1. What Xiaohongshu Published — and Why It Matters Beyond One Platform
On 15 September 2026, Xiaohongshu released its first Community Finance Ecosystem Convention (《小红书社区金融生态公约》) at a finance governance open day. It applies to every account that publishes or distributes finance-related content on the platform, took effect on release as a trial, and is described as subject to continued revision.
That would be a platform housekeeping story if it stopped there. It does not, for two reasons.
First, the Convention is the clearest worked example yet of how China's new financial marketing rules travel from the regulator to the interface. The Administrative Measures for Online Marketing of Financial Products take effect on 30 September 2026. Xiaohongshu published its implementation fifteen days early, and in several places the platform's wording tracks the regulation almost sentence for sentence.
Second, the platform's own numbers show the scale of what is being regulated. Over the past year Xiaohongshu averaged close to 2 million finance-related posts per month and roughly 12 million comments per month on finance content. Financial daily active users grew 65%, finance-related searches rose 314%, and searches for financial products grew more than 110% year on year. 75% of finance monthly active users perform searches. Over 70% of finance-interested users are under 40, and more than 60% are in tier-one or tier-two cities.
This is a young, search-driven, high-intent audience — and the platform has just told brands, in writing, exactly what they may and may not do in front of it.
2. The Regulatory Chain: Three Documents Behind One Convention
The Convention states its own legal basis. That list is the most useful part of the document for anyone mapping compliance obligations.
| Document | Role in the chain |
|---|---|
| 《中华人民共和国网络安全法》 (Cybersecurity Law) | Underlying content and network obligations |
| 《网络信息内容生态治理规定》 (Provisions on Ecological Governance of Online Information Content) | Content ecosystem governance |
| 《关于加强"自媒体"管理的通知》 (Notice on Strengthening Management of "Self-Media") | Account-level accountability for independent publishers |
| 《关于规范网络名人账号行为管理的通知》 (Notice on Regulating Behaviour Management of Influencer Accounts) | Rules for public-figure accounts |
| 《金融产品网络营销管理办法》 (Administrative Measures for Online Marketing of Financial Products) | The financial marketing regulation, effective 30 September 2026 |
| 《小红书社区公约》 (Xiaohongshu Community Convention) | The platform's own baseline, which this Convention supplements |
Two further regulatory documents sit behind the platform's enforcement priorities, though the Convention does not name them in its basis list: the August 2026 joint measures by eight departments on cracking down on illegal cross-border securities, futures and fund business, and the 2019 notice that first required a licence to market financial products at all.
The practical point: a platform convention is now downstream of a departmental regulation. When a brand asks "what does the regulation mean for my Xiaohongshu account?", the answer is largely written out already.
3. The License Gate: License First, Verification Second, Marketing Third
The Convention states the principle plainly: finance is a licensed industry, so financial marketing is part of a financial activity, and professional qualification is a baseline requirement for protecting users.
The sequence is explicit and ordered — hold a license, then pass platform verification, then market.
| Step | Requirement |
|---|---|
| 1 — Hold a license | Obtain a state-recognised financial business qualification |
| 2 — Platform verification | Complete the platform's professional qualification verification. Institutions submit a financial business license issued by a financial regulator; practitioners submit securities, fund, futures or insurance qualifications as applicable, and display practice information as required |
| 3 — Market | Verified accounts display a verification badge. When publishing professional finance content or running marketing, account information, verification and the actual operating entity must be consistent, and required risk warnings must be given |
The prohibitions attached to the gate are the operative part:
| Prohibited | Detail |
|---|---|
| Using financial terms without verification | Unverified accounts may not use "银行" (bank), "证券" (securities), "期货" (futures), "保险" (insurance) or "基金" (fund) in the account name, avatar, bio or background image, nor imply a financial background or the ability to provide financial services |
| Operating without a license | Non-financial institutions may not operate without a license or conduct unapproved business |
| Impersonation | Impersonating a financial institution or finance professional is strictly prohibited |
| Renting, buying or forging qualifications | Explicitly banned |
| Borrowing another party's qualification | Explicitly banned — a crackdown on the common practice of "挂靠" (attaching a licensed entity's credentials to an unlicensed operator) |
| Lapsed credentials | If a qualification changes, expires or is cancelled, the account must update its verification or stop publishing professional content and running financial marketing |
The "挂靠" prohibition is the one with the widest commercial impact. For offshore or unlicensed firms, the standard workaround — operating under a licensed partner's credentials — is now closed in writing rather than merely discouraged.
