A new social media trend called “Chinamaxxing” has young Westerners declaring themselves “becoming Chinese.” Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram readily yields droves of posts featuring people “in a Chinese time of their life,” wearing house slippers, making hot apple tea, eating hotpot, or praising China as a model society. These posts are often set to tracks by the recent hip-hop phenomenon SKAI ISYOURGOD, (who now has more reach on YouTube music than Eminem, Drake or Kanye West), that almost every social-media-using Gen Zer will recognize.
One example features an American wearing a hat that says “I’m escaping the American century of humiliation” in Chinese. Alongside these cultural exchanges are genuine political sentiments; one viral Tweet read “Explain why China is my enemy. I have more in common with your average Chinese worker than with an American billionaire.”
While the “Chinamaxxing” trend can be viewed as playful and lighthearted, Americans should know that its rise is more reflective of China’s propaganda apparatus than an accurate representation of the lived experiences of most Chinese people. When this kind of glorified imagery begins shaping world views and political attitudes, it becomes not just misleading but dangerous.
The rise in positive perceptions of China among American netizens is indicative of a measurable improvement in global attitudes towards China. Pew Research Center data shows that favorable views of China are increasing in 2025 in 15 of the 25 surveyed countries, while global perceptions of the US have decreased significantly.
In many ways, America’s soft power decline and China’s rise in soft power among Americans reflect disillusionment with the US under the Trump administration. This is exemplified by record low optimism about the future among Americans according to a recent Gallup survey: The percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate high-quality lives in five years declined to 59.2% in 2025, the lowest level since measurement began almost twenty years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, cross-cultural exchange and Americans learning more about Chinese culture are undoubtedly good things—especially amid escalating geopolitical hostility between the U.S. and China. However, it is important to note that the content driving this trend is a carefully curated, sanitized view of China.
Online, China appears as a techno-utopia: the world’s largest high-speed rail network–efficient, clean, punctual, and offering amenities Amtrak couldn’t dream of; colossal infrastructure projects like the brand new Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, the world’s highest bridge; glass and steel megacities whose skylines beam with meticulously choreographed light displays synchronized with drone shows.
At the core of this contradiction between China’s online persona and reality lies the gap between its culture and its political system. While much of the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon celebrates Chinese fashion, food, music, and popular culture, it also carries a troubling undertone: an admiration for an authoritarian system fundamentally at odds with American democratic values. You can’t celebrate the attributes of China’s technological advances without acknowledging the authoritarian political system that produces them.
Of course, it’s important to give credit where credit is due. Many of China’s recent accomplishments are exciting and worthy of our praise; it is leading the green energy revolution, and its achievements in AI, smartphones, electric vehicles, and robotics are genuinely impressive. I often find myself envying many parts of Chinese society––their efficiency frequently outpaces ours.
But many examples celebrated in “Chinamaxxing” ignore and even censor the other side of China, the part that many Americans would dread. For instance, the grueling “996” work culture (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) is accompanied by very stagnant social mobility, soaring youth unemployment, widening inequality, stifling air pollution, censorship that permeates every facet of public discourse, and the suppression of peaceful protests.
As an American who has lived in China for the past year and a half, this online trend alarms me precisely because I experience its distortions up close. Yes, the Bund of Shanghai and Qingdao’s futuristic skyline are dazzling and unlike anything we have in the States, but that is far from the whole picture. In fact, from what I’ve personally seen driving through rural China, roughly one-third of Chinese people who live in the countryside experience a much lower quality of life than even the most impoverished places I’ve been in the US. Despite this, Chinese online platforms outputting content are tightly constrained–critical or unflattering depictions of China almost never survive censorship.
Meanwhile, America’s internal chaos––protests in Minneapolis, January 6th, Trump’s entanglement in the Epstein files––is front and center of the American discourse. That our system protects open criticism of its government is one of our greatest strengths. However, it can also be a weakness, for it can exacerbate division, dissent, and pessimism. Moreover, in the age of global social media, this can undermine soft power by exporting our darkest moments not only to our citizens, but to people around the world––projecting America as a hellscape ruled by a tyrannical dictator. This negative perception is amplified by algorithms that privilege content eliciting strong emotional responses, ignoring the more mundane realities of everyday life.
While the recent anger and dissatisfaction among many American youth and netizens with the state of our nation may be justified, China is no system to turn to as an alternative. In many ways, China represents the kind of authoritarian regime that many are afraid of the US becoming under the Trump administration: a society in which all media is either state-run or state-sanctioned and highly sycophantic. One where peaceful protest is explicitly illegal and systematically repressed, where leaders are above the law, and where one man can unilaterally dictate national policies.
For Americans currently disenchanted with our country, China should be a warning, not a model. If young Americans are worried about authoritarian drift at home, the answer is not to fantasize about a different autocracy—it is to use the tools of our own democratic system to resist those tendencies and demand something better.