Are you Chinamaxxing? That’s the question that people are asking right now on social media. In recent weeks, becoming Chinese has somehow become the latest viral trend.
People are posting videos of themselves enjoying activities that wouldn’t look out of place at my 73-year-old mum’s house – using a rice cooker, doing qigong exercises and drinking warm water in the morning (it’s better for your health, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine principles).
“You met me at a very Chinese time of my life”, their captions read. Even R&B star Ciara has gotten in on the trend, posting a video of herself drinking hot water while throwing peace fingers up. “I don’t even call it Chinese food anymore, I just call it food,” one meme declares. “Just a glimpse of how Chinese my mind is becoming…”
As someone with Singaporean-Chinese heritage, I initially found these posts endearing, if not slightly baffling. It’s a welcome change from the anti-Asian racism that swept the UK and the US during the pandemic – and seeing lesser-known cultural practices adopted and celebrated across TikTok reminded me of home, or at least of how my aunties would always insist on warm water even in the fanciest of European restaurants.
Call it part of the “American century of humiliation”, as some online have jokingly started to. (This being the internet, some marketing genius has already started producing novelty merch featuring the phrase.)
Thanks to his brutal ICE crackdown, aggressive pursuit of Venezuela and Greenland and judicious threat of tariffs to anybody who doesn’t agree with him, Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to America’s reputation. Being American no longer commands the same cultural cachet that it had in the 20th century. It is, in millennial and Gen Z parlance, a bit cringe. It makes sense, then, that social media users have turned their gaze towards other countries that might provide the way forward.
As Wired magazine points out, China was poised to take up that vacancy. Though the country has been manufacturing goods and shipping them around the world for decades, Chinese culture itself was previously something of a niche interest for most. But times are slowly changing – now every skincare girlie knows what gua sha is, one of the hottest tracks on social media belongs to southern Chinese rapper SKAI ISYOURGOD, and the latest must-have fashion item is Adidas’s limited-edition Tang-style jacket.
China was last year ranked second in the world for global soft power, ahead of the UK and Japan. Thanks to social media, many Western users, particularly those in America, are also finding out that everyday life in China isn’t the communist dystopia portrayed in Hollywood B-movies. When TikTok was threatened with a shutdown in the US and users migrated to the Chinese app Rednote, they were welcomed with tips on slang and Luigi Mangione fan edits, emphasising that the cultural divide between East and West does not necessarily imply a gulf.
In fact, the chaos and overt cruelty of the Trump administration may actually work in China’s favour. Despite well-established worries over security concerns and its human rights record, China currently presents to many as a political alternative that appears more stable and outwardly prosperous. (Just ask Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who just this week described China as a “more predictable” partner than the US.)
So why has the trend of Chinamaxxing begun to irk me? I know that it’s a fool’s errand to be this earnest about anything on the internet, where irony and sarcasm are the language of choice. Most of the people participating in this trend probably aren’t going to become qigong masters – it’s just a bit of superficial fun. But my memories of pandemic-era racism are hard to shrug off.
Just a few years ago, people who looked like me were getting harassed and attacked in the street. As many content creators have pointed out, it makes the current trend for proclaiming yourself “Chinese” a bitter pill to swallow.
Selectively celebrating certain parts of a community – while failing to take into account its struggles – isn’t too dissimilar to the flowering of interest in India in the 90s and 2000s, when Gwen Stefani was wearing a bindi and Madonna posed for photoshoots in a sari.
The artists professed to have a genuine interest in South Asian culture, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how they were simply commodifying this culture for their own gain. China is a vast country and its diaspora – not all of whom believe in drinking warm water, for the record – is even more huge and diverse.
There are people of Chinese heritage from Honolulu to Hanoi, and our expressions of identity vary greatly. That diversity isn’t reflected in surface-level interactions with Chinese-ness. There’ll come a time when drinking jujube tea or knowing how to use a rice cooker isn’t in vogue. When our culture isn’t fashionable anymore, will people still feel this warmly towards Chinese people?
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