Chinamaxxing is TikToks latest senseless trend as young people romanticize living in a Communist society
America is out.China, of all things, is in.At least on TikTok and Twitch, where a new trend called “Chinamaxxing” is taking the internet by storm, as young Americans declare they’re “becoming Chinese.”They’re drinking hot water in the morning.
They’re doing tai chi in their kitchens.They’re perfecting their chopstick skills and sporting Adidas track suits to achieve the elderly man in Beijing look.But Chinamaxxing isn’t just a lifestyle trend.
Many of the influencers praising Chinese culture are actively denigrating America.They’re aesthetically, morally and politically defecting to another superpower.Young people are going crazy on social media, declaring that “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” Plenty of their newfound habits — like taking off their shoes before entering a room or getting into herbal remedies — are perfectly innocent.There’s some cryptic Gen Z humor to it, too.Odd memes, like a fortune teller delivering the verdict that “u will turn Chinese tomorrow” and blurry cats wearing conical straw hats, fit right in with Zoomers’ often indecipherable sensibilities.Still, there’s a new level of indiscriminate cultural fetishization going on here.
Sure, we’ve had K-pop fads, a new embrace of Latin pop partly thanks to Bad Bunny, Scandinavian decor trends, French couture.But this myopic obsession with everything China isn’t about importing a great product from another country — it’s about Gen Z’s desperation to shed their American identity.The Chinamaxxing trend really caught steam when Hasan Piker, a popular political streamer with Gen Z, traveled to China and streamed his tour around Beijing.
He hyped up China on Twitch, declaring in a livestream from Tiananmen Square that he has “no patriotism in [his] heart for America.” Though he was confronted by police for showing an AI-generated meme of himself as Mao Zedong while livestreaming in a public space, Piker still went on to say that China ...