4. The Eight Red Lines
The Convention separates the content the community encourages from eight categories it prohibits. The eight are defined, not just listed.
| # | Prohibited category | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 恶意唱衰 — Malicious doomsaying | Distorting macroeconomic data or financial policy, or using selective quotation, malicious splicing or aggregated negative coverage to disparage the economy or capital markets, smear financial institutions or listed companies, and stir pessimism or panic |
| 2 | 恶意炒作市场走势 — Malicious market hype | Exaggerating or one-sidedly dramatising market movements and trends, speculating on index levels, disrupting market order |
| 3 | 非法荐股 — Illegal stock recommendations | Publicly recommending individual stocks, including indicating buy or sell levels, predicting future movements, giving investment advice, inciting follow-on trading, profit-sharing arrangements, or posting return screenshots to induce others to copy trades |
| 4 | 非法金融活动 — Illegal financial activity | Promoting illegal financial activity, teaching related methods, providing unlawful services, or marketing, channelling traffic, matching transactions or otherwise facilitating it |
| 5 | 不实信息 — False information | Fabricating insider news or exclusive tips; publishing unsourced or unverifiable financial claims; using AI to generate or spread false financial information; AI face-swapping to spread rumours |
| 6 | 误导性信息 — Misleading information | Claiming or promising "principal-protected and interest-guaranteed" or "guaranteed profit, no loss"; using "inside information", "exclusive channel" or "free to claim" to induce investment; using inducement terms such as "low risk", "low threshold", "instant payout" and "high yield"; borrowing authority from regulators, professionals or state-capital backing; showing historical returns without stating the time range and statistical basis |
| 7 | 违规导流 — Illegal traffic diversion | Disguised marketing under the guise of providing investment materials, wealth services or investment teaching; displaying contact details via variant or homophone characters; pushing users to private messages, paid groups or off-platform communication and trading |
| 8 | 虚假人设 — Fake personas | Fabricating investment experience or return stories, impersonating others, or constructing a financial persona inconsistent with actual identity |
Categories 4 and 6 deserve attention precisely because of how closely they mirror the regulation — see the next section.
5. Three Clauses Copied Almost Verbatim From the Regulation
The strongest evidence that this Convention is regulation-driven rather than self-authored lies in the overlap. Three passages are, in substance, lifted from the Administrative Measures for Online Marketing of Financial Products.
| Measure (effective 30 Sep 2026) | Convention clause |
|---|---|
| Article 6 defines illegal financial activity as "behaviour that, without lawful permission from a financial regulator or in violation of state financial management rules, substantively engages in currency, payment, deposit-taking, lending, insurance, securities, funds, futures, foreign exchange and other business activities, including but not limited to illegal fundraising, illegal securities and futures activity, illegal deposit-taking, illegal lending, virtual currency issuance and trading, illegal foreign exchange margin trading, and offshore institutions providing financial product services to PRC residents without authorization" | The Convention's Article 4 reproduces this definition, including the offshore-institution clause verbatim |
| Article 6 also bars providing online marketing services or facilitation for such activity | The Convention bars "marketing, channelling traffic, matching transactions or otherwise facilitating" it |
| Article 10(7) prohibits inducement terms: "低风险" "低门槛" "秒到账" "高收益" "低利率" "无成本" | The Convention's Article 6 prohibits "低风险" "低门槛" "秒到账" "高收益" — the same term list |
| Article 8 requires marketing content to match the financial product contract on product name, provider, seller, category, rates and risk warnings, with no material omission or concealment | The Convention's marketing rules require the same consistency |
| Article 6 bars online marketing of private-fund products and OTC derivatives | The Convention bars it in the same terms |
| Article 26 bars monopoly and unfair competition | The Convention bars disparaging competitors, improper ranking comparisons and misuse of similar brands |
Why this matters commercially. The overlap means the Convention is not a new, separate compliance burden to be tracked independently. A brand that has already mapped its obligations under the Measures has, with limited additions, mapped its obligations on Xiaohongshu. The reverse is also true: the platform will now enforce these rules itself, with account-level penalties, rather than waiting for a regulator to act.
The offshore clause travelling intact into a platform convention is worth noting on its own. Unlicensed offshore financial institutions serving PRC residents are named in the platform's prohibited list, not merely in a departmental regulation.
