A few years ago, Xiaohongshu Australia could reasonably be dismissed as a niche platform used mainly by mainland Chinese students and recent migrants.

That description no longer works.

ABC News reported in March 2025 that RedNote, the English name increasingly used for Xiaohongshu, had more than 700,000 monthly users in Australia. More interestingly, academic research published in 2026 describes the platform as becoming part of the everyday infrastructure Chinese migrants use to navigate life in Australia.

The important story is not simply that the user number has grown. It is why people keep finding reasons to use it once they are here.

The growth story did not start with the TikTok refugees

Xiaohongshu received enormous international attention in January 2025 when American users began joining the platform ahead of a possible TikTok ban.

More than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu in just two days, according to Reuters. The episode briefly turned a predominantly Chinese lifestyle platform into an unexpected global cultural exchange.

That certainly helped make the RedNote name more recognisable outside China. But it would be a mistake to explain Australian growth through that moment.

Xiaohongshu already had a substantial Chinese speaking audience in Australia before the TikTok story exploded. ABC was reporting on its influence over Australian tourism, coffee shop discovery and Chinese diaspora communities as early as 2023.

The TikTok moment made RedNote more visible globally. Australia’s growth, however, is better explained by local demographics and the platform’s usefulness in everyday life.

Australia keeps giving Xiaohongshu new users with local problems to solve

International students are one of the clearest reasons.

China remains Australia’s largest international student source country. From January to May 2026, Chinese students represented 23% of all international students studying in Australia.

Those students arrive needing far more than university information.  They need somewhere to live. A phone plan. Restaurants. Furniture. Beauty services. Weekend activities. Doctors. Grocery stores. Transport advice. Travel ideas. Places to meet people.

And they often want answers from people who understand the same cultural and language context. That is exactly where Xiaohongshu becomes useful.

A 2026 academic study of Chinese networked migrants in Australia documented users turning to RedNote for remarkably practical questions, including comparing clinics for visa health checks and reading other people’s experiences of Australian customs procedures.

That is very different from casually scrolling through lifestyle content. The platform is helping people figure out how to live somewhere unfamiliar.

Xiaohongshu fills the gap between official information and lived experience

Google can tell you where a restaurant is. A university website can explain enrolment. A government page can tell you the customs rules.

But those sources do not always answer the question a newcomer is really asking:

What was this actually like for someone like me?

That distinction helps explain Xiaohongshu’s strength.

Users can search through notes written by students, migrants, tourists and local residents who have already experienced the problem. The information might be subjective. Sometimes it can be wrong. But it is often specific, practical and written from a perspective that feels familiar.

That combination has made Xiaohongshu valuable for everything from choosing a restaurant to finding a fishing charter.

ABC documented a Victorian tourism operator who used Red to share fishing content with Chinese speaking audiences. People who found his posts then contacted him for recommendations and trips.

The platform works because the recommendation is not floating in isolation. It is connected to an experience someone can actually have in Australia.

Every local post makes the platform more useful locally

This is probably the most underestimated reason Xiaohongshu keeps growing in Australia.

Its Australian usefulness compounds. Someone posts about a Melbourne hotpot restaurant. Another person searches for hotpot six months later. They visit and create their own note. Other users save it, comment on it and add comparisons. Soon the platform contains not one recommendation but a small body of searchable experience around the restaurant.

The same process happens with cafés, universities, beaches, beauty clinics, supermarkets, property, attractions and weekend trips.

ABC reported an unusually clear example in Victoria. Chinese travellers independently arrived at Hang’s Tree to watch the sunrise and discovered that several of them had found the location through Xiaohongshu.

That is the network effect in physical form. More Australian content improves Australian search results. Better search results give Australian users more reasons to return. More users then create more Australian content.

Growth feeds usefulness, and usefulness feeds growth.

Chinese Australians are also using it alongside Australian platforms

Xiaohongshu’s growth does not mean Chinese Australians have abandoned Google, YouTube, Instagram or other Australian media.

The opposite is closer to reality.

Lowy Institute research found Chinese Australians already moved across several digital ecosystems. YouTube, Facebook and WeChat were among the most frequently used platforms, while Xiaohongshu was the most frequently mentioned platform in the survey’s additional social media category. The research was conducted in 2022, so it should not be treated as a current platform ranking, but it showed the mixed media behaviour clearly.

By the 2025 federal election, Xiaohongshu’s local relevance had become difficult to ignore.

Australian political candidates began using RedNote to communicate with Chinese Australian voters, while University of Melbourne researchers monitored RedNote alongside WeChat and YouTube because of its role in Chinese language political information in Australia.

Politics is not the reason Xiaohongshu grew. But politicians turning up on a lifestyle app is a useful signal that the audience had become locally significant.

Chinese tourism adds another layer of demand

Australia is not only dealing with resident users.

Chinese visitor numbers crossed one million in the year ending December 2025, while Chinese travellers spent a record A$12.3 billion on Australian trips in the year ending September 2025.

Those travellers bring another type of Xiaohongshu usage into Australia.

They search for places to eat, things to buy, attractions worth visiting and destinations that may not appear in a conventional travel guide.

That means one Sydney restaurant can potentially be discovered by:

a Chinese international student living nearby,
a Chinese Australian planning dinner with friends,
and a traveller from Shanghai visiting for five days.

The users may arrive for completely different reasons, but the same local content can sometimes influence all three.

That overlap is commercially powerful.

In 2026, RedNote itself is becoming more international

There is another reason to watch what happens next.

In 2026, RedNote began taking more deliberate steps towards becoming an international product.

The company launched Rednote.com for international users, created separate terms for domestic and overseas audiences, registered a Singapore based international entity and was developing a broader globalisation strategy.

The international site is already live in 2026.

This does not prove that Australian user numbers have suddenly jumped again. There is no authoritative public 2026 Australian monthly active user figure that we would be comfortable presenting as fact.

But it does tell us something important.

International usage is no longer an accidental side effect of Xiaohongshu’s popularity in China. It is becoming part of the company’s product strategy.

So why is Xiaohongshu growing in Australia?

There is no single reason.

It is the combination that matters.

Australia has a large Chinese speaking population. Chinese students continually replenish the audience. Chinese tourism creates high intent discovery. Existing users create more local information. Search makes that information useful long after it was posted. And RedNote itself is becoming more serious about users outside mainland China.

That makes the growth look less like a social media fad and more like a reinforcing ecosystem.

There is still an important qualification.

700,000 Australian monthly users does not mean every Australian business needs Xiaohongshu.

The platform matters most when a business sells something people research, compare, recommend or physically visit.

For those businesses, the question in 2026 is becoming less about whether Xiaohongshu has an Australian audience. The more useful question is whether that audience is already searching for what the business sells.

Digital Crew works with Australian brands trying to understand that difference and build Xiaohongshu strategies around actual Chinese consumer behaviour rather than platform hype.