I’ve always prided myself on being able to keep up with the latest Internet trends, but since early 2025, I’ve been seeing one that has utterly bewildered me. By now, you’ve probably seen it on your Twitter (X) or TikTok feeds—Westerners attempting, with various degrees of seriousness, to “become Chinese.” Maybe I’m a little woke, but as an ABC (American-Born Chinese), I have soured on this trend. Sure, it might come from a good place, and many Chinese or Chinese-Americans contribute to it. But it’s all too easy for the meme to spin out of control, morphing from legitimate curiosity about our culture into cultural appropriation, a performative spectacle, or outright fetishization.
Firstly, just what is “becoming Chinese,” anyway? Wikipedia defines it as “a social media trend propagated by Generation Z westerners who adopt norms and traditions typically associated with Chinese culture and/or praise China as a country and nation.” The trend originated in 2025, when phrases such as “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” started to appear, but it picked up steam in 2026 as an increasing number of Westerners began adopting Chinese behaviors, such as “drinking Tsingtao beer, walking with hands behind one’s back, eating congee, consuming traditional Asian medicine, drinking hot water, and so on.”
This newfound idolization of China has been absolutely bewildering to experience. I still remember, just five or six years ago, how starkly different the perception of China was. Back then, if you asked most people what they thought of China, they’d respond with some derisive joke about Mao Zedong, the CCP, or “-1000 social credit points”; the only Chinese anyone wanted to learn was the words for “fuck your mother.” That was all before the COVID pandemic, which brought phrases like “Wuhan Flu” or “Kung Flu,” and racist smears about Chinese people eating bats. Customers fled from Chinatown restaurants even before the virus reached pandemic levels in the US; reports of hate crimes against the Chinese-American community soared. Back then, it wasn’t trendy to love China, it was trendy to hate it!
Is it good that people have better views of Chinese culture than they did six years ago? Absolutely, 100 percent! It was heartening to see streamer iShowSpeed tour mainland China in 2025, exposing millions of viewers to China’s cities, local celebrities, and traditional arts. And when the Chinese movie “Ne Zha 2”—the fifth-highest-grossing movie of all time—hit theaters in the US, I ended up watching it with three separate friend groups, all of whom ended up loving it (and you will too!). If people want to genuinely learn more about China, then by all means, they should. Chinese history, which spans nearly 5000 years, is an endlessly fascinating topic, and the uniqueness of Chinese geography, cityscapes, arts, philosophy, and even the written language are all worth exploring.
So then, what’s the problem with the “becoming Chinese” trend? Clearly, it’s part of the growing interest in China, but in many cases, it doesn’t feel like a good-faith attempt to actually engage with the culture. Pretending that playing mahjong or drinking hot water automatically makes you Chinese is, of course, dangerously reminiscent of cultural appropriation. In fact, perhaps the only reason why “becoming Chinese” isn’t being widely condemned is because a number of Chinese and Chinese-Americans have taken part in it, giving lifestyle tips and making grand pronouncements like “Tomorrow, you’re turning Chinese. I know it sounds intimidating, but resisting it now is pointless.”
Regardless, the dynamics will always be different when it’s a Chinese person doing it and when it’s a non-Chinese person doing it. Especially when the steps people are taking to “become Chinese” amount to nothing more than incredibly unserious and shallow lifestyle choices. Over Chinese New Year, for instance, we’ve seen white people make a show of not washing their hair during the holiday, or declaring that Chinese New Year has replaced Valentine’s day. How does any of this look to someone who was actually born Chinese? Incredibly cringeworthy, if you ask me.
