'Chinamaxxing' trend tests China's cultural pull against K-wave

A social media trend dubbed "Chinamaxxing" is spreading among young Americans who are adopting Chinese lifestyle habits — from drinking hot water to cooking hotpot — sparking comparisons to South Korea's K-wave and fresh debate over China's soft-power reach.

For Korean-Americans who have watched K-pop and Korean culture build a decade of global influence, the trend raises pointed questions about whether China is gaining cultural ground — and whether an internet meme cycle can sustain it.

The SAIS Observer, a student-run publication at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, captured the trend's online reach: "Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram readily yields droves of posts featuring people 'in a Chinese time of their life,' wearing house slippers, making hot apple tea, eating hotpot, or praising China as a model society," according to The Korea Times.

Under the "Chinamaxxing" banner, videos show users swapping morning coffee for green tea, embracing the traditional practice of drinking hot water, preparing congee and hotpot, and adopting the habit of walking with hands clasped behind the back. Admiring China's high-speed rail network and cashless payment infrastructure has become a recurring theme as well.

Researchers say the trend projects a selective, flattened image of the country. Tingting Liu, a research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote that "fragments of everyday life are circulating globally rather than China in its full complexity. The meme format inevitably reduces a millennia-old civilisation to easily digestible, surface-level aesthetics," according to The Korea Times.

Despite growing online curiosity, the American public at large remains deeply skeptical. A March survey by the Pew Research Center found 27 percent of U.S. adults hold a favorable view of China, while 71 percent remain unfavorable — and many respondents described China more as a competitor than a partner.

Analysts cited by The Korea Times drew a sharp distinction between Chinamaxxing and the sustained reach of South Korea's cultural exports. The K-wave built durable international audiences through music, film and food over more than a decade; observers warned that short-form video trends risk fading quickly as social media attention migrates elsewhere.

Whether Chinamaxxing signals a genuine shift in how Americans perceive China — or simply mirrors a pattern of short-lived internet fascination — may depend on whether curiosity about Chinese daily life outlasts the meme cycle that carried it.