Introduction
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.
The trend is often playful, but it is not politically neutral.
As Justine Poplin notes in The Conversation, these videos are often “part parody and part politics”, blending humour with a more genuine curiosity about alternative cultures.
What is Chinamaxxing?
At its core, “maxxing” is internet slang for optimising, intensifying or fully adopting something, often with an ironic or exaggerated edge. 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 could be described as “Indonesiamaxxing”.
From Chinamaxxing to 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 playfully engage with Indonesia’s large online audiences. Their command of Indonesian may not be textbook perfect, 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.
The novelty lies less in cross-cultural fascination itself than in the speed, scale and monetisation of its digital circulation.
From pop culture to cultural appropriation
Broadly speaking, this trend of cultural fascination 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, albeit it 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.
Who benefits from Indonesiamaxxing?
But it may also be read through a postcolonial lens: as a case of the Western “Self” attempting to perform, translate or profit from the identity of the “Other” in ways that still serve its own interests.
In this framework, the “Other” is constructed as foreign, chaotic, unfamiliar, uncanny or untamed: everything the supposedly ordered, rational and civilised “Self” imagines itself not to be.
In the context of online content creation, the balance of power may have shifted, if only slightly. It is, after all, the Indonesian “Other” that provides the massive online audiences for the West’s “Self”-interested content creators.
Western content creators can leverage the sheer scale of the world’s fourth-largest population and its impressively high levels of digital engagement to generate revenue. In this sense, Indonesiamaxxing has moved well beyond mere cultural curiosity. For Western digital nomads able to combine Indonesia’s lower cost of living with its massive online audience, it is also a business model.
The irony is that the Indonesian “Other” is no longer merely being represented. It is also watching, commenting, sharing and, in effect, monetising the performance.
As in earlier colonial power relations, both the Self and the Other remain mutually dependent.
– Marshall, Brisbane, March-April 2026