6. What the Community Encourages — and the AI Labelling Rule
The Convention is not purely restrictive. It sets out four things the platform wants to see.
| Encouraged | Detail |
|---|---|
| Professional科普 (public education) | Qualified creators and financial institutions should explain macroeconomics and finance objectively, neutrally and accessibly, and promote rational investment concepts |
| Genuine experience sharing | Users are encouraged to share real investing experience, spending decisions and life lessons, without exaggerating returns or concealing risk |
| Risk warnings | Content involving personal investing must carry necessary and adequate risk warnings |
| AI content labelling | Content generated or assisted by AI must be labelled, and the publisher is responsible for its accuracy and timeliness |
The AI labelling requirement is the operationally significant one. It aligns with China's AI content labelling rules that took effect on 1 September 2026 and extends them into the finance vertical specifically: an AI-written market commentary post on Xiaohongshu must be labelled, and the account — not the model — owns the accuracy of what it says.
7. Enforcement: Numbers, Methods, and the Platform's Own Constraints
The Convention publishes both the penalties and the scale of enforcement to date.
| Dimension | Detail |
|---|---|
| Content-level penalties | Distribution restriction, takedown |
| Account-level penalties | Muting, verification revocation, ban |
| Aggravating factors | Nature, circumstances, frequency and impact of the violation |
| Zero tolerance | Promoting, teaching or providing illegal financial activity, or channelling marketing traffic to it — handled severely; suspected crimes referred to regulators and judicial authorities |
Enforcement to date (approximately the past six months)
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Violating posts actioned | over 1.01 million |
| Violating accounts banned | over 157,000 |
| Violating comments rectified | over 4.77 million |
| Criminal suspects detained in a coordinated operation against account-registration fraud rings (H1 2026) | 15, involving more than 20,000 accounts |
Detection methods. Xiaohongshu describes a three-stage framework — discover, identify, action — with an AI model assessing intent across posts, comments and private messages, specifically to catch accounts where "a single post looks compliant but the overall behaviour violates". The platform also clusters IP, device and account relationships to identify coordinated groups, on the logic that tactics change but physical relationships do not.
The adversarial cycle. The platform disclosed how violators have adapted: early accounts posted return screenshots and pushed users to private chat; after enforcement, they moved to disguising stock codes inside numeric strings within innocuous-looking courier, library or subway-station guides; more recently they pose as ordinary users sharing daily trading and divert to off-platform trading.
The platform's own constraint. The Convention commits Xiaohongshu to strengthen inspection, prevent violating content and artificially amplified extreme market sentiment from being amplified by recommendation systems, and not to use algorithms to induce excessive consumption or excessive investment.
That last commitment is a direct echo of the Measures' Article 13, which bars algorithm models designed to induce excessive consumption and requires an opt-out from personalised recommendations.
8. What a Licensed Institution Actually Chose to Give Up
The most useful signal on what "good" looks like came from CITIC Securities, which presented its investor-education practice at the same event.
CITIC observed that investors increasingly build awareness, compare information and form interest through social and search platforms before developing a service need, and that Xiaohongshu sits at that early awareness stage — a stage traditional brokerage channels cover poorly. The firm therefore ran investor education there, and said it had deliberately abandoned three traffic shortcuts:
- Emotional return narratives
- Over-use of "seeding-style" (种草式) marketing packaging
- Chasing short-term volume through aggressive posting frequency
Its framing is worth quoting, because it captures the shift the Convention formalises: "Financial content is not one-off marketing material. It is closer to infrastructure." The measure of success it described was not reach but whether users return to licensed institutions' content when they have a question.
For brands, this is the clearest available statement of the platform's preferred posture: licensed entities publishing durable, educational, non-promotional content will be favoured over entities optimising for reach.
9. What This Means for International Financial Brands
Five implications for firms assessing their Xiaohongshu position:
- The licence gate is now a platform gate, not just a regulatory one. Xiaohongshu will verify credentials itself before allowing financial marketing. An entity without a PRC financial licence cannot pass step one, and there is no workaround — borrowing a partner's qualification is explicitly banned.
- Offshore institutions are named. The Measures' offshore clause is reproduced in the Convention, so unlicensed offshore financial institutions serving PRC residents appear in the platform's prohibited list. Content that markets their services — directly or through creators — falls inside the ban.
- The regulatory vocabulary is now operational vocabulary. Terms like "low risk", "low threshold", "instant payout" and "high yield" are prohibited on the platform, with account-level penalties attached. Creative review should be checking against a specific word list, not a general tone guideline.
