From late 2025 to the early months of 2026, social media has been flooded with videos of young people from the US and Europe at “a very Chinese time in their lives”. American girls, living in Paris, making breakfast with stock ingredients from Traditional Chinese Medicine. British TikTokers drinking warm water, wearing house slippers, and boiling apples for their gut health. Europeans yearning for the glittering metropolises of Chongqing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. Suddenly, everyone seems to be Chinamaxxing, but it’s more than just a short-lived trend. The meme has broken containment, revealing a new affinity for the world’s “next superpower” that runs much deeper than a craving for bubble tea and xiaolongbao.

In Britain, there was a significant uptick in the number of people who see China in friendly terms between October 2025 and late January 2026, with the only other notable shift being US relations (down 17 points). A separate poll from 2025 reveals a stark generational divide, with young people much more inclined to trust China than their older counterparts. And this swing was already taking place before Keir Starmer became the first UK leader to accept an invite from the CCP since 2018, ending a so-called diplomatic “ice age” (and, more importantly, locking down plans for seven new Labubu stores in the UK). 

These figures alone would suggest that Chinamaxxing was, and still is, more than just a passing trend, but they’re just one example of a sweeping renegotiation of the west’s relationship with China under president Xi Jinping. Earlier in January, Canadian PM Mark Carney also declared a “new strategic partnership” with China, and European leaders likewise entered a new era of diplomacy as the year of the Fire Horse began, resulting in major trade deals and visa-free travel.

This diplomatic shift comes amid a widely noted “rupture” in the old world order. The former superpower du jour, the USA, has tanked its global reputation with “illegal” wars and threats of invading allied territories; some commentators argue that Donald Trump has single-handedly driven the west into China’s arms. But it’s not really such a simple case of cause-and-effect. After all, the political disruption of early 2026 only accelerated a process that was already underway. So where did it originate? Are young westerners under the spell of a strategic “soft power” campaign cooked up by China’s greatest minds, spanning social media, music, video games, and more? A series of subconscious TikTok psy-ops? Or is the west simply charmed by snapshots of life, culture, and technology we get to see through the Great Firewall, from aunties dancing in the park, to backflipping robots?

Maybe it’s not so much about China at all – arguably, our obsession actually says more about our own dreams about the future, or lack thereof. In 2026, living in the UK and Europe can feel like living through the “death throes of empire”, says Amy Ireland, writer, theorist, and editor of Machine Decision is Not Final. This is by no means a unique feeling, either: polls say that young people’s pride in Britain was down to a meagre 29 per cent in 2025, and faith in current forms of democracy is gradually fading across Europe. “We’re going through this negative moment, where we’re feeling a sense of loss and decline, and we’re looking for something to fill that void,” Ireland adds. 

Almost a year ago, the Ohio-born streamer IShowSpeed touched down in Shanghai for a two-week trip through several major cities, including Beijing, Chongqing, Chengdu and Shenzhen. This livestreamed journey exposed tens of millions of viewers to a side of China that’s “rarely highlighted” by western mainstream media, as noted in glowing praise from CCP officials. In November 2025, the popular streamer Hasan Piker also visited the country, telling the South China Morning Post: “My motivation was to show that China isn’t this hermit kingdom the way it’s often presented... Americans have been taught to hate China, this country that we heavily rely on. And I find that to be not only hypocritical, but also very stupid.” More recently, Timothée Chalamet joined Chinese social sites RedNote and Weibo to share his experiences in China while promoting Marty Supreme.

“IShowSpeed, in particular, single-handedly did a lot to improve ideas of China with young people in America,” says Vincent Garton, a researcher whose work spans aesthetics, technology and Chinese philosophy, and whose writing appears in Machine Decision Is Not Final. The streamer achieved this on “multiple levels”, Garton adds, from his interactions with “random people” in local restaurants or the bustling streets of Shanghai after dark, to the “futuristic cityscapes” that formed the backdrop of his livestreams, reinforcing the western idea of China as a cyberpunk utopia (a seductive, albeit reductive fantasy that’s proliferated via pop culture since Deng Xiaoping’s modernising reforms in the 1980s).

Around the same time as these widely broadcast visits hit the internet, western content creators also shared footage of Chinese-created media like Road to Empress (2025) and Black Myth: Wukong (2024) – video games based on ancient Chinese history and myth. “Young gamers were like, ‘Holy shit, these Chinese studios are doing amazing stuff,’” says Ireland.

Unsurprisingly, many of the streamers and influencers whose attention has turned to China in the last 12 months have been criticised for overlooking some of the more serious accusations levelled at the CCP under Xi Jinping, who assumed office in 2013, and became “president for life” after abolishing China’s two-term limit in 2018. These include the party’s alleged use of “detention camps” for Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, its culture of censorship and mass surveillance, and its (much-disputed) “neocolonialism” in Africa.

