If you’re reading this, you’re Chinese. Or so says a genre of online content, which delivers instructions to the newly initiated. You should wear slippers and practice qigong; lay a zhen jin on your pillow to sleep; and exclusively drink warm water, ideally steeped with apples, jujubes and goji berries. Since the phrase took off last year, many Westerners have claimed they are in “a very Chinese time” in their lives, taking to social media to evangelize about their newfound Sinophilia. They’re not only curious but also focused on the finer details: Should they peel their apples, for example, or even use pears instead?
References to “being Chinese” started as a mostly nonsensical joke, but they’ve become a trope that is loosely aspirational. Casual mimicry gradually emerged as creators “unlocked” their “Chinese uncle” personality (apparently: stoic; aloof; occasionally exposing midriff) or found themselves “damn close” to buying a floral quilted jacket, “the Chinese auntie drip” in one viewer’s words. Now whole swaths of the internet have “just found out” they’re Chinese or are declaring their complete transformation: “I don’t even call it Chinatown anymore, I just call it town,” states the text of one video. “That is how Chinese my mind has become.” The joke has become so common that “Chinamaxxing” has been applied to the most mundane activities — the American influencer Hasan Piker posted as much while standing before the Shanghai skyline, conspicuously pairing socks with slippers.
Several Chinese American influencers have happily taken up the role of cultural arbiter. Notable among them is Sherry Zhu, who often gives her audience lively Mandarin-English pep talks: Anyone staying in on a Friday night, for example, should instead eat hot pot and go to karaoke, because bed rotting is “not Chinese baddie of you.” That “baddie” persona has made its way into a range of wellness content, most of which appropriate traditional Chinese medicine. The content multiplied recently on the occasion of Lunar New Year, with one infographic illustrating the components of a “Chinease Baddie Morning Routine” — pun intended. It included photos of “morning herbs,” “meditation” and “gua sha” alongside a set of disembodied abs (labeled “lymph drain belly massage”) and a toilet (labeled, simply, “elimination”).
Many Chinese people have of course objected to their culture’s being trivialized, even fetishized, by Western audiences — some have even likened the experience to the parasitic predation in Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Get Out.” In particular, the idea of being “diagnosed as Chinese” has stoked outrage for recalling stereotypes that were widely revived with the onset of the pandemic. “Where was this love for Chinese culture when they were getting attacked in the streets?” asks one user, recalling how anti-Asian hate crimes spiked in 2020, at a time when President Trump also called Covid-19 the “China virus.” His vitriol helped rekindle a long tradition of Sinophobia that casts China as irrevocably backward, even barbaric. In this “very Chinese time,” the same Orientalizing impulses have produced new variations on these themes: One “British guy showing you the real China,” for example, regularly telegraphs his immersion in the culture by toting a local beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
What is unexpected about this trend — and certainly unthinkable just six years ago — is that these jokes are now inflected with reverence. As in the video that overlays scenes from Chinese pagodas, street markets and skylines with an admiring if enigmatic directive: “You have to get more locked in/You have to get more motion/You have to get more Chinese.” Or as one account articulates, parodying Confucius’ “Analects,” “The sinicization of a man’s mind comes not as an unbidden surprise, but is welcomed and greeted warmly like an old friend returning home.”
Social media has long sustained cultural exchange between the United States and China, a relationship that seems to only strengthen when political tensions escalate. Anticipating Trump’s second presidency in early 2025 — and, more specifically, the proposed ban on TikTok — users in the United States pre-emptively sought out the app’s Chinese equivalent, Xiaohongshu, colloquially known as RedNote. It shot to the top of the U.S. Apple Store downloads list by mid-January. While many of these “TikTok refugees” simply wanted a new digital home, others took to the Chinese app to “troll” the American government. (Trump’s inauguration featured a coterie of tech elites whose net worth exceeded one trillion dollars.) “In short, we’re here to spite our government and to learn about China and hang out with you guys,” one such refugee posted on Xiaohongshu.
When TikTok eventually announced its rescue by Trump, its refugees returned to the platform and business as usual — though something had palpably shifted in the course of their brief exile. Users began to find themselves in a “very Chinese time,” relaying visions of a foreign life: mass-market electric cars, socialized health care, high-speed rail. These only added to the impressions broadcast by tourists and professional vloggers over recent years, which steadily demystified life in China while also boosting it as a tourist destination for a new generation, an almost mythical place replete with otherworldly scenery and ultramodern technologies. Even Americans could see in these clips a vision of the future that hadn’t arrived at home.
As they observe the decline of their own country, American TikTokers continue to fantasize about “being Chinese”: In their minds, high-quality, low-cost living, with slippered feet and nourished spleens, is not for the privileged few but for all. If racist tropes once signaled Western dominance over “the Orient,” “Chinamaxxing” reveals how Americans now seem to surrender to certain kinds of Chinese influence. And if you aren’t already convinced, the algorithmic mechanics of social media will hold you captive to engage you directly. When one Chinese-born, Britain-based user tells his viewers, “If you’re watching this, you’re Chinese,” he means it materially: “Aren’t you scrolling on this Chinese app, probably on a Chinese-made phone, wearing clothes that are made in China, collecting dolls that are from China, wearing bags that are made in China, wearing perfumes that are made in China?”
But just like other forms of aspirational content, many scenes of life in China are also edited to sustain a fantasy; fan-cam footage of high-speed rail highlights its delivery McDonald’s service but not the state’s use of surveillance to prevent “untrustworthy” citizens from boarding. Social media may have rendered life in China less mysterious, but by positioning it as aspirational, influencers have ensured that the “Orient” remains a receptacle for Western desires, especially on platforms that favor neat oppositions: right versus wrong, good versus evil, East versus West.
The grass is usually greener when viewed from the other side of the world and in curated, seconds-long clips. But pledging allegiance to a different country — or to your phone, or to a new wellness routine — rarely solves the root of the problem. Still, why would anyone stop now? Especially while feeling that life has improved since “becoming Chinese” — that is, since embracing explicit instruction on what to eat, wear and do. “Thank you, Congress,” beams one Western college student, having projected a Chinese flag on a television behind her while expressing her gratitude in Mandarin. “Without you none of this is possible, I love the People’s Republic of China!” The video is intended as a joke, though it evokes more earnest reactions. “I CAN’T LOSE THIS INTERNET,” says a top comment, liked by thousands whose fealty lies not with any country, per se, but with the state of being online.
Kim Hew-Low is an Australian writer living in Brooklyn.
Source photographs for illustration above: Xu Wu/Getty Images; Sammyvision/Getty Images; screenshots from TikTok, X and Instagram.
The post American TikTok Users Are Fantasizing About ‘Being Chinese’ appeared first on New York Times.