- Educational positioning is the viable lane. The rules distinguish between qualified institutions providing public education and anyone conducting marketing. For brands that hold a licence, investment in genuinely useful, durable content is both compliant and platform-favoured.
- Commercial content must be disclosed. Content with a commercial relationship must be published through the platform's commercialisation tools and clearly labelled — publishing paid content as personal experience is prohibited. Creator campaigns must be structured accordingly from the outset.
10. Action Plan
| Priority | Action | Why |
|---|---|---|
| P0 | Determine which entity in the group holds a PRC financial licence, and confirm it can complete Xiaohongshu's professional qualification verification | Verification precedes any financial marketing; an unlicensed entity cannot pass step one |
| P0 | Stop any "挂靠" arrangement immediately — operating under a licensed partner's credentials | Explicitly banned, with account-level penalties |
| P0 | Audit account names, avatars, bios and background images for unverified use of bank, securities, futures, insurance or fund terms | The Convention names these placements specifically |
| P0 | Screen all finance creative against the prohibited-term list: principal-protected and interest-guaranteed, guaranteed profit, low risk, low threshold, instant payout, high yield, inside information, exclusive channel | These carry account-level penalties |
| P1 | Label every piece of AI-generated or AI-assisted finance content, and assign a human owner for its accuracy | Labelling is a Convention requirement and dovetails with the September 2026 AI labelling rules |
| P1 | Route commercial content through platform commercialisation tools with clear disclosure | Undisclosed promotional content published as personal experience violates the Convention |
| P1 | Restructure creator programmes so creators are not asked to give investment advice or individual stock commentary | Illegal stock recommendation is a zero-tolerance category |
| P2 | Review historical returns displays to confirm time range and statistical basis are stated | Showing returns without basis is defined as misleading information |
| P2 | Build an educational content programme rather than a promotional one | The rules favour licensed institutions doing sustained public education |
11. Key Takeaways
- On 15 September 2026 Xiaohongshu released its first 《社区金融生态公约》 (Community Finance Ecosystem Convention), applying to every account that publishes or distributes finance-related content on the platform. It took effect on release as a trial.
- The Convention cites 《金融产品网络营销管理办法》 among its legal bases — the regulation that takes effect on 30 September 2026 — making it an early, concrete instance of a platform implementing a departmental regulation at the interface level.
- The core rule is an ordered gate: hold a licence, complete platform verification, then market. Unverified accounts may not use bank, securities, futures, insurance or fund terms in their profile, and renting, buying, forging or borrowing qualifications is banned.
- Eight categories are prohibited: malicious doomsaying, malicious market hype, illegal stock recommendations, illegal financial activity, false information, misleading information, illegal traffic diversion and fake personas.
- Several clauses track the regulation almost verbatim, including the definition of illegal financial activity and the offshore-institution clause, the prohibited inducement-term list, the bar on marketing private-fund products and OTC derivatives, and the requirement that marketing content match the product contract.
- Enforcement data: over 1.01 million violating posts, over 157,000 accounts banned and over 4.77 million comments rectified in roughly six months. Detection uses an AI model reading intent across posts, comments and private messages, plus IP, device and account clustering.
- The platform also commits not to use algorithms to induce excessive consumption or investment — mirroring Article 13 of the Measures.
- The audience is worth taking seriously: 75% of finance monthly active users search, finance-related searches rose 314%, and searches for financial products grew more than 110% year on year.
- Practical consequence: the Convention is not a separate compliance regime. A brand that has mapped its obligations under the Measures has, with limited additions, mapped its Xiaohongshu obligations — and should assume the platform will enforce them itself.
- This article is a regulatory and platform-policy summary for information purposes and is not legal advice. Scope determinations for a specific entity or campaign depend on facts only you and your counsel hold.
Sources
- Xiaohongshu Community Finance Ecosystem Convention, reported by Economic Information Daily (经济参考网): https://www.jjckb.cn/20260915/35b8348ba0c1452d824a2cd980786bc7/c.html
- Convention full text as published by Xiaohongshu's official 财经薯 account, reproduced with analysis: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7685719279651537427
- Shanghai Securities News / cnstock analysis of the Convention's regulatory coordinates: https://www.cnstock.com/commonDetail/792184
- Chongqing Daily report on the eight red lines and enforcement detail: https://www.cqrb.cn/caijingzonghe/2026-09-15/2775510_pc.html
- International Financial News, including the CITIC Securities presentation: https://ifnews.com/news.html?aid=870418&cid=49
- The Paper (澎湃新闻): https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_34077916