The people who understand Xiaohongshu best across China are a group of middle-aged men in Zhengzhou | Deep Dive
Text by | Xiao Sijia
Edited by | Qiao Qian
If someone delves deep into the heart of Zhengzhou, they might witness a rather absurd scene: a group of middle - aged men in their thirties and forties, seemingly having nothing to do with the refined aura of Xiaohongshu, are leveraging this platform, which is popular among young women. Relying on a standardized content factory and the ultimate utilization of algorithms, they have achieved annual revenues in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. Most of them come from humble beginnings, and many have only primary or secondary school education.
In the Internet marketing circle, they have an imposing name: the Zhengzhou Gang.
Let's rewind to 2018. Taobao live - streaming e - commerce was just starting to gain momentum. Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya became well - known one after another. By mid - year, Douyin, which was constantly producing popular content, officially surpassed Kuaishou and became the leading traffic pool among Chinese content - distribution apps. As a result, almost no one paid attention to Xiaohongshu, a product - recommendation community with a monthly active user base of less than ten million.
However, in that very year, a group of operators from Zhengzhou's e - commerce companies quietly emerged.
Looking back now, there are some similarities in their "collaboration": As an agricultural province with limited Internet resources, Henan's merchants have long been on the periphery of the e - commerce circle. They lack both capital support and brand resources, and most of them can only fumble with difficulty at the lower end of the industrial chain. Liu Zhi, who has 10 years of experience in Taobao e - commerce, told 36Kr that at that time, there were only 2,000 Tmall stores in Zhengzhou, while in Hangzhou, the number was ten times that.
Meanwhile, Xiaohongshu, which had just transformed into a "lifestyle content platform", was in an awkward position under the double pressure of Douyin and Taobao. This was a desolate land that mainstream players disdained to enter, but unexpectedly, it gave an opportunity to marginal forces. Unexpectedly, this seemingly helpless choice allowed them to accidentally discover a gold mine that no one was competing for.
However, as more people came to dig for gold, Xiaohongshu, this stage, withdrew its initial tolerance. Newcomers are still pouring in, but old players have silently left.
Zhengzhou Xiaohongshu offline sharing meeting
01 The Traffic Myth
"We used to joke that we were the nomads in the Internet world. We would go wherever there was traffic, wherever the pastures were lush."
At the end of April 2025, in Zhengzhou, at an offline teaching session on Xiaohongshu content e - commerce, the keynote speaker, Daming, defined the identity of the "Zhengzhou Gang" in this way. "The traffic on Xiaohongshu is of high quality and abundant." He joked.
Subsequently, he shared a case to illustrate how Xiaohongshu can leverage traffic to create a wealth myth: In 2022, he posted a product - recommendation note on an amateur account with zero followers. The content of the post was extremely simple. The main text was just one sentence, "My mother - in - law praised me for my good purchase." The accompanying picture was of a bed, and a product, a small pillow for newborns, was subtly inserted into the scene. Eventually, without any paid promotion, this note reached 100,000 views through organic traffic and brought in hundreds of thousands of yuan in sales for his product. Moreover, creating such a note cost almost nothing.
This content strategy of achieving great results with minimal investment is a typical approach of the Zhengzhou Gang.
The entire venue was packed. More than a hundred founders or e - commerce operators from various companies gathered in groups around long tables, looking concentrated. Everyone stared intently at the "traffic formula" on the screen and occasionally took pictures with their mobile phones. Among the crowd, there were also many learners who came from outside Henan Province.
As a Xiaohongshu operator with five years of experience, Lin Qing had heard of the Zhengzhou Gang two or three years ago. However, since 2024, more and more merchants have frequently mentioned these three words to him. The reason is that these merchants have noticed that in their respective product categories, a number of new brands have emerged at the top of the rankings. They sprang up like mushrooms after rain, grew rapidly, and left well - established brands that had been in the market for many years far behind.
After some investigation, they found that the IP positioning of these brands ultimately pointed to the same source: Zhengzhou.
The so - called Zhengzhou Gang is not an official organization. It is a group of e - commerce companies in Zhengzhou that have made their mark by researching Xiaohongshu content production and product - recommendation advertising. In the early days, they started with white - label products, mainly targeting high - profit sectors such as health products and the so - called "black five categories" (traditional Chinese food products). As their approach matured, they gradually expanded into areas such as beauty, home decor, and small household appliances.
