A TikTok video with over 5.5 million views shows a simple morning routine. A young woman fills a glass with hot water, no ice, no coffee. The caption reads “You’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” Below, hundreds respond with comments like, “first time being Chinese,” and “I’m going to start being Chinese tomorrow.”
Scroll through TikTok right now and you’ll see it everywhere. Hot lemon water in the morning, visits to Chinese medicine shops, first-time celebrations of Lunar New Year, tutorials on how to say “Happy New Year” in Cantonese. Sometimes it’s in earnest. Sometimes it’s tongue-in-cheek. Always, it’s Chinamaxxing.
But whether it’s appreciation, appropriation, or a political statement depends on who you ask.
There is a specific kind of erasure that happens when a culture becomes a trend. It doesn’t announce itself, but it arrives in the form of a questionable caption under someone’s daily ritual. Golden milk, cowboy caviar, rice water hair care, waist beads and an entire vocabulary of Gen Z slang that started as AAVE (African American Vernacular English) all took the same path: every culture gets cherry-picked, practiced and spoken for generations, ignored completely, then rediscovered by the internet and sold back to the world as something new.
But here, what gets left behind are the decades-old posts by Chinese-American creators who already were posting this content for years, recommending Chinese skincare routines, cooking their grandmothers’ recipes on camera and explaining traditional medicine to their curious followers. From Jiafei remixes in Floptropica to the Snow App, Chinese culture was already embedded in Western internet spaces long before anyone put a name on it. “People, especially white people, have always hated other cultures and then all of a sudden it’s trendy and cool,” one respondent wrote on an anonymous survey the US-China Today administered to people ages 18-24. Another student? pointed to Instagram accounts from 2022 and 2023 that had already built entire followings teaching non-Chinese speakers Mandarin or Cantonese slang, content that predates the current Chinamaxxing moment by years. Before NPR ran a segment on it, CNN packaged it as a trend piece, or Fox News found it something to worry about, the mainstream arrived, stamped a label on it, and called it a phenomenon.
The origin story of Chinamaxxing sounds organic enough. On April 4, 2025, Twitter user @girl__virus posted a Fight Club parody. “you met me at a very chinese time in my life,” lowercase and ironic. The tweet went viral with almost a million views. Gen Z ate it up. By year’s end, “becoming Chinese” videos flooded TikTok.
Our US-China Today survey found that 72% of respondents had already seen some Chinamaxxing content, and when asked to describe what the trend actually was, 64% called it internet humor or a meme. “It’s an Anglocentric way of labeling things as ‘Chinese X,'” one respondent wrote. “In China, it would just be called ‘X.'”
By February, the South China Morning Post published “Why Americans Are ‘Becoming Chinese.” Chinese state media couldn’t pump out celebratory coverage fast enough. The Global Times declared that Chinamaxxing showed Gen Z was “reaching for a real, vibrant, warm image of China.” When Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Li Jian was asked about the trend, he welcomed it as proof that Americans could see beyond “the Great Wall, kung fu, pandas, and Chinese cuisine.”
Now, the question is whether Chinamaxxing was ever really Gen Z’s to begin with, or whether it got claimed the moment state media found it useful. Among survey respondents, 32% described Chinamaxxing as a soft power play. Another 12% called it a political statement. But 52% said the trend was both sincere and performative, and a small share called it purely sincere. “I think the two are independent,” one respondent wrote. “The concept of things made or from China being called ‘Chinese X’ or considered exotic has always been inherently Anglocentric,” another wrote. “This trend, while humorous, could actually be doing work to de-stigmatize these things for young Americans.” Others were less sure. The Chinese state media embrace complicated the read for a lot of people who had been treating the whole thing as harmless.
It is worth noting what the TikTok ban actually did, or did not do to Chinamaxxing. Among respondents, 76% said the ban changed nothing about their behavior and only 12% said they joined Chinese platforms as a result of the movement. The narrative that chinamaxxing was driven by Americans fleeing to RedNote collapses under that number. Public support for the TikTok ban stood at just 34% by early 2025, according to Pew Research, down from 50% two years prior. The trend was not a political act for most people. The politics got layered on afterwards, by state media, by op-ed writers, by the same outlets that spent years ignoring Chinese-American creators and then needed a story about why their audiences suddenly cared.
I didn’t have to bring up Chinamaxxing with my Chinese-American friends. They brought it to me, unprompted, and they were unhappy. For respondents who identified as Chinese or Chinese-American, reactions were more divided than the trend’s often-celebratory coverage suggested. About 40% described their feelings as positive. But 30% said they had mixed feelings, and another 20% said it depended entirely on how it was presented. “It could lead to more acceptance of Chinese culture,” one respondent wrote. “The spread of our culture can be a positive thing,” said another. But the concern was not abstract. “People are using it to make fun of Chinese culture,” one respondent wrote. Another pointed to something more specific: “It can easily become cultural appropriation, especially when non-Chinese people change traditional practices.”
That tension showed up clearly in the numbers. Among respondents, 44% described Chinamaxxing as cultural appreciation. 48% called it cultural appropriation. “A culture’s practices shouldn’t be a trend in the first place,” one respondent wrote. “I see why people view it as soft power or appropriation, but I’m not sure where to draw the line,” said another.
“I thought it was just celebrating the culture, appreciating it and trying something different that I saw online,” one respondent wrote. “But now after reading this I’m worried it was appropriation or not okay.“
One respondent put it more simply: “It might actually help make Chinese culture feel less foreign to young Americans.”
Maybe. But that framing assumes the concept was foreign to begin with. The more uncomfortable question is what it means that a culture has to go viral before it gets treated as worth understanding. Half of all Asian-Americans are still perceived as perpetual foreigners regardless of where they were born or how long their families have been here, according to a survey by Committee of 100 done in March 2026. “I’m just worried that people will start hating on China or completely disregard everything taught through Chinamaxxing after it isn’t a trend anymore,” one respondent wrote.
The culture went viral. The last time something Chinese went viral, Chinese Americans were getting attacked in the street.
About the author:
Aani Nagaiah is an undergraduate at USC studying Health and Aging with a minor in News Media and Society, where she hopes to pursue medicine while indulging a persistent habit of analyzing culture through journalism.
