#BecomingChinese — also tagged #Chinamaxxing, #VeryChinese, and #IWannaBeChinese — is a 2025-2026 internet-culture trend in which mostly American Gen-Z creators post themselves adopting visibly Chinese daily habits: drinking hot water with goji berries, learning Mandarin, doing qigong, wearing indoor slippers, marveling at high-speed rail and mobile payments. The tone runs from earnest cultural admiration to pointed critique of American life, and coverage in Fortune, The Week, and East Asia Forum treats it as one of the more consequential soft-power stories of the mid-2020s.
What It Means
“Becoming Chinese” is the descriptive framing; “Chinamaxxing” is the sardonic one. Both label the same set of behaviors: creators showcase deliberately Chinese-coded routines and read them into the camera as either aspirational or as implicit indictments of US housing costs, health care, transit, and food. The formula is simple enough to travel — a habit, a why, a comparison — and portable across TikTok, RedNote, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
Origin
The trend’s proximate trigger was the January 2025 migration of American TikTok users to #RedNote (Xiaohongshu) in the days before the threatened US TikTok ban. That migration put Americans and Chinese users in the same feeds for the first time at scale and produced weeks of cross-cultural first contact. American streamer IShowSpeed’s 2025 China tour — with his live-streamed astonishment at Chinese cities and technology — and Chinese-American TikToker Sherry Zhu’s sardonic “how to become Chinese” tutorials became the two most-cited entry points into the format. By late 2025 the term “Chinamaxxing” was in circulation, and “Becoming Chinese” hardened into the standard label through 2026.
How the Format Works
Individual posts almost always pair a small habit with a comparison:
- Habit: drinking hot water with goji berries, wearing plastic slippers indoors, learning Mandarin numerals, using WeChat to pay a friend, doing morning qigong, refusing ice in drinks.
- Comparison: an American baseline the poster now finds absurd — bottled water bills, shoe-worn carpets, English-only signage, credit-card fees, gym memberships, iced everything.
Chinese state outlets have highlighted the more admiring cuts; Western outlets have highlighted the critique undertone. Both readings live in the same feed.
Cultural Impact
For the Chinese platforms involved, the trend produced a rare inbound cultural moment: Fortune reported that related tags including #becomingchinese, #iwannabechinese, and #veryChinese had accumulated over 40 billion views across TikTok and RedNote by early 2026. For Western observers, East Asia Forum framed it as an early example of Chinese “affective soft power” — everyday digital habits, rather than state messaging, reshaping international perceptions of Chinese life. The trend also collided with Trump-era US-China tensions, giving it a sharper political charge than similar aesthetic movements.
Related & Adjacent Hashtags
The tag cluster overlaps closely with #RedNote, the platform where much of the cross-cultural contact actually happens, and with 2025’s #TikTokRefugees moment that made the migration possible. Adjacent tags include #VeryChinese, #IWannaBeChinese, and creator-specific tags like #SherryZhu.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Chinese
- https://fortune.com/2026/04/19/what-is-becoming-chinese-chinamaxxing-tiktok-trend-american-critique/
- https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/04/08/the-becoming-chinese-trend-and-beijings-soft-power-shift/
- https://theweek.com/culture-life/chinamaxxing-tik-tok-trend-chinese-culture
- http://www.china.org.cn/2026-04/15/content_118438135.shtml