Some critics have suggested that western influencers are willingly promoting Chinese government propaganda, while others say they’re spreading anti-western messaging as engagement bait. In some cases, the latter might be true. As Garton says: “Influencers have their own set of incentives... to wind people up and clickbait.” But, in his 15 years of experience, more insidious, organised forms of propaganda are “pretty rare”.

If the level of external propaganda is overblown, the Chinese state’s intervention in people’s daily lives is similarly exaggerated, Garton suggests. “Youth culture in China is a lot more open than people realise.” This can be seen via viral trends like the ‘lying flat’ or tang ping movement, which rejects social pressures to overwork (see: the technically illegal 996 schedule, where work hours run from 9am to 9pm, six days a week). Sparked by a 2021 manifesto that was heavily censored by the Chinese government, tang ping thrived via memes that evolved faster than censors could keep up, demonstrating how youth subcultures can critique the state and express their disillusionment.

Chinese youth culture is also “more in sync with the western internet” than many westerners might expect, Garton explains. Memes travel back and forth, and catch on fast. This is a notable shift from 15 years ago, around the time he began talking to people from mainland China, largely thanks to the widespread proliferation of VPNs that bypass the Great Firewall in the early 2010s. With this technology in hand, a new generation of net-savvy Chinese youth also began voraciously consuming western media – and, particularly, its music. Now, over a decade on, this deluge of influences has given birth to a new Chinese youth culture movement that forms an unlikely counterpoint to the Chinamaxxing trend in the west: the ‘Nu China’ rap scene.

Counting names like Billionhappy, Jackzebra and Chalky Wong among its ranks, the Nu China scene is deeply inspired by western music – from the misfit-uniting rise of Swedish superstars Yung Lean and Drain Gang to the maximalist EDM-rap fusions of 2hollis – but its resonance is hyper-specific to the issues facing Chinese young people today. “Now, a lot of kids [in China] have graduated [university] and they don’t have a job,” Billionhappy told Dazed earlier this year. “Either they don’t want to work, or they can’t find work. A lot of teenagers are hopeless [so] they just choose to do weird stuff and have fun.” It’s a sentiment that echoes the tang ping trend, with Billionhappy’s Shabby Club collective (itself a pun on the vulgar Chinese word shabi, meaning stupid) preaching a sort of happy-go-lucky nihilism that arises in direct response to overwork and dwindling future prospects.

Crucially, however, Billionhappy acknowledged that the Nu China scene is built on faulty and selective readings of western youth culture. Much like how western influencers’ fascination with TCM and drinking warm water seems to speak more to a “negative moment” in their own lives than any critical engagement with Chinese social reality, the Nu China scene’s warped imitations of western musical subcultures has been deployed to articulate a very Chinese kind of disillusionment – one that is entirely absent from the Chinamaxxing discourse abroad.

Games like Black Myth: Wukong introduced many western gamers to Chinese history and mythology, but they also contributed to the “slow unravelling” of another kind of myth: that China isn’t as technologically advanced as the west. (As a popular maxim among political commentators states: “America innovates, China imitates”.) The China-based AI chatbot DeepSeek also dealt a blow to this narrative when it was released in January last year, performing better than many US competitors in benchmark tests despite using far fewer resources. At the time, the announcement wiped $1 trillion off US stocks, in what Trump described as a “wake up call” for industries in the west. 

Today, when Western power centres like Washington DC or Silicon Valley talk about Chinese technology, a strange paradox arises. On the one hand, China is still perceived as lagging behind its Western counterparts (and, admittedly, many of today’s dominant technologies originated in the West before being copied, and often improved, by Chinese companies). On the other, we’re constantly being fed images of China’s advanced humanoid robots, facial recognition tech, or staggering energy output as evidence that they might be pulling ahead in a technological arms race. 

Take electric vehicles, Garton says – from the electric supercars that can dance and jump over obstacles, to more consumer-friendly options. “You get this weird tension between people [saying], ‘This is all copied, stolen tech, or really low quality’. But also, ‘We need to exclude them, because if people were given a free choice, they would all rush to buy them’. It doesn’t quite make sense.”

How can we understand this paradox, where the west proclaims its technological superiority and, at the same time, quivers at the sight of a robot landing a smooth backflip in a Marty Supreme shirt? For Ireland, the answer lies in a kind of ideological indoctrination, where the “western obsession with originality and invention” is seen as the only true route to success.

