21 Mar 2026 3 min read analysis

CHINAMAXXING 🇨🇳

As the internet’s resident all-things China yapper, I cannot help but participate in the “Chinamaxxing” discourse. It’s 2026 and I’m not handholding white supremacists to explain why it is racist to cosplay a culture.

Many in the East Asian communities are still feeling the violence of anti-Asian hate - particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic years. It wasn’t that long ago when the west normalized anti-Asian hate in the name of health and safety, shunning our peoples, foods, and culture as unsafe and disgusting.

What a contrast!
Nowadays, “Chinese” culture is cool.

It is racist to appropriate ethnicity by embodying stereotypical traits, like wearing house slippers or drinking hot water. Beyond the surface of sensationalizing an ethnicity, this is based on the assumption that “Chinese” is an identity defined by an arbitrary set of practices. “Chinese” is not a real ethnicity to begin with, but a generalized and anglaized term to refer to Han and/or residents in so-called China.

When people say “Chinese”, they think about the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It should be obvious that the PRC is huge and each region has its own unique culture, language, and identity. While Han people are the majority, there is no monolithic culture in China. It is also impossible to extract “Chinese” culture without confronting Han supremacy, Sinicization, and settler-colonialism of the PRC. The state-manufactured “Chinese” culture is genocidal intentions wrapped in ethnonationalism.

Ultimately, the extraction of culture by sanitizing the political component of identity is problematic.

To bring this conversation back to the West, there is something deeper to unpack in this cultural clash. I cannot help but interpret “Chinamaxxing” as a reflection of the American-Chinese dichotomy. Digging beneath the trend of “Chinamaxxing”, it feels like a social-cultural response to un-do Americanness, by leaning into its geopolitical opponent - the PRC.

The geopolitical dichotomy is not healthy, it is manufactured and enforced polarization. The nuanced truth is: both the USA and the PRC are normalizing authoritarian governance and state-sanctioned violence. We have to confront oppressive regime simultaneously and in solidarity with people, without falling into campism.

I have no grand conclusion or groundbreaking discovery to this piece. But simply an observation of a cultural moment.

What is it like to be a Chinese person, living in a Chinese time?

Surreal.

I want savour this opportunity to share my language, culture, and traditions with my western peers. At the same time, I refuse to simplify and extract culture from the politics and history of my peoples for social media consumption.