Now something is shifting, at least online. On TikTok, a growing wave of Gen Z creators—American first, then European, then global—are declaring themselves to be in their “Chinese era.” They’re drinking hot water. They’re eating hotpot. They’re wearing slippers indoors and marveling at the electric buzz of Chinese city life. They’re calling it “Chinamaxxing.” And increasingly, they mean it as more than a joke.
Welcome to the “Becoming Chinese” moment. Beneath its ironic, meme-friendly surface, the trend has ignited a genuine debate: Is this the first credible crack in American soft power dominance—or is it simply Gen Z doing what Gen Z does?
Spend five minutes in the Chinamaxxing corner of TikTok, and a clear aesthetic emerges. The videos cluster into a few recognizable genres. There’s “wellness and longevity mode” — warm water with fruit, herbal teas, gua sha, early bedtimes, gentle morning exercises, all framed as ancient secrets to soft living. There’s “uncle core,” in which creators affectionately mimic Chinese retirees: tracksuits, sidewalk squatting, communal street-side beers, a whole visual argument against American hustle culture.
And then there’s the infrastructure porn. Bullet trains gliding into spotless stations. Drone shows over neon-lit Shenzhen skylines. Chinese EVs. Walkable, dense neighborhoods. Drone food delivery. Contactless payment for a noodle soup that costs the equivalent of two dollars. These clips, often set to ambient or synthwave music, are edited to make American commuters watching on cracked phone screens feel something specific: that the future is being built somewhere else.
His point cuts to the core of what makes this different from anything a Cold War-era analyst would recognize. Gen Z, Litman argued, doesn’t treat identity as fixed or inherited — it’s assembled. “Pieces are borrowed, remixed, and layered over time, the same way they approach music, fashion, or language. When someone says they’re in their ‘very Chinese era,’ it’s not a geopolitical statement. It’s a signal of a phase — closer to trying something on than switching sides.”
That framing matters. But it doesn’t defuse the broader signal. The content gaining traction — tea rituals, slow routines, dense and futuristic cities, food culture that feels abundant and communal — maps precisely onto what young people say is missing from their own lives. “China becomes less of a destination,” Litman said, “and more of a canvas to project those desires.” A sense of wellness and calm. A feeling of prosperity. An everyday beauty that American strip-mall culture conspicuously fails to provide.
Litman’s analysis suggests the Chinese government may not need to act at all. “There’s little to suggest a top-down push driving this specific behavior,” he said. “What’s more evident is a shift in tone — compared to the COVID era, the posture now feels more curious and less distant.”
Henry Luce, it’s worth remembering, was a staunch Republican and a massive proponent of 20th-century American internationalism, capitalism, and anti-communism — a worldview whose ultimate vindication was the 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain. American soft power during the Cold War was paradoxically most effective precisely when it felt least engineered. Hollywood produced anti-communist films at Washington’s quiet urging, but what global audiences absorbed was aspiration: big cars, wide suburbs, the sense that anything was possible. The suburban supermarket may have actually won the Cold War — Boris Yeltsin famously recalled the physical pain of walking through a Houston grocery store in 1989 and seeing its shelves stocked.
Consumer culture was itself ideological. As historian Eric Foner has written, it demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life to communism and effectively redefined the nation’s mission as the export of freedom itself. Blue jeans smuggled behind the Iron Curtain weren’t just denim — they were a vote against the system.
The unsettling symmetry of the current moment is that the infrastructure videos and hot-water memes are playing the same role in reverse. Bullet-train footage isn’t just rail — it’s a vote. And the vote is being cast by a generation that has no Cold War precedent for its view of China. New Pew Research data shows American adults under 34 view China far more favorably than those over 50. The 2020s have been a decade of compounding American institutional failure — a pandemic, political rupture, an affordability crisis, student loan servicers treated as adversaries, a healthcare system that bankrupts the sick, and a growing sense that the system is not working as advertised. Chinese modernity, filtered through a TikTok feed, offers an implicit counter-narrative: cities that work, infrastructure that impresses, a culture that feels rooted and forward-moving simultaneously.
Litman acknowledges the nuance. “It’s never fully sincere or fully ironic,” he said of the trend’s Gen Z texture. “It carries humor, but also real curiosity — bits of truth, bits of silliness, and a layer of escapism holding it all together.” The tension between genuine interest and aesthetic shorthand isn’t a flaw of the trend. It’s how Gen Z operates — comfortable holding contradictions without resolving them.
Litman’s final word is probably the right one for calibration. “This kind of exploration is only possible because of American culture,” he said. “It’s more about play and expressing desires than a true turning away.” Gen Z is using global culture as a palette, and right now, China is the color they’re reaching for.
But the Cold War analogy cuts in both directions. American culture won the ideological struggle of the twentieth century not because Washington planned it perfectly, but because it generated something the other side couldn’t manufacture: a genuine, bottom-up, organic want. The “Becoming Chinese” trend, for all its irony and imprecision, is producing exactly that kind of signal — uncoerced, youth-driven, and spreading on its own momentum.
The American century was built on the world’s desire to be American, a desire so powerful that it didn’t require irony or caveats. The question the turbulent 2020s is forcing is a simpler and more unsettling one: what happens when the generation that was supposed to inherit the American promise looks around at their student loans, their rent, their medical bills, and their crumbling train stations — and decides they’d rather be something else?
