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The American century \u2014 a phrase coined by Fortune founder Henry Luce \u2014\u00a0had a soundtrack. It was Chuck Berry on the radio and Coca-Cola in the cooler, Levi\u2019s jeans, and Marlboro billboards stretching across Europe. American culture didn\u2019t conquer the world through military force\u2014it did it through\u00a0desirability. People wanted to be American. That aspiration was a kind of geopolitical superpower that no missile silo could replicate.<\/p>\n
Now something is shifting, at least online. On TikTok, a growing wave of Gen Z creators\u2014American first, then European, then global\u2014are declaring themselves to be in their \u201cChinese era.\u201d They\u2019re drinking hot water. They\u2019re eating hotpot. They\u2019re wearing slippers indoors and marveling at the electric buzz of Chinese city life. They\u2019re calling it \u201cChinamaxxing.\u201d And increasingly, they mean it as more than a joke.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the \u201cBecoming Chinese\u201d 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\u2014or is it simply Gen Z doing what Gen Z does?<\/p>\n
What they\u2019re actually glamorizing<\/p>\n
Spend five minutes in the Chinamaxxing corner of TikTok, and a clear aesthetic emerges. The videos cluster into a few recognizable genres. There\u2019s \u201cwellness and longevity mode\u201d \u2014 warm water with fruit, herbal teas, gua sha, early bedtimes, gentle morning exercises, all framed as ancient secrets to soft living. There\u2019s \u201cuncle core,\u201d in which creators affectionately mimic Chinese retirees: tracksuits, sidewalk squatting, communal street-side beers, a whole visual argument against American hustle culture.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
As tech commentator Afra Wang put it, \u201cThese young people have watched their physical reality remain frozen while China built entire cities. When you can\u2019t build high-speed rail, but you can scroll through videos of Chinese infrastructure, of course, the future starts to look Chinese.\u201d<\/p>\n
The subtext of every \u201cvery Chinese era\u201d video isn\u2019t really about China. It\u2019s about what young Americans feel they\u2019ve been denied. Chinamaxxing romanticizes things that feel structurally out of reach at home \u2014 compact, affordable-looking apartments; public transit that works; streets safe to walk at night; multigenerational households as an antidote to loneliness; communal meals as an antidote to atomization. The comparison is implicit but unmissable: they have this, and we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
A mirror, not a window<\/p>\n
The numbers underneath the memes are brutal. A four-year U.S. public university costs $50,000 to $60,000 for in-state students; the equivalent in China runs $3,000 to $5,000 for the whole degree. American households spend roughly $5,177 a year on healthcare, with medical debt touching nearly half of all adults. China\u2019s subsidized system costs somewhere between $350 and $565 annually. Housing eats 25% to 35% of an American paycheck. In China, rent in major cities often runs 60% to 70% lower.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gen Z Americans now carry an average of $94,000 in student-loan debt, and the psychological weight of that number is fueling what Fortune\u2018s Jacqueline Munis has called \u201cdisillusionomics\u201d \u2014 a generational rejection of traditional financial prudence rooted in the belief that the old rules no longer apply. One-third of Gen Z says they believe they\u2019ll never own a home. Many are planning to forgo children. Youth unemployment hit 10.8% last year against a 4.3% national average.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is the context in which \u201cbecoming Chinese\u201d lands. It isn\u2019t that Gen Z has carefully studied comparative political economy and chosen Beijing. It\u2019s that they were raised on a promise \u2014 get the degree, get the job, get the house, get the healthcare \u2014 that increasingly feels like a lie. American higher education, once the most reliable on-ramp to the middle class, now generates crippling debt in exchange for credentials that pay less in real terms than they did for their parents. Tuition at U.S. public universities has increased 153.8% since the early 1980s in inflation-adjusted terms, growing 65% faster than currency inflation and 35% faster than wages. The institution, sold as the gateway to prosperity, has become its single largest private obstacle.<\/p>\n
Slate\u2018s Nitish Pahwa captured the emotional logic cleanly: \u201cYou told us we couldn\u2019t have a high-speed railroad and universal health care, and it turns out they have it across the street! I\u2019m going to live at their house now!\u201d It is, as he described it, a petulant-toddler reaction to a broken promise \u2014 and one that Western institutions have given Gen Z ample grounds to throw.<\/p>\n
A generation assembling itself<\/p>\n
Reid Litman, a consulting director at Ogilvy who studies Gen Z behavior, told Fortune he doesn\u2019t read Chinamaxxing as a wholesale rejection of American culture. \u201cIt\u2019s not Western Gen Z turning against American culture or choosing China instead,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s something much more native to how this generation builds identity and uses the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t treat identity as fixed or inherited \u2014 it\u2019s assembled. \u201cPieces are borrowed, remixed, and layered over time, the same way they approach music, fashion, or language. When someone says they\u2019re in their \u2018very Chinese era,\u2019 it\u2019s not a geopolitical statement. It\u2019s a signal of a phase \u2014 closer to trying something on than switching sides.\u201d<\/p>\n
