Amid the endless chaos and cruelty of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, China, America’s main geopolitical rival, is enjoying a resurgence of interest online. Posting under the hashtags #BecomingChinese, #NewlyChinese, and especially #Chinamaxxing, youthful influencers are playfully adopting traditional Chinese medicine-based wellness routines maintained by pensioners in Beijing, celebrating the Blade Runner aesthetic of Chongqing, the megacity in China’s southwestern hinterland, and marveling at Chinese mass transit.
In many ways, the trend is refreshing. It breaks from the overwrought national security focus of most debates about the People’s Republic in Washington, D.C. And, at the same time, the interest of Chinamaxxers in quotidian life across the Pacific contrasts with the monumental image projected by Chinese authorities themselves during events such as state visits and the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Similar to the exchanges that happened between Chinese and Americans on the app Xiaohongshu a year ago, when TikTok looked set to be banned in the United States, at its best, Chinamaxxing is a positive, human-scaled conversation across cultures.
Amid the endless chaos and cruelty of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, China, America’s main geopolitical rival, is enjoying a resurgence of interest online. Posting under the hashtags #BecomingChinese, #NewlyChinese, and especially #Chinamaxxing, youthful influencers are playfully adopting traditional Chinese medicine-based wellness routines maintained by pensioners in Beijing, celebrating the Blade Runner aesthetic of Chongqing, the megacity in China’s southwestern hinterland, and marveling at Chinese mass transit.
In many ways, the trend is refreshing. It breaks from the overwrought national security focus of most debates about the People’s Republic in Washington, D.C. And, at the same time, the interest of Chinamaxxers in quotidian life across the Pacific contrasts with the monumental image projected by Chinese authorities themselves during events such as state visits and the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Similar to the exchanges that happened between Chinese and Americans on the app Xiaohongshu a year ago, when TikTok looked set to be banned in the United States, at its best, Chinamaxxing is a positive, human-scaled conversation across cultures.
But the “China” of Chinamaxxing is not a China with which any sort of real solidarity is imagined by its enthusiasts. The trend does not conceive of Chinese people as political actors. In fact, it assumes that the only political opinion that ordinary citizens of China are capable of is incredulity at the backwardness of American public services, as captured in viral online videos, and regurgitated rhetoric from the country’s state socialist past. There are no social movements in China, it seems. No debates. No counterparts for the politically active American to engage.
At its worst, the trend dovetails with a disappointing tendency among a vocal minority on the American left, who parrot Beijing’s more odious talking points. Think: progressive Twitch streamers downplaying Xinjiang’s internment camps while riding Chinese high-speed trains.
At its not-quite-so-bad, the trend fits with some left-leaning intellectuals’ newfound attention to Chinese five-year plans and development forums. Here, we are not talking about crude boosterism. But we are dealing with a relatively frictionless, top-down version of China.
A decade and a half ago, interest in China among progressives manifested in a very different way. U.S. unions and nongovernmental organizations supported their counterparts in Hong Kong and backed lively workers’ centers in South China’s industrial boomtowns. Meanwhile, Chinese labor activists and labor scholars traveled to the U.S. on speaking tours and joined rank-and-file gatherings like Labor Notes, where they shared their strike experiences with eager audiences. When U.S. and European multinationals lobbied to water down a new Chinese labor law in 2007, unionists and academics in both countries coordinated to push back. U.S. environmental groups opened formal offices in Beijing. Chinese feminists got U.S. support to pursue legal cases.
People involved in these exchanges tried to make clear that they were not pursuing regime change in China. In fact, Beijing was fitfully engaged: American unions, for instance, reached out to the Communist Party-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions, with mixed success. Nongovernmental organization staffers and academics held workshops for Chinese lawyers and arbitrators from inside the system. But the Chinese authorities were not valorized like they are in some circles today. And they were not assumed to be the only voices worth hearing.
I myself participated in this work. Accompanying Chinese activists in the American Midwest, it was inspiring to witness laid-off U.S. autoworkers come to see their counterparts from across the Pacific as more than victims—as instead labor leaders in their own right, with shared corporate enemies. It was similarly hopeful to see Chinese participants soaking in the egalitarian spirit of American unionists and taking notes on their tactics.
The change between then and now can be attributed in large part to China’s crackdown on civil society under President Xi Jinping. Chinese authorities decimated labor activism starting in 2015. They detained the “Feminist Five” the same year. In 2018, police crushed Marxist students after they campaigned in support of protesting electronics factory workers in Shenzhen. In 2020 Beijing responded to previous year’s mass protests in Hong Kong with a repressive new national security law. And in 2022, the white paper protests over the government’s COVID controls were thoroughly suppressed.
In the U.S., the Trump administration’s mass detentions of immigrants, abrogation of collective-bargaining rights for federal workers, and threats against left-leaning nonprofits have also likely tamped down enthusiasm for progressive Sino-American exchanges among the people who were most active in them. There is too much to attend to at home. Plus, American unionists, in particular, must determine where they stand on Trump’s intermittent trade wars.
When cross-Pacific exchanges between activists are one day able to pick back up again, the constellation of institutions involved will have shifted. The breakaway Change to Win union federation that spearheaded official dialogues on the U.S. side is no more. China’s edgier nongovernmental organizations have been replaced by government-backed groups with more of a social service orientation. The China obsession of U.S. universities has cooled. At the same time, democratic socialists in the United States are now winning major elections and debating what their foreign-policy stances ought to be, including with respect to the People’s Republic.
The issues of shared concern will have changed, too. For instance, the rights of tech workers and gig workers in both countries might become a focus. Climate change may loom larger. Americans will have to grapple with Beijing’s ramped-up campaign to erase Uyghur and Tibetan culture. Chinese will have to deal with a United States that has isolated itself on the world stage.
Relatedly, the balance of power between U.S. and Chinese participants will likely have altered. A financial crisis, two Trump elections, and a war of choice with Iran later, American prestige has unsurprisingly declined in China—and this probably extends to American civil society. Gone may be the paternalism that sometimes cropped up in U.S. programming.
More of the impetus for engagement may come from the Chinese diaspora this time. Chinese students at American universities have formed promising new organizations and joined graduate-student organizing campaigns and other campus activism at their host institutions. Emigré Chinese intellectuals have set up bookstores and Feminist comedy spaces in the United States.
Participants will furthermore have to grapple with a changed security calculus in both countries that is unlikely to alter with a change of administrations in Beijing and Washington. One concrete thing on the Chinese side that slowed previous exchanges was heightened scrutiny of foreign money transfers to Chinese nonprofits. This scrutiny began well before Xi took office. The United States, meanwhile, is increasingly suspicious of academic ties to China—and this holds for both the Biden and Trump administrations. Activists will need to clearly distinguish their efforts from their respective countries’ diplomacy and carefully document how funds are used.
Regardless, progressives in both places should start thinking now about how they want that engagement to unfold.
Curiosity about other countries is always to be encouraged. In many ways, today’s Chinamaxxing is just the latest iteration of a popular fascination with China that goes back to the first tour groups that visited China as ties were being normalized—and the fascination with U.S. popular culture that animated young Chinese from the 1980s through the early 2000s.
But curiosity is not a substitute for solidarity. And fascination with another country that flattens out that country’s struggles can actively undermine meaningful connections.