Different from the traditional marketing method of spending hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan on celebrities and influencers, the Zhengzhou Gang takes the path of "winning by quantity". They recruit a large number of Xiaohongshu editors, mass - produce a huge number of notes by replicating popular content every day, and widely distribute them on amateur accounts. They rely on organic traffic to create popular posts and then direct the traffic to Taobao and Tmall platforms outside Xiaohongshu for transactions. This unorthodox approach that bypasses the official channels and relies solely on free traffic is known in the industry as "underwater notes".
The Zhengzhou Gang has three classic content templates: product reviews, product recommendations, and bait posts. Take the so - called "bait post" as an example. A Xiaohongshu editor in Zhengzhou posts on Xiaohongshu in the tone of an amateur, asking, "What black coffee have you repurchased more than five times?" Then, using another account, they recommend a specific product in the comments, also in the tone of an amateur.
This method precisely captures the core mechanism of Xiaohongshu: driven by product recommendations, not pushing products forcefully, but subtly inserting products in the guise of sharing real life. However, these seemingly accidental and sincere notes are actually constructed from scratch by Xiaohongshu editors at their workstations. It is this "army of ants" hidden behind the platform that subtly influences users' consumption decisions through a continuous stream of product - recommendation notes.
The keynote speaker, Daming, calls this approach "flying close to the ground". It neither pursues a high - profile presence nor emphasizes brand image. It only focuses on conversion efficiency and note data. More importantly, the cost is extremely low. "Even if you lose money, you won't lose much, just the labor cost at most."
It's hard not to be envious. "He achieved a large number of effective views with very low - cost methods, while we have to pay for traffic to achieve the same results," sighed a Xiaohongshu operator of a brand. For a long time, she and her colleagues have been discussing and researching the Zhengzhou Gang, trying to figure out the operating rules behind this model.
An undeniable background is that in recent years, traffic on Xiaohongshu has become increasingly expensive. At the same time, the marketing budgets of merchants have been shrinking.
Chen Jue is a media planner for an underwear brand in Shanghai. Due to cost - cutting and efficiency - improvement measures, the department's marketing budget has been reduced by nearly half in the past two years. However, there are still many expenses. "If we create official - approved content (content promoted through Xiaohongshu's official Puying platform, which requires a 10% service fee), it's almost impossible to get good results without paid traffic," Chen Jue observed. For a Xiaohongshu blogger with an average view count of about 1,000, the view count of a sponsored post will drop to six or seven hundred. "Without paid traffic, it's difficult for the content to gain momentum in the early stage, so you have to spend money."
With a smaller budget and more expensive traffic, the conversion rate has also declined. Chen Jue remembers that in one week, the company spent more than 17,000 yuan on Xiaohongshu promotion, a 28.77% increase compared to the previous year, but the sales volume actually decreased.
It was in this situation that the approach of the "Zhengzhou Gang" caught her attention. At the Double Eleven review meeting in 2024, when conducting a competitor analysis, she discovered a rising brand. "Its approach is very aggressive, and it has also occupied a significant market share." At that time, when she opened Xiaohongshu and entered any keyword related to "underwear", all the search results were products of this competitor. "The entire screen was filled with their products."
On Xiaohongshu, which is regarded as the "final stop for consumption decisions", whoever occupies the keywords will capture the users' minds. Therefore, merchants often flood the platform with content, targeting users' search habits through "keyword positioning". For example, for a body wash oil, relevant keywords such as "body wash oil for dry skin" and "moisturizing body wash for autumn and winter" should be covered as much as possible to ensure that when users search for these keywords, the brand's products are the first to appear. The more firmly the keywords are locked, the more significant the conversion effect will be.
However, after Chen Jue's company spent hundreds of thousands of yuan on Xiaohongshu promotion, they found that "many positions had been taken by them". After learning that the competitor was using the Zhengzhou Gang approach, without hesitation, Chen Jue's supervisor immediately ordered the team members to replicate this model and fight fire with fire.
"If others can do it, so can we." When the next Women's Day promotion came around, they were determined to regain the lost ground.
02 The Zhengzhou Story
Liu Zhi was first shocked by Xiaohongshu in May 2019. He and several friends founded an e - commerce exchange community called "Wanniu Club" and visited two companies for learning every day.
At that time, there were only four companies in Zhengzhou that specialized in Xiaohongshu. When he visited one of them, he was greatly impacted. It was a medium - sized e - commerce company with three or four hundred employees, focusing only on the Xiaohongshu traffic channel. He saw a single fresh graduate writing posts on Xiaohongshu about how to prepare for pregnancy. By directing free traffic to Taobao, he was able to generate millions of yuan in sales per month.
"I felt that my understanding of e - commerce had completely collapsed," said Liu Zhi, who majored in journalism and considered himself to have some aesthetic sense in writing. When he saw these posts, his first reaction was disdain. He took a look at the young man who wrote the post. He was about 1.7 meters tall, looked a bit thin, and had dark skin, presenting a very plain image. "He didn't fit in with Xiaohongshu at all."
