I'm not here to tell you China is good or bad.
I'm here to show you what 600 million people are actually arguing about.

RESOU (热搜, rè sōu — “hot search”) is the list of what's trending on the Chinese internet at any given moment. Not the official version of China, and not the foreign-correspondent version either: the version 600 million people write themselves, one comment section at a time.

I grew up inside that internet, and now I live outside the firewall — a chronically online Chinese woman abroad, reading Weibo, Xiaohongshu and WeChat so you don't have to. What gets lost in translation isn't the words. It's the context: why a math prize turns into a marriage debate, why millions of women share one pink dinosaur avatar, what a two-character word can carry that a paragraph of English can't.

How every story works

Three layers, always in the same order, so you always know what you're reading:

What happened — the facts, in one tight section.
What they're saying — the comment sections themselves: translated, with like-counts, from more than one side. This is the part you can't get anywhere else.
What I see — my read, clearly marked as mine, and never more than a third of the piece.

The rules I read by

Every screenshot is traceable. Every translation shows its work. When the Western press reads China wrong, I'll say that too — being nobody's megaphone is the whole point. No funders, no party line, no algorithm deciding what matters. One person, picking by hand.

Say hello

Corrections, tips, press: [email protected]. Or find me on Substack, Instagram and Bluesky.

— Resou · A Chinese girl who never logged off.