Those Chinese TikToks about life on the mainland aren’t propaganda — they’re brilliant marketing

TikTok content has always been surprisingly evergreen. It’s rare to see videos about the news or current events trending at the highest levels of the app; it’s usually just fun dances or the occasional viral strawberry. That’s why the app remained largely unaffected by its brief blackout back in January, when it shut off for all US users before the incoming Trump administration delayed the ban on the app (and delayed it again in April). Since it’s come back, though, it’s become much harder for the app’s 135 million users in the US to ignore the political context of scrolling, liking, and sharing.

There has been a noticeable uptick of content about America’s trade war with China — or at least the perception of a notable uptick. Accounts are showing off Chinese-made planes and flying taxis, a user going by “GrumpyChineseGuy” complains about tariffs, and American users are being accused of being foreign agents. It’s all led to a larger, nagging question that now hangs over the app: is TikTok showing us all Chinese propaganda? 

Based on an upcoming study from Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute, the answer is yes. Right-wing media in the US has latched on to the study, even as TikTok has denied it. But what’s actually happening on the app? It’s hard to tell, especially when the app’s auto-scrolling, totally algorithmic interface means users have little control over what they see and even less understanding of what other users see.

Well, according to Garbage Day’s findings, yes, there is more content about China trending on the app right now, but it’s not exactly the governmental propaganda you might expect.

For a start, if a random TikTok user is saying something about China that isn’t completely negative, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re toeing the Chinese Community Party line, nor are they some kind of insidious foreign agent who’s knowingly spreading it. This idea, in fact, originated long before TikTok went dark. In 2023, The Guardian deleted a statement written by Osama Bin Laden on his justification for the 9/11 attacks after the statement got attention on TikTok. Years before Americans were on RedNote, politicians like Nikki Haley were expressing identical fears about what TikTok was doing to our impressionable youth.

Ultimately, the Bin Laden scare was over a relatively small amount of attention driven by a few individual account holders who found a view they had never taken seriously before. Media scholar Vasily Gatov uses the term “white noise jamming” to describe the way global powers maintain their own cultural narratives, dismissing anything positive about rival nations as intentionally spread by the enemy. TikTok was designed to be merely an engaging social media app, but the context collapse it helps promote enforces this mentality. It’s hard for anyone to reckon with the scale and reach of a single TikTok video, but whatever clip expressing pro-China views that makes it to your For You feed probably wasn’t made by the CCP.

Since the blackout and delayed ban in January, though, there’s been an obvious change in the source of the videos many people are seeing on TikTok. Chinese users don’t actually use TikTok, but instead use Douyin, a separate app exclusively for China. And until recently, there hadn’t been an extensive effort by most users on either side of the Great Firewall to get around it.

The January blackout meant enough account holders put in that effort to briefly make the app RedNote a center of cultural exchange. Until January 19, when the Trump administration delayed the ban on TikTok, there was a genuine sense of discovery and excitement. Ordinary Chinese users and ordinary American users talked to each other, comparing their experiences and memes. 

As TikTok has remained active in the US, Chinese users have started to more actively make videos on the platform for an American audience. It’s easy to see why some are worried about propaganda thanks to accounts like @rogerwu_georgedeco, which provides guided tours of Chinese homes and factories, or @lunasourcingchina, who makes videos critical of President Trump’s recent trade war with China.

These videos get hundreds of thousands of views. But are they propaganda? No. Do they have an unstated agenda? Absolutely, but it’s a very Western one: they’re all trying to sell you something. The tour guide actually runs an interior design business, and the anti-tariff videos are made by a wholesaler. One of the most egregious examples is actually “GrumpyChineseGuy,” who has advised his followers to commit import fraud while also not so subtly telling his followers to DM him about drop-shipping. In virtually every case where Garbage Day was able to find the source of a video that had been called “Chinese propaganda,” it turned out to be from an account sponsored by a company that does business involving China, rather than the CCP.

Since its launch in 2022, TikTok Shop has become central to the platform’s algorithm and business strategy. This is the app’s highest priority, and it’s a much more salient factor driving pro-China content than any kind of state interference.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t CCP propaganda on TikTok. Crucially, though, it’s not made for the app. State-controlled media outlets like Xinhua News Agency or China Media Group aren’t actually on TikTok, but their videos will regularly be reposted from other parts of the internet, sometimes earning hundreds of thousands of views. Because they’re reposted, they don’t have the same kind of production value or format as native short videos, but they also don’t have any kind of official label or way to screen that they’re propaganda.

Beyond that, there’s the murkier question of how much influence China has on the app. But it’s the wrong question to be asking — at least for American politicians. It’s not that China is flooding TikTok with propaganda that’s changing young Americans’ minds; it’s that they’re latching on to sentiment that’s already there. And you’re going to find the same thing on every social media app right now, with or without the Chinese Communist Party.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here on Sherwood News. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.