuckled at the cute and earnest responses. This is what the internet is supposed to do: connect people. More important, RedNote demonstrated how competitive a random Chinese social media app can be from a purely product point of view.

我花了好几个小时刷屏那些所谓的猫税照片，对可爱且真诚的回复忍俊不禁。这是互联网本该做的：为人们建立联系。更重要的是，从纯粹的产品角度来看，小红书展示了中国随便一个社交媒体应用的竞争力。

With access to an online population of one billion and an army of hard-working, resourceful engineers, China’s internet platforms are world-class in their design, functionality and user experience — as is demonstrated by TikTok and now by RedNote, or Xiaohongshu in Chinese.

中国有十亿上网者，还有一支勤奋工作、足智多谋的工程师大军，中国的互联网平台在设计、功能和用户体验上都是世界一流的——正如TikTok以前和小红书现在展示的那样。

上海的小红书办公室。

But why aren’t more people outside China using Chinese apps?

但为什么没有更多中国以外的人使用中国的应用程序呢？

For a while, the Chinese internet giants seemed to be poised to take over the world. Remember the excitement when Alibaba listed its initial public offering in New York in 2014, when Didi took over Uber in China in 2016, when Facebook was imitating WeChat, and when a partner from the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz preached the power of WeChat? At one point, five of the world’s 10 largest internet companies measured by market capitalization were Chinese. Now Tencent, the WeChat creator and game company, is the only one left in those ranks.

曾有一段时间，中国的互联网巨头们似乎已做好占领世界的准备。还记得阿里巴巴2014年在纽约首次公开募股时引发的兴奋吗？记得滴滴曾在2016年收购Uber的中国品牌优步吗？记得Facebook曾模仿微信、硅谷公司安德里森·霍罗威茨的一名合伙人宣扬微信功能的强大吗？曾几何时，全球市值最高的十家互联网公司里，有五家是中国公司。如今，微信的创造者和游戏公司腾讯是唯一仍在这个行列的中国互联网企业。

The biggest Chinese internet companies still make products that can compete with any in the world. Their employees work harder than their Silicon Valley counterparts. (Many work a “996” schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.) In the face of U.S. semiconductor bans, they have managed to make impressive developments in artificial intelligence. But the world seems to have forgotten China’s internet leaders, except for seeing them as part of a technological and geopolitical threat.

中国最大的互联网公司仍在制造能与世界上任何公司竞争的产品。它们的员工比硅谷的同行更努力工作。（许多人是“996”工作制——早上9点上班、晚上9点下班，每周工作六天。）在美国禁止向中国出口高端半导体产品的情况下，他们仍在人工智能领域取得了令人瞩目的进展。但世界似乎已经忘记了中国的互联网领袖，只把他们视为技术和地缘政治威胁的一部分。

The industry didn’t live up to its promises. Why? What happened?

互联网行业辜负了人们对它的期望。为什么？是怎么发生的？

In 2017, I wrote a column at another publication with the headline, “Behind the Great Firewall, the Chinese internet is booming.” I told English-speaking readers to think beyond China’s urge to censor and copy Western businesses because China was being digitized on a scale and at a speed that was mind-boggling.

2017年，我曾在另一家出版物上发表了一篇题为《在防火长城的背后，中国互联网正在蓬勃发展》的专栏文章。我告诉说英语的读者，不要局限于中国的审查和抄袭西方企业的冲动，因为中国正在以令人难以置信的规模和速度发展数字化行业。

That year, Tencent’s revenue grew 56 percent, while revenue at Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, surged 60 percent. Didi raised nearly $10 billion in funding, mostly from international investors.

那年，腾讯的营收增长了56%，电子商务巨头阿里巴巴的营收飙升了60%。滴滴从主要是国际投资者那里筹集到了近100亿美元的资金。

All of these feel like a lifetime ago. It’s a lot more difficult for Chinese internet companies to thrive now.

所有这些像是上辈子发生的事情。现在，中国互联网公司想蓬勃发展要困难得多。

The country is mired in the worst economic downturn since the Mao era. Few people believe the 5 percent growth rate the government announced for 2024. Consumer confidence is low — both Uniqlo and Starbucks, two consumer brands that had thrived in China for years, are losing customers to cheaper brands.

中国已陷入了毛泽东时代以来最严重的经济衰退。没有多少人相信政府宣布的2024年的5%增长率。消费者信心低迷，优衣库和星巴克这两个曾在中国蓬勃发展多年的消费品牌正在将客户流失给更便宜的品牌。

When the country’s economy suffers, it’s hard for one of its pillar industries to do well. The tech companies’ earnings have reflected that.

国家的经济状况不佳时，很难让其支柱产业之一表现良好。科技公司的收益情况已反映了这点。

新泽西州的联邦参议员科里·布克（左）和马萨诸塞州的联邦参议员爱德华·马基出席有关TikTok的记者会，摄于上周四。

As China’s population continues a steady decline — it fell a third consecutive year — the big tech platforms are running out of new users. WeChat has about 1.4 billion accounts, bigger than the Chinese population. Even a second-tier social media app like RedNote, which is popular among young, urban and affluent female users, amassed more than 300 million users. For such companies, international expansion is the natural next step.

随着中国人口继续稳步下降——中国人口已连续三年下降，大型科技公司的平台上很难找到新用户。微信平台上已有约14亿个账号，比中国的人口还多。就连小红书这样的受年轻富裕的城市女性用户欢迎的二线社交媒体应用也只积累了逾3亿用户。对这些公司来说，向国际扩张是自然而然的下一步。

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is the envy of the industry because of the success of its overseas businesses, which have been growing at a much faster rate than its domestic operations.

