When your culture becomes a meme: the ‘jarring’ effect of Chinamaxxing

When your culture becomes a meme: the ‘jarring’ effect of Chinamaxxing The TikTok trend may be fading, but people of Chinese heritage wonder if an appreciation for their culture will continue after the algorithm moves on I have been Chinese my whole life. Lately, many online have also found their Chinese roots, but not through traditional ancestry tests. Creators are drinking hot water, wearing slippers around the house, using chopsticks, eating Chinese food, and wearing red. Taking off in popularity from mid-2025, these videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, finding virality first on TikTok, then later Instagram and X. Put simply, “people are trying to be more Chinese regardless of what their heritage is,” says Michelle She, a London-based fashion label owner. Chinamaxxing has variations too: one may be in their “Chinese era”, or might say: “You met me at a very Chinese time of my life”. It might seem odd to distill a millennia-old culture into a seconds-long TikTok video. But digital trends aren’t just an aesthetic, says Jamie Cohen, an associate professor of media studies at Queens College in New York. He says they’re a response to cultural changes – and a lot has been happening. Disillusionment with the west , an obsession with wellness and historic exoticisation of the east all laid the foundations for the trend to emerge from behind the Great Firewall. In true internet fashion, it is equal parts nonsensical and reductive. “What’s spreading globally is not China in its full complexity, but fragments of everyday life,” says Tingting Liu, a research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney specialising in Chinese digital media. China is not a new concept. So what does it feel like for your culture to become a trend? From North America to Australia, those from the Chinese diaspora that I spoke to all used the same word to describe Chinamaxxing: jarring. Though, with varying levels of indignation. For some in the diaspora, Chinamaxxing reached i...