Your RedNote account got blocked. What now?
RedNote (Xiaohongshu) account blocked? What an English teacher outside China can and can't do, and what we did when we lost ours with 300 followers.
We’ll keep this one short and straight, because most of what you’ll read about RedNote blocks is wishful thinking. If you don’t live in mainland China and you don’t have a Chinese phone number, your account can get blocked for all sorts of reasons, and the most useful thing you can do is be ready for it before it happens.
There’s no workaround
Without a Chinese phone number there’s no workaround that reliably gets you back in. With a Chinese number your odds are better, and with a Chinese ID on top of that you can actually recover the account and claim it as yours. For everyone else it’s a great big lottery: some blocked accounts come back after an appeal a few days later, and some appeals simply go nowhere, and you won’t be told why in either case.
How we lost ours
We had an account with around 300 followers, which doesn’t sound like much, but it worked hard for us. Every single day some client wrote to us through it.
Then one day we lost access, and the reason was almost boring: the phone number we’d registered with stopped receiving RedNote’s text messages, so the login code never arrived and there was no other way in.
We went through the whole program. First we were upset, then we were properly angry, and then we went and made a brand new account and started growing it again from zero.
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Playing by the rules helps, and it still isn’t a guarantee
Since you can’t fight a block from outside China, the only thing left is to make one less likely. Understanding how RedNote works and playing by its rules does lower the risk, and we go through those rules in chapter 6 of the guide, along with what to do in the first days after a block.
We’d be lying, though, if we said it protects you completely. You can know every rule, follow all of them and still lose an account one morning, because nobody outside RedNote really knows how its systems decide what to block. There’s no universal answer and no guaranteed fix, so what’s left is accepting that blocks come with the job, trying again and rebuilding the account when you have to.
So if it happens to you, be upset for an evening, be angry for another one if you need it, and then start the next account.