The last decade has seen thinkers like Yuk Hui challenge this blinkered idea, but now that we’re seeing so much Chinese development play out in real time, maybe the paradox is finally approaching a breaking point. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, as Ireland points out: “What’s interesting is that it makes us realise that the way we see the world in the west is particular to us, rather than being an objective set of values, and that we don’t have to hold onto those values any more. We can question them.”

In January 2025, the US government threatened to pull the plug on TikTok, a social media platform then owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, with 136 million active American users. Ironically, this sparked a brief user exodus to more localised Chinese apps, including Xiaohongshu (AKA RedNote), where users from both nations began to interact and share jokes, including AI-generated videos of overweight American workers on factory production lines. This contributed to the shifting perspective on Chinese life, culture, and infrastructure when compared with western equivalents. 

“For millennials, China used to be framed as cheap, authoritarian, backwards, not cool,” explains researcher Caroline Ying Ouellette in a January 2026 video for the anthropology channel Anthrodorphins. “Now this image has flipped. Online, China shows up as clean cities, functional public transit, dancing aunties in parks, late night food markets... little clips of social life that feel almost utopian compared to American burnout.”

In January 2026, ByteDance finally averted a TikTok ban by selling a majority stake of its US operations to a consortium of American investors, including Larry Ellison’s Oracle. But again, this takeover resulted in a reputational own-goal when it turned out that the US-based leadership, which has been criticised for its pro-Zionist beliefs and links to the Israeli military, appeared to censor content relating to Palestine, as well as ICE, Jeffrey Epstein and anti-Trump messages. This was met with significant backlash, including calls to reinstate Chinese leadership. In response, US TikTok denied claims that it was rolling out more draconian censorship policies than its Chinese predecessor, seemingly blaming “technical issues” for posts that failed to send or gather any engagement.

“There’s this condescending, liberal humanist critique of China as being techno-authoritarian and despotic, while we in the west are free,” says Ireland. “We don’t have social credit scores, and facial recognition in all the train stations, all of that...” But recent events, both online and off – from the crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations in the UK, to ICE’s authoritarian rampage in the US – have eroded our sense that the west is a free, liberal alternative. Meanwhile, the idea of China as an authoritarian dystopia has been exposed as a “caricature”.

Flashy tech and functional cities, YouTube travel vlogs, and an uptick in cross-cultural communication have all helped mainstream the idea that China is the place where all our sci-fi dreams can come true (if they haven’t already). But this idea – as it exists in the west – has its roots in more fringe communities of artists, writers, and musicians. In the 90s, it was a favourite subject of thinkers associated with the CCRU, a group of cultural theorists that formed at Warwick University, who laid the foundations for the accelerationist philosophy espoused by many members of the AI arms race today. As one controversial member of the collective, Nick Land, wrote in his 1995 essay Meltdown: “Neo-China arrives from the future.”

Steve Goodman (AKA Kode9) would later coin a term for the concept – “Sinofuturism” – which was popularised by the artist Lawrence Lek via his 2016 video essay Sinofuturism (1839 – 2046 AD). In the film, Lek plays with stereotypes of China to explore how Chinese cosmology, cultural clichés, and emerging technology come together in modern-day. “It is a science fiction that already exists,” reads the voiceover.

When he made Sinofuturism in the 2010s, Lawrence Lek was well aware of the complex history of orientalism and exoticisation that still informs our outlook on China today, referencing thinkers like Edward Said. But the film doesn’t necessarily seek to tear it down, or see beyond it to find the ‘real’ China. “He takes this orientalized image of China and goes, ‘Okay what are the productive possibilities of it? What if we just accept the caricature and see where it goes?’” Ireland says. “And he comes up with this really creative, amazing manifesto, out of leaning into that.” 

“Young kids on the internet fetishising [China] are building a way to think outside of western prejudices” – Amy Ireland

Today’s obsession with Chinamaxxing raises similar questions. When young westerners post online about “becoming Chinese” are they engaging with the ‘real’ China, or just fetishising a distant reality? Even if it is just a fantasy, can it help us navigate the fragmentation and fragility of the west, just as the Nu China scene builds its identity on selective readings of western culture? 

Ireland thinks so. “It stops us from thinking that the Western approach to technology, temporality, history, and the sense of the future is objective and universal,” she says. “Young kids on the internet fetishising [China] are building a way to think outside of western prejudices.” Plus, our engagement with China doesn’t have to end the memes we see online. “If you fetishise China for long enough, and become enough of a committed Sinofuturist, eventually you come out the other side, into the actual complexity of today’s China, and recognise that there are a lot of different things going on, especially in Chinese cyber-culture and youth movements.”

We might not even end up wanting to “become Chinese” when we’re faced with the full, complicated reality of what that actually means – but we might have a clearer sense of where we do want the future to lead.

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