However, such rough - looking content and ordinary employees brought in astonishing sales. Sitting in the office, Liu Zhi was silent for about ten minutes, lost in thought.
After leaving the company, Liu Zhi and his partner quickly replicated this approach to promote a new product from scratch. They recruited three fresh graduates, opened a Tmall store, and provided each of them with ten mobile phones. They posted 30 pieces of content on Xiaohongshu every day, covering topics such as hair removal, sunscreen, and product recommendations. At that time, Xiaohongshu's content deduplication mechanism was relatively loose, and posts could be reposted with only a few words changed. There was almost no competition in the market, and simply stating the product's efficacy could drive sales. Even though the team had limited experience, the product was still able to generate 20,000 yuan in daily sales, amounting to 600,000 yuan per month.
Later, Liu Zhi summarized the success of the Zhengzhou Gang model in one sentence: "Use employees with a 60 - point ability to produce 60 - point content, but require a 120 - point execution standard."
If you are a Xiaohongshu editor in Zhengzhou, your daily work routine is roughly as follows: The night before, you first browse Xiaohongshu to find popular post templates in your product category and forward them to your team leader for approval. The next morning, as soon as you arrive at work, you start working according to the selected template - taking pictures, editing photos, and writing copy, imitating every step precisely. Before leaving work, you need to post the specified number of notes (usually six). After confirming that they are successfully included in the platform, you still can't relax. Next, you need to monitor the data to see if any post has received more than 100 likes. Once a post with over 100 likes emerges, you need to immediately add comments and provide guidance to direct the traffic to the external purchase link.
Liu Zhi vividly described this content - creation approach as an electronic assembly line or an online Foxconn. "What does an assembly line need to do? It's to minimize the need for employees to think. They just need to do their jobs well, like tightening screws, without making any mistakes." He emphasized that the most remarkable aspect of the Zhengzhou approach is not the ability to follow trends or chase popular posts, but this highly standardized and replicable SOP.
The underlying logic behind it is that the Zhengzhou Gang's approach does not rely on talent or innovation but on avoiding mistakes.
"It's very mechanical. When you see a popular post, you just imitate it in terms of photos, copywriting, and font effects," complained Zhang Kexin, a former Xiaohongshu editor in Zhengzhou who has since left the job. "For example, if a post with a person holding a toothpaste in front of flowers and plants becomes popular, then we would imitate it by holding a makeup remover and taking a picture in front of the company's plants."
By imitating existing popular notes in the market and outputting content through a volume - based model, the probability of creating a popular post is increased. Following this path, anyone can quickly get the hang of it within a week.
Zhang Kexin once tried to be creative at work. For example, she combined popular otome games or IPs to recommend products according to users' favorite characters. This idea was well - received within the company. However, when the content was posted, it was directly judged as a marketing violation by the platform and was not included. It was a waste of effort. After that, she started to obediently replicate popular content and never did such thankless things again. "To put it bluntly, we are just assembly - line robots designed to sell products."
An e - commerce company following the Zhengzhou Gang model usually requires hundreds of Xiaohongshu editors to support its operations. "So the talent threshold should be low, and employees should not be overly self - conscious," Liu Zhi emphasized.
He once knew a merchant who ran a maternity care center. When recruiting Xiaohongshu content editors, the merchant required candidates to have good aesthetics, writing skills, and knowledge of the maternity care industry. Finally, the merchant recruited an editor from a newspaper, but the editor never made a splash on Xiaohongshu.
In essence, what Zhengzhou recruits are not content creators but salespeople. With this self - created approach, in those years, there were numerous stories of people getting rich overnight in Zhengzhou by leveraging Xiaohongshu. It seemed that as long as you sowed the seeds, no matter what they were, you could reap gold.
The content style of the Zhengzhou Gang
03 The Secret of Success
Not everyone realizes that the core advantage of the so - called Zhengzhou Gang approach lies not in the "approach" itself but in the two words "Zhengzhou". The huge population dividend has provided the Zhengzhou Gang with the space to grow.
In Zhengzhou, the basic salary of a Xiaohongshu operator is generally only around 3,500 yuan, and most companies do not provide social insurance. For the same position in Shanghai or Hangzhou, the cost is at least two to three times higher. Behind the mass - produced content is a model that relies on intensive labor, sacrificing employees' welfare and development opportunities to achieve an extremely high efficiency - to - cost ratio.
Just as oranges grown in the south may turn into trifoliate oranges