By Claire DIVISIA
In April 2025, a seemingly innocuous post by Twitter user @girl_virus declared: “you met me at a very chinese time in my life.” What began as a parody of a quote from the cult classic Fight Club quickly mutated into a defining cultural trend for Gen Z: “becoming Chinese,” or “Chinamaxxing.” Becoming Chinese has been defined as a social media trend popularized by Generation Z, and particularly prevalent among those living in the West, who adopt norms and traditions typically associated with Chinese culture, or express public praise for China as a country and nation (South China Morning Post, 2026). While the origins of the meme date back to early 2025, it began widespread circulation across Tiktok and other social media platforms in 2026 (Price, 2026). But beneath the viral videos of influencers drinking hot water or unboxing Labubu dolls lies a deeper story: an entire generation’s growing disillusionment with the American Dream.
This phenomenon started with consumerism. For years, “Made in China” was a label looked down upon in the West, but today, these products, from Labubu dolls to Temu furniture, have become desirable. Market data shows that Pop Mart, the company behind the viral Labubu figurines, made roughly $870 million in just the first half of 2024 (Bharade & Liam, 2025). Meanwhile, Chinese e-commerce giants like Taobao have surged to the top of App Store charts in the US, Canada and France in 2025. But the spread of “Chineseness” hasn’t stopped at viral products; it has entered people’s lifestyles. Mandarin learning on Duolingo spiked by 216% in early 2026, at the same time as Tiktok users migrated in a cohort of over 700 million ‘refugees’ to RedNote (Xiaohongshu) (Perez, 2025). Searches for “Traditional Chinese Medicine” also reached peak popularity this year as young Westerners trade coffee for hot water and embrace Chinese routines like eating congee and wearing slippers around the house. For many, these practices offer a sense of discipline and wellness that feels missing in the chaotic, high-stress environment of Western late-stage capitalism.
Why is this happening now? The answer is as much about Washington as it is about Beijing. While China is enjoying a rise in popularity, favorability for the West, notably the United States, is plummeting (Schulman & Silver, 2026). Following the 2024 US election and a series of controversial reforms, trust in Western institutions has severely eroded (Eddy & Shearer, 2025). In 2014, 75% of people in France viewed the US favorably (Statista 2025a); by 2025, that number dropped to 36% (Statista 2025b). As the “American Dream” feels increasingly unattainable due to rising costs of living and political instability, China’s model is being re-evaluated by Gen Z. While the West faces recession fears, China has reached a 90% urban homeownership rate (Jin, 2023) and eradicated extreme poverty for 800 million people (World Bank Group, 2023). Beijing has also gotten smarter about its image, employing increasingly efficient soft power tactics through social media. Instead of rigid political propaganda, they are harnessing the “attention economy” by inviting influencers to share “authentic” experiences of the utopias they encounter in China’s big cities like Chongqing and Shanghai. This “memetic warfare,” using memes and viral content to fight ideological battles, has successfully rebranded China as the cool, efficient alternative to a declining West.
However, we need to look at this trend with a critical eye. Most Americans “becoming Chinese” aren’t engaging with the actual, complex reality of life in the PRC. Instead, they are consuming a “hyperreal” version: a curated, frictionless fantasy designed to absorb the West’s grievances. By over-idealizing China as a response to their own political frustrations, many are falling into a trap of what the sociologist Colin Campbell calls “imaginative hedonism.” The Western audience selectively chooses aspects of China to praise and daydream about, deriving pleasure from it, instead of actually engaging with the actual, complex reality of the state (Urry, 2002). This binary thinking, leading “anti-US” sentiments of the Western youth to evolve into “pro-China” ones often overlooks serious issues, such as the treatment of ethnic Tibetan and Uyghur minorities, in favor of the smooth, one-dimensional facade portrayed through memes and short-form online content.
In a similar vein, this trend risks the commodification of racial differences. When we reduce a country’s culture to a “trend” or a “meme,” we engage in a form of cultural consumption that famous author bell hooks described as “eating the other” (hooks, 1992). We treat Chinese culture like a “spice” to liven up our own lives without actually respecting the history or the struggles of the people behind it. We can wear Adidas CNY jackets and drink Tsingtao beer, but we don’t have to face the systemic discrimination that many of Chinese descent actually experience in the West. Ultimately, this trend is just an “era” that will also come to an end as the Internet moves on to another culture to center on, as easily disposable as a SHEIN piece of clothing. China is just an “Other” that will ultimately be “eaten, consumed, and forgotten,” inscribing itself in a long history of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said, 1973).
Perhaps the most concerning part of this correlation between “becoming Chinese” memes and the tendency of falling into a dualist nature of discourse of “good VS. bad” is what it says about our current capacity for nuance. While the trend is broadly a force for good, combating decades of anti-Chinese propaganda from the West, we seem to have lost the ability to hold two truths at once: that the Western model is currently failing many of its citizens, and that the alternative rising to meet it has its own, deep flaws.
The “Chinese Era” of social media proves that we are desperate for a different way of living, but we won’t find it by simply swapping one idealized superpower for another. True progress requires us to stop looking for a “default” model, critiquing both systems honestly, and fixing their issues. Until we can move past the binary of “Western failure vs. Eastern success,” we aren’t actually protesting the status quo, we’re just continuing to scroll through it, with no action taken.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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