A new social media trend, often referred to as “Chinamaxxing”, has seen content creators – particularly in the West – experiment with aspects of Chinese culture, from food and wellness practices to language and everyday habits.
As a recent article by Justine Poplin in The Conversation notes, these videos are often “part parody and part politics”, blending humour with a more genuine curiosity about alternative cultures.
At its core, “maxxing” is internet slang for optimising or fully adopting something. What is striking, however, is how quickly such trends travel, and how readily they are adapted across different cultural and digital contexts.
Parallel to “Chinamaxxing”, there is emerging evidence of what might be described as “Indonesiamaxxing”.
Western, or bule, YouTubers and TikTok creators are increasingly producing content in Indonesian, or even Javanese, engaging directly with local audiences and building large followings in the process.
Channels such as Londo Kampung or Bule Hamis illustrate how this form of cultural engagement operates in practice, with creators adopting local language, humour and behaviours to connect with, playfully engage with, or prank Indonesian audiences. Their command of Indonesian may not be the best, but Indonesian audiences are lapping it up.
Others, such as Christoph Keller, simply base themselves in Indonesia and create wry observational content in English that resonates with Indonesian audiences.
Hyper-Indonesian content, especially when produced by unexpected sources, such as bule, consistently generates tens of thousands of views, comments and shares.
Broadly speaking, this trend is not entirely new.
A fascination with other cultures, and projecting oneself into those cultures, has long circulated through popular culture. The 1980s song I Think I’m Turning Japanese by The Vapors captured a similar moment of cross-cultural curiosity and projection, albeit in a very different media environment.
Another example is Paul Simon’s iconic album, Graceland, which combined American folk/pop with South African musicians and styles, and was met by criticisms of cultural appropriation.
The broader significance of expatriates rediscovering Indonesia, or of Paul Simon’s appropriation of South African music, may be found in the politics of the time. For Paul Simon, it was likely an artistic response to apartheid; today’s social media trends may represent a response to Trump’s America, as some have argued.
But it might just be a case of what postcolonial theorists have described as the colonial “Self” attempting to articulate the identity of the colonised “Other”.
The Other, by definition, is constructed as foreign, chaotic, unfamiliar, uncanny, and untamed – everything the ordered, rational, civilised, white Self lacks. As in colonial power relations, each is dependent on the other.