TikTok的母公司字节跳动因海外业务成功已成为行业羡慕的对象，其海外业务的增长速度远高于国内业务。

But the U.S. effort to ban TikTok highlights how hard it is for Chinese internet companies to expand overseas. As the Chinese Communist Party tightens its grip on the country’s private sector, it’s increasingly difficult for the world to entrust their citizens’ personal data to Chinese companies, which ultimately answer to Beijing.

但美国禁止TikTok的努力凸显了中国互联网公司向海外扩张的难度。随着中共加强对私营部门的控制，世界各国已越来越不愿意将本国公民的个人数据委托给最终听命于北京的中国公司。

There are good reasons that the outside world, including the U.S. government, doesn’t trust these companies. In a country where the government owns much of everything and wields power randomly and often ruthlessly, the private sector has been on its toes. The internet companies are heavily censored and must self censor to survive. All the big ones, with no exception, have had their apps removed from app stores or been fined or disciplined by regulators in recent years.

包括美国政府在内的外部世界有充分的理由不信任这些公司。在一个政府几乎拥有所有东西，而且常常随意、无情动用国家权力的国家里，私营部门一直如履薄冰。互联网公司受到严格审查，而且必须自我审查才能生存。近年来，所有大型企业无一例外地都有过从应用商店下架应用、或受到监管机构罚款或处罚的事情。

It’s well known that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is no fan of the digital sector, unless it is being used to advance his agenda of national rejuvenation.

众所周知，中国领导人习近平不喜欢数字行业，除非该行业被用来推进他的民族复兴议程。

“The real economy is the foundation of a nation’s economy and the source of its wealth,” he said in 2018. “Economic development must never deviate from the real economy toward excessive reliance on the virtual economy.”

“实体经济是一国经济的立身之本、财富之源，”他曾在2018年说。“经济发展任何时候都不能脱实向虚。”

In that speech and on other occasions, Mr. Xi made it clear that he put a higher priority on advanced manufacturing than on the internet and liked the state-owned enterprises more than the private sector.

习近平已在那次讲话中和其他场合明确表示，他要优先发展先进制造业，而不是互联网行业，他更喜欢国有企业，而不是民营企业。

TikTok母公司字节跳动位于加州圣何塞的办公楼。

That set the tone for the crackdown of Alibaba, Ant Group, Didi and Tencent’s video game business in 2020 and 2021. The harsh “zero Covid” restrictions in 2022 that crippled the country’s economy plunged some of the biggest internet companies into financial losses for the first time in years.

这为政府在2020年和2021年对阿里巴巴、蚂蚁集团、滴滴，以及腾讯的视频游戏业务进行打压定下了基调。中国严厉的“新冠清零”措施让经济在2022年陷入瘫痪，导致一些最大的互联网公司多年来首次陷入财务亏损。

Also around this time, the Chinese government’s wolf warrior diplomacy and its alliance with Russia forced many countries to rethink their views of China as an important part of the global economy. Some now see it as a threat to democratic systems and world peace. Perceptions of China deteriorated in many Western countries, and fewer people are interested in visiting China compared with a decade ago.

大约在这个时候，中国政府的“战狼外交”以及与俄罗斯的密切关系迫使许多国家重新考虑它们对中国作为全球经济重要组成部分的看法。一些人现在把中国视为对民主制度和世界和平的威胁。许多西方国家对中国的看法变坏，与十年前相比，有兴趣访问中国的人减少了。

Chinese internet companies and investors are increasingly caught between their authoritarian government at home and suspicion, even hostility, abroad.

中国的互联网公司和投资者正越来越多地夹在国内的威权政府和国外的猜疑甚至敌意之间。

Most Western investors now deem China’s tech industry not worth investing in because of the geopolitical tension and the country’s unpredictable policies.

由于紧张的地缘政治以及中国不可预测的政策，大多数西方投资者们现在认为中国的科技行业不值得投资。

U.S. university endowments and pension funds stopped giving venture capital firms money to invest in Chinese start-ups. A generation of Chinese investors who helped create some of the most successful tech companies have taken up golfing, marathoning and hiking.

美国大学的捐款基金和养老基金已不再把钱交给风险投资公司，让它们投资中国初创企业。帮助创建了一些最成功的科技企业的一代中国投资者们已开始过上打高尔夫球、跑马拉松和徒步旅行的生活。

Investors in global stock markets are equally uninterested in Chinese internet firms.

全球各地股市的投资者们同样对中国的互联网公司不感兴趣。

An investor who was not authorized to speak publicly told me recently that in 2017, when she joined a hedge fund that managed more than $100 billion, about 40 percent of the fund’s emerging market holdings were Chinese tech stocks. Now they are less than 3 percent.

一名投资者最近告诉我，2017年她加入一家曾管理着1000多亿美元的对冲基金时，该基金在新兴市场持的股份中约40%是中国科技股，现在这个比例不到3%。该人未获得公开评论的授权，所以要求不具名。

The ecosystem that cultivated a vibrant tech sector is broken. Fewer investments mean fewer start-ups, far fewer overseas initial public offerings and much lower stock valuations than their American counterparts. RedNote, the social media app that American TikTok users have taken up, was founded in 2013 and has yet to go public.

曾培育了充满活力的科技行业的生态系统已经遭到破坏。投资减少意味着初创企业减少，到海外进行首次公开募股的公司大幅减少，中国科技企业的股票估值也远低于其美国同行的。美国的TikTok用户转向使用的社交媒体应用小红书成立于2013年，尚未上市。

These companies remain competitive, the investor said. But in the eyes of the world, she added, they’re no longer relevant.

上述投资者说，这些公司仍有竞争力。但她也说，在世界的眼里，它们已不再有价值。