Digital Refugees and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Encounter: “American Absurdism” and the #TikTokRefugee Migration to Xiaohongshu(小紅書)

In January 2025, the U.S. “divest-or-ban” law targeting TikTok prompted hundreds of thousands of users to migrate to Xiaohongshu and identify themselves as “TikTok refugees.” This paper examines how cross-platform migration and “American absurdism” transformed resistance to the ban into a temporary space of cross-cultural encounter, and how platform infrastructures subsequently recoded this resistance. Drawing on legal documents, contemporary journalism, digital ethnographies, meme studies, and research published between 2025 and 2026, the paper argues that the migration functioned as a form of “performative exit.” Through absurd exaggeration, self-parody, and meme-based communication, security narratives were inverted and translated into low-threshold forms of cross-cultural interaction. However, this openness remained structured by unequal linguistic power, visibility allocation, commercialization, and platform governance. Recommendation systems, translation mechanisms, and moderation practices transformed political expression into data, visibility, and economic value. The concept of “memetic reterritorialization” describes how digital protest can temporarily disrupt platform boundaries while remaining dependent on alternative infrastructures.