That framing matters. But it doesn\u2019t defuse the broader signal. The content gaining traction \u2014 tea rituals, slow routines, dense and futuristic cities, food culture that feels abundant and communal \u2014 maps precisely onto what young people say is missing from their own lives. \u201cChina becomes less of a destination,\u201d Litman said, \u201cand more of a canvas to project those desires.\u201d A sense of wellness and calm. A feeling of prosperity. An everyday beauty that American strip-mall culture conspicuously fails to provide.<\/p>\n
The meme propaganda couldn\u2019t buy<\/p>\n
However you read the motivation, the cultural moment is real \u2014 and its origins are instructive. The trend traces to 2025, when American gaming streamer IShowSpeed toured China and broadcast his genuine awe at its technological energy to millions of followers. Chinese-American TikToker Sherry Zhu amplified it with sardonic tutorials on \u201chow to become Chinese\u201d that went viral in 2025, some of which drew millions of views. The great migration of U.S. users to China\u2019s Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, in early 2025 \u2014 triggered by the threatened TikTok ban \u2014 put Americans and Chinese netizens in direct contact at unprecedented scale, and the cross-pollination accelerated from there.<\/p>\n
Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar who studies Chinese soft power, told NPR the trend operates on two tracks at once: one that \u201cweakens American narrative authority by highlighting content that highlights U.S. dysfunction,\u201d and another that \u201cmakes China look more attractive.\u201d The Week The dysfunction track, crucially, writes itself. Nobody needs Beijing to fabricate footage of American potholes, ER bills, or decaying Amtrak cars.<\/p>\n
Chinese officialdom has noticed. The Chinese ambassador to the U.S. has cited the trend publicly while pushing for expanded tourist visas. State outlet Global Times has begun amplifying it. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian welcomed the international interest, saying it reflected a broader understanding of Chinese culture beyond \u201ctraditional symbols, such as the Great Wall, kung fu, pandas, and Chinese cuisine.\u201d But this is Beijing\u2019s central dilemma \u2014 and the most important Cold War lesson it should heed. State embrace is the soft power killer. What resonates as a genuine cultural moment curdles quickly into propaganda the moment party fingerprints appear.<\/p>\n
Litman\u2019s analysis suggests the Chinese government may not need to act at all. \u201cThere\u2019s little to suggest a top-down push driving this specific behavior,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s more evident is a shift in tone \u2014 compared to the COVID era, the posture now feels more curious and less distant.\u201d<\/p>\n
The turbulent 2020s as an accelerant<\/p>\n
Henry Luce, it\u2019s worth remembering, was a staunch Republican and a massive proponent of 20th-century American internationalism, capitalism, and anti-communism \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 Boris Yeltsin famously recalled the physical pain of walking through a Houston grocery store in 1989 and seeing its shelves stocked.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s mission as the export of freedom itself. Blue jeans smuggled behind the Iron Curtain weren\u2019t just denim \u2014 they were a vote against the system.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t just rail \u2014 it\u2019s 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The contrast is oversimplified, and critics are right to say so. Wages in China are significantly lower than in the U.S.; youth unemployment is a serious problem there; workplace demands can be punishing. The videos don\u2019t show any of that. But the videos don\u2019t have to. Their power lies in the specific comparison they invite \u2014 not \u201cis China better in every way,\u201d but \u201cwhy does an ordinary life there appear to include things an ordinary life here no longer does.\u201d<\/p>\n
Litman acknowledges the nuance. \u201cIt\u2019s never fully sincere or fully ironic,\u201d he said of the trend\u2019s Gen Z texture. \u201cIt carries humor, but also real curiosity \u2014 bits of truth, bits of silliness, and a layer of escapism holding it all together.\u201d The tension between genuine interest and aesthetic shorthand isn\u2019t a flaw of the trend. It\u2019s how Gen Z operates \u2014 comfortable holding contradictions without resolving them.<\/p>\n
The bigger picture<\/p>\n
For Chinese Americans who grew up mocked for their food, their customs, their Chinese-ness, the trend carries its own complicated charge \u2014 a 5,000-year-old civilization reduced to a lifestyle aesthetic, now embraced on the same platforms where it was once invisible. Some in the diaspora have pushed back sharply, calling it \u201cOrientalism by any other name.\u201d The critique is fair. It also doesn\u2019t cancel out what the trend signals.<\/p>\n
Litman\u2019s final word is probably the right one for calibration. \u201cThis kind of exploration is only possible because of American culture,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s more about play and expressing desires than a true turning away.\u201d Gen Z is using global culture as a palette, and right now, China is the color they\u2019re reaching for.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t manufacture: a genuine, bottom-up, organic want. The \u201cBecoming Chinese\u201d trend, for all its irony and imprecision, is producing exactly that kind of signal \u2014 uncoerced, youth-driven, and spreading on its own momentum.<\/p>\n
The American century was built on the world\u2019s desire to be American, a desire so powerful that it didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 and decides they\u2019d rather be something else?<\/p>\n
#Gen #Chinamaxxingand #love #letter #Beijing #indictment #America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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