My Year as a RedNote Professor
It all started with a post that I was too lazy to write.
Late one night — or maybe it was very early one morning? — in 2024, I was scrolling through the Chinese lifestyle app Xiaohongshu when I happened upon a question that I felt uniquely prepared to answer.
A graduate student was asking whether she should attend a regional academic conference. As a professor well into my second decade of university life, I naturally had some thoughts on the matter. More, as it turns out, than I was prepared to type into a phone.
So, the next day, I set my phone up on a cheap tripod and began speaking directly to the camera — one take, no script, just answering the question as best I could. Soon, other questions common to graduate students started pouring into my account — how to choose a research topic, how to deal with rejection, how to approach a potential supervisor. I answered them as best I could. One video, titled “Three Rules for Applying to an Overseas Ph.D. Program,” has been viewed over 80,000 times.
Only then did I start to realize the potential of a site like Xiaohongshu — apparently better known as RedNote abroad — for reaching a pool of students just like the ones I teach in Beijing, only on a much, much larger scale. Still riding the dopamine rush of my initial success, I started making videos on topics like fieldwork methods and influential thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu and folklorist Yanagita Kunio, even taking my one-man show on the road to record from different locations.
My most popular video? A short introduction to the abstruse theory of Structuralism that has racked up nearly 400,000 views and garnered hundreds of comments, some suggesting the possibility that I was in fact an AI trained on the works (and appearance) of French thinker Michel Foucault.
It’s not always easy. One creator I know put her channel on hold after the comments on one of her videos turned particularly ugly. And the algorithm is frustratingly hard to understand: Apart from my physical resemblance to a certain French theorist, I have no idea why my Structuralism video blew up like it did, while other videos have barely gotten any notice at all.
I briefly considered the idea of expanding into a more professional operation. Each of my relatively simple videos still requires at least a full day to research, shoot, and edit. Hiring a team would help me produce more professional-looking content while allowing me to expand into other social media platforms like (microblogging site) Weibo. Social media “boot camps” promise to help people at my modest level — I have just over 30,000 followers — make the leap to social media stardom.
But I eventually rejected this sort of “up-or-out” logic. None of the creators I know personally have plans to monetize their sites. Rather, it’s a simple matter of sharing what we know — and reaching out to the people who need to hear it. One friend of mine, a doctor at a Beijing hospital, makes videos to help young people manage the stress of their lives. Others give language instruction.
Simply put, we create for the sense of community. We thrive on the quality of engagement, not the number of clicks.
Viewer comments make the effort worthwhile. A single word of thanks justifies the hours of preparation and filming. I read each comment and try my best to answer requests for new content. Comments have also helped me understand my viewers. What kind of person clicks on a RedNote video about Bourdieu? Many are students, but quite a few watch purely out of interest, there to satisfy curiosity about a person or idea they had heard mentioned before but never had the chance to understand in detail.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the demand for philosophical content. China’s public has always been hungry for knowledge — and I don’t mean only in relation to its famous exam culture, but rather intellectual enrichment at a personal level.
Just think about cooking videos. Search any dish or technique, no matter how obscure, and you will find dozens of people willing to treat viewers to a three-minute culinary lesson. You can see the same dish cooked in various ways, as well as in different settings: at home, in a restaurant kitchen, or my favorite, in an outdoor market. Add in viewers willing to click and engage, and these videos become their own knowledge ecosystem.
The same curiosity applies to more academic topics. Visit any large bookstore in Shanghai and you’ll see people sitting and reading — if not actually buying — Chinese and foreign literary classics. Stop by a bar in Beijing’s Haidian District and you might be treated to a university lecture, complete with PowerPoint.
Coffee and Kafka. Balzac and baijiu. But what about the hundreds of millions of Chinese who don’t live in a megacity?
The fact is, there are limits to what most learners can access offline, especially outside of the biggest cities. Smaller cities and towns might boast a beautiful library space but struggle to build a community of readers — or a collection worthy of their time.
My own modest RedNote channel has given me a way to engage directly with interested audiences and build a dialogue among viewers of diverse backgrounds. These conversations continue offline. Viewers often tell me that one of my videos drove them to a particular book, to raise questions in their own seminars, or to seek out new works to deepen their knowledge.
Eventually, I’d love to start actually meeting people. I travel extensively for research, and after posting videos from places like Harbin (in the northeast) and Urumqi (in the northwest), I’ve received kind notes from viewers welcoming me to their hometowns. Next time, I hope I’ll have the sense to post a notice before traveling.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even break into the academic bar lecture circuit.
Editor: Cai Yineng.
(Header image: Visuals from @老食好 on Xiaohongshu and Chen Yaqiong, reedited by Sixth Tone)
