The Chinamaxxing trend emerged in 2025, through TikTok and YouTube, when content creators found their Chinese roots, regardless of their heritage.
These non-Chinese creators shared brief clips of themselves drinking warm water, wearing Chinese fashion items such as indoor slippers, using chopsticks, eating Chinese cuisine, or performing tai chi, often captioned: “You met me at a very Chinese time of my life”.
Academics have argued that this digital trend, like all digital trends, is more than just an aesthetic blip, but rather a response to social or political change.
According to Isabella Lee’s summation, it is partly related to a disillusionment with the legitimacy of the US as a cultural or political force under President Donald Trump, an obsession with Chinese health, wellness and dietary habits, and the historic exoticisation of the East: “In true internet fashion, it is equal parts nonsensical and reductive”.
Assuming it is part social media nonsense and part knee-jerk response to Trump’s America, how do we critically respond to the reverse trend, of non-Americans celebrating fragments of American culture?
Consider the rise of Chinese online personalities such as Chongqing-based Ryan Chen (瑞哥英语), often described as the “Chinese Trump”.
Performing this persona for local and global audiences, in Chinese locations, Chen draws on Trump’s distinctive accent, mannerisms and speech style, re-framing them within Chinese social and cultural contexts.
Chen’s strikingly accurate mimicry of Trump’s voice and gestures doesn’t necessarily celebrate American culture. Instead, it parodies, with laser-like intent, Trump himself. Ironically, this comes at the very same moment the West is embracing Chinese culture, as a knee-jerk reaction to Trump. All roads lead to Trump, it seems.
We’re all Americamaxxing now. The whole world is living through a very American time in our lives.
