Chinamaxxing: China has become the aesthetic everyone wants to live in

Hot water instead of coffee. Labubu as keychains. Mahjong on Friday nights. Jianbing for breakfast. Skincare routines inspired by traditional Chinese medicine. More and more young Westerners are taking to social media to share that they have entered their “Chinese period”. On TikTok, the phenomenon already has a name: Chinamaxxing. The response to this Chinese influence is called Chinamaxxing – the trend that has swept through TikTok and Instagram in recent months, prompting young Americans and others to declare that they have entered their “very Chinese period”.

On the surface, it seems like little: someone drinks hot water instead of cold brew, someone follows a skincare routine inspired by traditional Chinese medicine. 

But looked at closely, the phenomenon tells us something more precise about the way Gen Z is rewriting its cultural coordinates – and how aesthetics circulate in the world today, increasingly independent of the geopolitics that produce them.

This is not the first time a non-Western cultural imaginary has been absorbed by the West through memes and lifestyle content. The difference, this time, is the context in which it occurs: while relations between the United States and China remain formally tense, a generation raised on TikTok – itself a Chinese platform – is developing a familiarity with that country’s culture that completely bypasses geopolitical discourse.

Not China as a systemic rival, not China as a technological threat: China as a source of daily rituals, of objects, of an aesthetic of care and slowness that clearly has something to say to those who have grown up in the permanent acceleration of the digital West.

There is something structurally interesting in this short circuit. Chinamaxxing did not start as a political gesture (perhaps for some) – it started as an aesthetic gesture, and for that very reason, it ends up being more effective than many stances. Anyone adopting an herb-based beauty routine or starting to drink tea instead of coffee is not necessarily declaring a political position: they are choosing an imaginary, a way of being in the world. And it is precisely in that seemingly superficial choice that we can measure something that soft power analysts – a country’s ability to influence through attraction rather than coercion – still struggle to quantify.

It is no coincidence that the trend found its main amplification right on TikTok, which by its very architecture builds familiarity with what it shows – and it shows a great deal of Chinese daily life, its rhythms, its objects, its domestic aesthetics.

The result is a generation that knows China not through newspaper headlines but through cooking videos, skincare tutorials, Chengdu apartment tours, and Chinese or sometimes expat creators. A fragmented knowledge, superficial in some ways, but also unusually direct. The other side of the phenomenon is less comfortable to look at. Part of the Chinese diaspora has reacted with growing annoyance, and it is not hard to see why: seeing traditions, practices, and knowledge condensed into an aesthetic that anyone can adopt, without history or context, produces a form of symbolic erosion that those belonging to that culture recognize immediately.

Chinamaxxing is ultimately a textbook case of how aesthetics work in the social media era: they detach themselves from the body that produced them, circulate freely, are adopted, reworked, emptied, and filled with new meaning. It is a process that has always existed – cultures have always contaminated, hybridized, and copied one another – but today it happens at a speed and with a ubiquity that make it almost impossible to draw clear lines between appreciation and appropriation, between curiosity and consumption. What remains, beneath the trend, is something more interesting than the trend itself: a generation looking elsewhere – geographically, aesthetically, culturally – for what its own context can no longer offer.

Featured image: Photo from Adobe Stock