Topic: What white Americans don't know about "Red Note"
Anonymous A started this discussion 1 year ago#122,932
The Chinese name is 小红书, which means "little red book." It refers to the little red book of Chairman Mao's sayings that the Communist revolutionaries carried around with them.
Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 1 year ago, 1 hour later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#1,340,758
I looked it up on Wikipedia (it’s actually because the guy who made it went to Stanford and red is Stanford’s school color)
The app was initially called "Hong Kong Shopping Guide" and targeted Chinese tourists.[9]
The name Xiaohongshu or 'Little Red Book' was inspired by its co-founder Mao Wenchao [zh]'s career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; both institutions feature red as their main color.[10][11]
'Little Red Book' is also the English nickname for the 1964 compilation Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.[9][12] The company stated that the platform's name is not a reference to the book.[13]
Internationally, the app has been officially listed under the name REDnote on the Google Play store since at least September 2024,[14][3] and it is often called by that name by US users.[11][15]