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 is the most ideal government today, in his eyes.
Piker, who holds huge sway with Gen Z lefties, doesn’t just denigrate America — he actively promotes our greatest adversary.
In a recent podcast episode about Chinamaxxing, independent journalist Taylor Lorenz, who covers internet culture, said that Piker told her that he’s “the most Chinese” and “the real white Chinese.”
Lorenz also took a stab at explaining why China is taking off with young people. “It seems like this paradise almost that Americans can kind of, like, project their hopes onto because our country feels so hopeless,” she said.
Projecting your hopes onto China sounds ludicrous. But just 41% of Gen Z say they’re proud to be Americans. Only 26% say we’re the best nation on the planet.
A whole lot of young people who grew up on smartphones, being constantly bombarded with the worst news stories out of America, see the black box that is China as a refuge.
For American youth feeling like down-and-out victims in their own country, embracing “Chinamaxxing” can be a transgressive way to feel the same sense of culture and camaraderie that patriotism brings, all while actively dissing their homeland.
But China is not our friend. The country’s Communist Party is complicit in countless human right violations, as well as genocide of the Uyghur people. They’ve trampled civil liberties in Hong Kong and Tibet. Freedoms — and the internet — can be revoked at a moment’s notice.
They control what religions citizens can practice, how many children a family can have, what news they can access. The government has even been accused of turning a blind eye to mass forced labor in manufacturing.
They decimated free speech and the free press in Hong Kong. Social media is all under centralized control. A social credit system dictates people’s behavior. Civilians can even get in trouble for noting that Xi Jinping resembles Winnie the Pooh.
China is no doubt reveling in Americans propagandizing themselves. There’s nothing they’d like more than a generation of self-loathing Americans wide open to their influence.
I’m all for young people drinking hot water in the morning if it makes them happy. But all-out cosplaying as Chinese is embarrassingly naive.
America is not perfect, but China most certainly isn’t better — even if streamers tell you otherwise.
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