You may have seen lighthearted memes from Chinese and non-Chinese people alike with bold text highlighting “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” alongside videos of them washing rice, drinking Tsingtao beer or engaging in Chinese exercises like Tai Chi or Qigong.
Chinamaxxing is just maxxing to me; that’s just a glimpse into how Chinese I’ve become.
Amidst the increasingly intense US-China rivalry, young people all over the West have found themselves disillusioned with their government — institutions they can no longer comfortably trust. These memes unexpectedly sparked curiosity about Chinese culture and traditions, like Chinese New Year, a positive cultural exchange few could’ve predicted in the aftermath of the coronavirus-fuelled hate crimes of 2020.
When the memes first appeared, I felt relieved. For once, China wasn’t the punchline of an ill-intended joke — there was a weird comfort in seeing people embrace being “more Chinese” as something fun and quirky.
But like all memes, the fun of it was ruined when I thought about it beyond its surface tomfoolery.
With the rise of Chinamaxxing memes, and the surge of Adidas Tang jackets, mandarin collars, Labubu dolls, and Chinese boba chains, I couldn’t help but see the familiar shadow of Orientalism behind what seemed like harmless celebration.
Why does it always feel like other cultures are only safe to celebrate when it’s trendy for Western consumerism?
While these memes may appear to improve China’s cultural image, for many Chinese people they expose something deeper: the persistent, subconscious Othering of Chinese identity. People of colour are too often treated as inferior, unless their cultures become consumable.
Right now, Chinese culture feels like another toy for Western media: fun for a while, then discarded.
Tracing the roots of Chinamaxxing
The Chinese diaspora has long faced the consequences of yellow fever (the fetishisation of Asian people), the Red Scare, neo-colonial Western racism and and the current resurgence of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The Red Scare, a campaign by the US left-wing government to incite fear of communism, had devastating consequences on all populations but especially Chinese immigrants residing in the West. Surveillance and suspicion ran rampant among the population, which has had roots in many anti-Chinese rhetoric to this day.
Since the ban (and then unban) of TikTok in the US early last year, influencers and fellow doomscrollers fled to TikTok’s Chinese equivalent, Xiaohongshu (Rednote), as a form of revenge against their government that wanted to prevent Chinese data farming on the social media platform.
Interactions of Chinese users welcoming “TikTok refugees” to the platform became viral, and it felt like generations of anti-Chinese propaganda were dissipating fractionally. More foreigners were interacting with Chinese users during this brief window of cultural exchange, and realising (condescendingly) that Chinese people were, indeed, human beings capable of humour and emotions like everyone else.
But when Western society equates liking China or Chinese culture to rebelling against their own government and being an edgy anti-fascist revolutionist, love for Chinese culture doesn’t come from a genuinely respectful place, it’s still rooted in Western propaganda and is viewed through a strictly vengeful lens.
It’s highly disrespectful to enjoy parts of another culture just because it feels like a middle finger to your own government.
Enjoying parts of a culture as a reaction to your government means you only care about reclaiming a sense of control in a system that aims to strip you of it. Are you genuinely engaging with another culture, or are you just saying it for the meme?
What is Orientalism?
To simplify this all boils down to Orientalism. This is how Western authors, scholars, artists and consumers depict and interpret Eastern cultures as inherently inferior but, at the same time, mystical and exotic. A lot of this happens subconsciously because that’s what microaggressions are: subconscious biases that affect how you treat or think about different people.
The paradox of Orientalism is closely studied in Anne Anlin Cheng’s book Ornamentalism, asking “What does it mean to survive as someone too aestheticised to suffer injury but so aestheticised that she invites injury”?
Cheng argues that we use brutish terms like black women, brown women, white women, but never yellow women because it feels too tied in nineteenth-century racial grouping, it feels icky and connected to a very dehumanising period of human history for the East Asian diaspora.
Excluding this term from discussions of race brings up interesting questions of how East Asian cultures are consumed in the wider cultural sphere compared to others. Think of K-pop and Korean skincare, anime, or the mass popularisation of matcha.
Many Asian cultures are forced to make parts of themselves palatable to Western audiences to survive rapid globalisation, a direct consequence of mass colonisation. We can think of these products and practices as cultural exchange, but the way Western consumerism popularises these products is more on par with cultural consumption.
Dehumanising Eastern cultures while demanding sellable products from them (even in more “progressive” circles) is still common, it’s just taking new forms. Consuming China as a product is spitting in the faces of those who live and breathe the culture and suffer the consequences for it, and the memes make China a cultural product to consume and discard.
Japanese culture has especially been adapted for Western consumption since the atrocities committed by their army in WWII — something that affects the Western subconscious to this day. For example, English patternmaker RoughcutOfficial sold a pattern for a wrap shirt with a Chinese cheongsam-style opening, crediting it as a “Japanese wrap shirt”. The patterns are called “kaze” and “kiri”, a reference to the 1994 Japanese video game.
After commenters corrected where his inspirations should be credited, the pattern names remained the same but were recategorised as “Cheongsam wrap shirts”. These patterns and the people behind them are a classic example of Japanese culture becoming buzzwords and symbols for Western consumers.
Mina Zhao, however, takes elements of Chinese garments, credits them correctly in the first place and still sells patterns that are modernised for the contemporary consumer in her Jun top. You don’t have to be Chinese to be respectful of your own culture, but when you utilise another culture for commercial gain, it’s inevitably going to draw criticism from people of that culture.
We’re seeing the same thing with Chinese culture now. Tang-style jackets and frog buttons are trending, and with it are fast fashion brands scrambling to make a profit off yet another microtrend.
Showpo’s “Lunar New Year Edit” utilises “mandarin collars” on sexy silhouettes and completely transparent lace dresses, when qipaos have historically been sexualised despite being a cultural garment. This is especially perplexing because Showpo’s CEO, Jane Lu, is Chinese, but the brand ultimately feels like the scapegoat for Western cultural consumerism, because selling your own culture while adhering to Western standards of fashion and microtrends feels like the most convenient cash grab.
Even Bonds, hardly a Chinese-adjacent brand in my opinion, has hopped on the Lunar New Year hype with red envelope promos — a hollow gesture when it’s not backed by genuine inclusion.
When brands that once ignored Chinese identity suddenly capitalise on it, you have to ask: who’s this really for?
Companies that have previously had absolutely no interest in East Asian culture are now eager to make money from trending Chinese silhouettes while doing nothing to spotlight voices and talent from the cultures they’re exploiting.
Chinamaxxing memes are ultimately a historically recurring failure in Western pop culture of trying to reinvent microaggressive mannerisms but perpetuating them in new ways.
Not only do they spit in the faces of ethnic groups that are forced to assimilate into the umbrella of Chinese identity through colonialism (Tibetans, Indigenous Taiwanese groups, etc…), but they also perpetuate Chinese people and culture as consumable and monolithic.
Chinese culture is rich, ancient and diverse, and like all Eastern cultures, it deserves to be more than a fleeting digital consumable for your doomscrolling sesh.
Lead image: TikTok – @producesection001 / @nmmalaika / @steffie.chann
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