I Love TikTok: Permanent Revolution and the Forever War
ByteDance and the Byte Tax
To have the book was a must; to have a bookmark in it was to face scrutiny.
Yang Ji-Heng
There is an app on Chinese social media called Little Red Book. It’s nominally a reference to a shopping guide, but a foreigner cannot help but think of the book authored by Mao and honed by Lin Biao: short aphorisms, almost designed to be scrolled endlessly, in a way that even shuffling seems more orderly.
The cultural revolution destroyed filial bonds the same way discovery algorithms replaced the friendship graph. We went from “your friend tom liked this, so we think you will too” to “hey try this from a complete new stranger, we want to see if this is right for everyone else”. Deracination began with a revolutionary spirit and ended with an economic drive.
Think, too, of the modes of expression that were appropriated most by the cultural revolution. Calligraphy done by Mao himself, and tailored under party lines; Opera was commandeered by Mao's wife, a former actress who oversaw the eight model operas that replaced the traditional repertoire. These are two of the most embodied, ephemeral, in-the-moment artforms that China has to offer. The performance of writing text was championed while the substance of it was burnt for ink. So too did dancers survive more than playwrights.
Fifty years later, we find these aesthetic sensibilities in the superiority of Chinese AI voice-banks. Because of both linguistics and cultural priorities Chinese models are not only more fluent than western models, but often can sing in English more fluently than an English one can sing in Chinese.
My claim is not that the Cultural Revolution paved the way for TikTok. Rather, I’d say they are both symptoms or reactions to outside influence that the Chinese had to wind around.
China's internet was not always visual-first. In the 2000s, platforms like Tianya Club and Sina Blog hosted opinionated and text-heavy rants. Han Han's blog alone drew over 100 million reads. But that culture was dismantled faster and more completely than its Western equivalent. When censorship tightened after 2010, hundreds of millions of new users leapfrogged desktops entirely and came online through smartphones, and recommendation algorithms rewarded visual brevity over textual depth. They embraced WeChat, and eventually Douyin. There were a minority who tried VPNs; but even then, they were excluded because they had to gear their language to western encoding.
It’s well known that encoding Chinese in a byte-based system designed for alphabetic scripts was always an awkward fit. Before Unicode, China relied on native encodings that allowed each character to occupy just two bytes. When the global internet forced a reluctant switch to UTF-8, that cost rose to three. Unicode created the illusion of parity on the screen, but at the foundational layer of the machine, the byte still belonged to the alphabet.
Leibniz introduced binary to the west and validated it through the I-Ching, a book that had been introduced to Europe by missionaries. How funny it is that three centuries later, that binary in the form of encoding standards would end up penalizing the Chinese language.
Under GBK, their native encoding, Chinese writers produced serialized fiction at enormous scale. Then when Unicode arrived, foreigners were baffled at the sheer amount they had produced. It was only a harbinger.
Then, recommendation algorithms arrived. Based on discovery, they fit a media environment that was already more broadcast-oriented and less identity-driven than Western social media. The gap to bridge was smaller. By the time the text could finally render cleanly, Chinese digital culture had already evolved to bypass the text stream entirely, hurtling toward the visual algorithm. It is apt that the company so well-known for circumventing text heavy platforms in favor of visual ones is named ByteDance.
Despite China’s prowess in visual generative AI, language models were a different problem. Their intuition for the performative didn’t transfer to text prediction. Chinese users who bemoaned the so-called “Byte tax” now bemoan the “Token tax.” For them, tokenization is “ASCII 2.0”: English-centric training data and vocabulary design meant that Chinese required more tokens to express the same meaning.
CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) optimized tokenizers have narrowed the gap, but this is a tradeoff, not a true workaround. The native encoding had to work before people wrote, before a universal one developed; in the LLM case, Chinese labs started from multilingual capacity built around English and are honing it to natively match logographic languages.
Now, China has a culture that prioritizes short form visuals and audio, and a literature more feed than archive. Its text culture was built twice and dismantled twice: once by revolution, once by algorithm. What remains prioritizes everything the cultural revolution alluded to: Performance, Visuals, and Pithiness.
Compare that with the rational and enlightened West, warned away from pithy rhetoric by the world wars. Its post-war order was explicitly designed to make rhetoric boring; the EU, the UN, parliamentary procedure, the entire architecture of liberal democracy is a machine for converting charisma into tedium. The first world is deliberately anti-performative.
Public oratory never held the civic status in China that it did in the West. But Chinese rhetoric has its pockets. The Little Red Book was its most concentrated form, and the Cultural Revolution its most dramatic consequence. Where the West defused rhetoric by making governance boring, China monopolized it. The state claimed political speech, and the public was left to own its entertainment. There is no public dissent, but nor is there any unmarked state attempt at entertainment.
When CCTV airs the spring gala, its propaganda is OBVIOUS. In a way that ads from decades ago are neutered in their effect, so too is heavy handed propaganda. Social credit? Obvious. FICO? Not so much. Chinese propaganda and social engineering fails to persuade, but succeeds in being the limits of proper discourse. The problem in the West is that its PR often persuades, yet establishes no limits to what can be said. This is possibly why AI doomerism is absent from China, which many westerners take as simple naivete. The former takes its politics as entertainment; the latter takes entertainment as politics.
Of course the West is nauseated. They have valued enlightenment; and in its wake, cherished romantic interiority. The algorithmic feed spits on both. They must not just live in a world that the chinese are creating, but are living in an environment that they themselves helped create. They cannot build upon it in their image, yet cannot stop it. The European regulatory impulse (GDPR, the AI Act) is essentially an attempt to build the firewall after the fact.
Who builds high speed rail after investing so heavily into highways when the highways have already reshaped the geography? Suburbs sprawl, cities decentralize, the entire built environment reorganizes around the car. By the time you want rail, the population no longer lives in patterns that rail can serve. Similarly, consider the governments we have. One has built a democracy, and allows all in; another has built a one-party system, and cannot tolerate an impersonation at its head. Ask which one will survive in an era where no truth can be ascertained but the sheer fun and beauty of it all.
Fascinating perspective.