{"id":64369,"date":"2026-06-28T08:54:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T00:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=64369"},"modified":"2026-06-28T08:54:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T00:54:04","slug":"why-malaysias-tourism-boom-lives-and-dies-on-a-chinese-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=64369","title":{"rendered":"Why Malaysia\u2019s tourism boom lives and dies on a Chinese app"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Stand on the pedestrian crossing outside McDonald\u2019s in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, and you will understand something about how travel works in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

To the office workers and taxi drivers streaming past, it is just another junction in Malaysia<\/span>\u2019s biggest city. Yet Chinese tourists<\/span> will often stop at the side of the intersection, phones raised, capturing a sight only RedNote<\/span> taught them to see.<\/div>\n

This is the new geography of Malaysian tourism: shaped less by guidebooks or travel agents than by a Chinese lifestyle app handling 600 million searches every single day.<\/p>\n

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A woman holds her smartphone displaying the Chinese social networking and e-commerce app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu. Photo: AFP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu in Mandarin, has become the default itinerary planner for a generation of outbound Chinese travellers.<\/p>\n

Last year, the platform logged 130 million monthly active outbound travel users, with more than nine in 10 of them actively searching for travel content.<\/p>\n

Malaysia, with its colourful mosques, Mandarin-speaking locals, durian stalls and photogenic roti tisu<\/em> (crispy, crepe-like flatbread) has proved ideal fodder for the feed.<\/p>\n

\u2018Authentic, trustworthy\u2019<\/h3>\n

What makes RedNote so potent is its ease of use and massive user base, according to Sienna Parulis-Cook of China-focused marketing consultancy Dragon Trail International.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Stand on the pedestrian crossing outside McDonald\u2019s in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, and you will understand something about how travel works in the 21st century….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4840],"tags":[524,6233,107,3134,1514,4409,5058],"class_list":["post-64369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel-globetrotting","tag-app","tag-boom","tag-chinese","tag-dies","tag-lives","tag-malaysias","tag-tourism","wpcat-4840-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/64370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}