In October last year Kim Kardashian joined Little Red Book (aka Xiaohongshu), a Chinese content and shopping platform that has more than 100 million registered users. The site’s KOLs (key opinion leaders) are extremely powerful, directing consumers straight to the shopping pages.

Hong Kong-based actress and Dior brand ambassador Angelababy has more than 14.4 million followers on the site. Kim Kardashian has a mere 171,000, a far cry from the 135 million she has on Instagram, which is banned in China.

Similarly, American model Karlie Kloss has 394,000 followers on the Chinese site compared to eight million on Instagram. Kloss joined Little Red Book to promote her campaign for Estee Lauder, but according to sources at the brand, she “barely made a dent”.

“Western influencers struggle to break into China because they don’t have any genuine connection with Chinese people,” says Kim Ing, a brand engagement strategist based in London and Hong Kong. “As they’re not celebrated or well-known in the local market, their endorsement of products has little emotional meaning.”

KOLs therefore remain the biggest – and often only – drivers of social engagement for consumer brands across all sectors.

“Foreign celebrities can’t even come close,” says Elizabeth Flora, the Asia editor for research firm L2 Gartner. “In our recent digital index report on beauty, all of the top 10 Weibo posts with the most engagement featured Chinese stars. Celebrity-generated posts by Chinese pop stars account for 80 per cent of all engagement for mass beauty brands, and 84 per cent for premium beauty brands.”

It makes sense. The most popular television shows and musical acts in China are Chinese, therefore so are the biggest celebrities. The government’s restriction on foreign films and television series ensures even the most famous Western actors are often unknown. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, for instance, has little to no Chinese following.

However, Western influencers have made a number of missteps that make breaking into an already challenging market considerably more difficult. Some are career defining: Katy Perry waving a Taiwanese flag while playing at a concert in Taipei, and Gigi Hadid uploading what could be construed as a racist video on Instagram, squinting her eyes while eating a Buddha biscuit.

But others are easily fixed. Kim Kardashian posts all her Little Red Book and Weibo content in English – one of the biggest gaffes a Western influencer can make. Whether it is because of laziness, arrogance or having too small a marketing team on the ground, the inability to edit, hone or often even translate content for a local audience makes little sense, given the rewards they would reap if they did so.

Influencers arguably wield more power in China than they do almost anywhere else on Earth. This is partly because the Chinese mainstream media is heavily regulated, which gives social media stars a unique and far more authoritative role than their peers have in Western markets. Here, a strong opinion-based print and online media competes with, and often criticises, Instagram stars.

Chinese culture is also famously collective, which makes it the ideal place to create online role models and foster a social media community.

Western influencers can reap some of these rewards, but to do so, they need to engage properly with the local population. Chinese consumers, unsurprisingly, have different tastes and expectations in terms of social media content. So why is it taking Western influencers so long to learn what they are?

“The days are gone when you could just land in China and suggest people just follow you. That cultural arrogance doesn’t play well here any more,” says Charlie Gu, founder of Kollective Influence, a marketing strategy firm based in California and Shanghai.

“The Chinese consumer is spoiled now they know they have big purchasing power, and they expect brands to court them. For Western influencers to be big, they usually need to speak some Chinese or have a topic that is of interest to Chinese consumers.”

Rapper Kanye West is better known in China than his wife, Kim Kardashian, due to the fact he lived in the eastern city of Nanjing for a year as a child. As is Kendall Jenner, because she regularly attends Shanghai Fashion Week and once appeared with actor Kris Wu on the cover of Vogue China. Wu is one of China’s biggest celebrities, despite being raised in Canada, because he can speak Mandarin.

That said, it’s not enough to make lazy race connections.

“A French brand that I work for once suggested Lucy Liu as an influencer they would like to partner with for China,” says Ing. “It came as quite a shock for me to have explain that, even though she is of Asian heritage, she is hardly known in China.”

Equally, brands planning to push adverts driven by Western celebrities need to adapt the humour and focus.

“Centrum’s recent multivitamin ad featuring Tom Hiddleston making a breakfast salad was considered odd in the UK market but went down well with a Chinese audience, which was who they pitched it to,” says Flora.

Ostentatious displays of wealth by influencers are also becoming less acceptable in China, particularly since last October when actress Fan Bingbing – who endorsed multiple brands – was fined for tax fraud.

“Anything too excessive negatively impacts a celebrity here,” says Gu. “It goes against the whole tone of the media and the values of Chinese culture. Those behaviours are not encouraged.”

Statistics suggest Western influencers may be facing an even more perilous uphill battle in the years ahead. Data overwhelmingly shows that consumers from generation Z (those born after 1996) are more nationalistic than millennials, having grown up alongside China’s rapid ascent – and as a result are more likely to want Chinese-designed goods than older generations, making Western social media stars even more redundant.

However, the future is not entirely bleak. One area where influencers such as Alexa Chung, Camille Charriere and Chiara Ferragni could still flourish is by highlighting their aspirational global lifestyles, and the picturesque European cities they live in.

“Travel is huge on Chinese social media,” says Gu. “Everyone wants to travel and there is a huge demand for content. Western influencers can produce it far more easily and combine it with whatever product they are trying to push.”

Stars such as Ferragni and Chung resonate more in China’s tier-one and tier-two metropolitan hubs, where people do use Instagram, even though it is officially banned.

“This group tends to be more tech savvy, which means they’re more sophisticated, prime target consumers, and they use it every day with a VPN,” says Gu. “Brands don’t look at them as potential, but they should.”

Finally, where does Hong Kong – with its tangled affinity for both Chinese megastars and Western Instagram queens – sit in all this?

“Hong Kong is a strange middle place with a population too small and diluted to create real influencers locally,” says Ing.

“In Hong Kong, more than anywhere, we need to ask whether, by engaging influencers, we are feeding a vacuous, egocentric bubble that has little to no effect on a brand’s actual awareness or sales, or if we are working with people who genuinely love the product and can’t wait to co-create social media conversations with an audience they understand.”

This question should be posed a lot more frequently than it currently is. Of course Western brands need to become part of the hugely lucrative Chinese social media landscape, but without a genuine understanding of the country, even influencers who come armed with expensively insured bottoms and “momagers” of note are bound to fail.