In fact, this seemingly positive attitude towards China can morph into something more belittling. I once watched a video in which YouTubers compared their Instagram Reels to see whose feed had the most brainrot. The catch is that any Chinese video counted as “brainrot.” Yes, you heard that right. At one point they saw a reel with someone speaking Mandarin and that counted for brainrot points. Nevermind that the reel was, as far as I could tell, a serious one about life planning—it was brainrot, alongside such categories as “67,” “kirkification,” and “Khaby Lame Mechanism,” because someone in it was speaking Chinese. Was this intentionally made to harm? Most likely not. But things like this are what happen when Chinese identity is treated as a joke.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some people have begun to idolize China a little too much. I saw a screenshot of a post on Rednote, the Chinese social media platform, made by an American user and saying, “I wish to be Chinese. I hope I die and come back as Chinese.” In the comments of the post, actual Chinese users attempted to comfort and advise the poster, to no avail. One commented, “Even though this might be a joke, I still want to remind you that life is precious and you should live it to the fullest. If you truly love China, we welcome you to come and visit us.” The American poster replied, “It won’t be the same. I want to look Chinese, be of Chinese blood and know that I have the same ancestors.” Yikes!
This fetishization of all things Chinese—from partaking in the minutiae of Chinese New Year superstitions, to literally wanting to die and be reborn in China—is nothing new. Another East Asian country, Japan, has long been subjected to the same treatment. We all know the stereotype of the weeb—the obnoxious basement-dweller who is obsessed with anime, peppers their speech with Japanese honorifics, and believes that Japan is superior to the West in literally every way. Just watch the hilarious Sakura-Con 2009 video, in which white cosplayers shout the names of Japanese metal bands at a confused sushi chef, for a prime example of this sort of cringe. Even today, you’ll often hear half-serious jokes about how going to Japan at the age of 22 will solve all of your problems, or how places in Japan automatically look better than equivalent places elsewhere in the world.
So why is it China’s turn to be fetishized? The answer is simple: politics. To say that this meme lacks a political dimension would be disingenuous. The first iterations of “becoming Chinese” appeared after Donald Trump returned to power in 2025. His ill-conceived tariff regime, violent immigration crackdowns, and his general demeanor while in office spawned apocalyptic predictions of American demise, and caused people to question whether a “Chinese century” might be imminent. One of the earliest “Chinese” memes that I remember around this time is a hat with English and Chinese text that reads, “Hello, I am fleeing the American Century of Humiliation. Can you show me where to buy Mountain Dew Baja Blast?” And more recent “becoming Chinese” memes continue to tie themselves to politics, like this tweet, replying to a report that China has banned all investments in Israel with an image of a massive stockpile of Chinese beer and the caption “tonight we’re letting the Tsingtao speak”.
It seems that for some people, “becoming Chinese” is a political statement. It marks someone as a contrarian. For them, embracing Chinese lifestyles signals their opposition to America, Israel, the West, capitalism, etc. And it is this form of the “becoming Chinese” meme that is the most uncomfortable. It treats Chinese culture and stereotypes not just as a trend, but as a disposable virtue signal, on the same level as a worn-out bumper sticker or an “I’M WITH HER” T-shirt.
Think about it. How many of the people fetishizing and idolizing Chinese culture are fair-weather friends, only praising China in this specific political moment? We all know how dramatically geopolitics can change, how quickly the West’s perception of China can fall like it did during COVID. If China’s reputation were to decline, would Americans still want to fly across the Pacific and parade themselves as “American refugees”? Would the “tonight we’re letting the Tsingtao speak” guy still let the Tsingtao speak if China’s position on Israel just happened to be different? If someone is only interested in China to protest, to be performative, to signal which side of the aisle you’re on—that means they were never truly interested in China in the first place. That’s opportunism.
I’m not alone in this opinion, by the way. Writing for Wired Magazine on the “becoming Chinese” trend, Zeyi Yang expresses discomfort with how it seems temporary, tied to a specific moment in time, not always out of genuine admiration for China. “By definition, the phrase ‘at a very Chinese time’ implies it’s a temporary state … If all people are looking for is another culture to aspire to, they could very well become Mexican in 2027, Indian the next month, or Filipino tomorrow. Meanwhile, some of us are stuck being Chinese forever, including all the less fun parts that come with it, like worrying about the stability of staying in the US amid immigration policy chaos.” I think the best response, though, comes from the “I wish to die and come back as Chinese” Rednote post mentioned earlier. One Chinese commenter wrote succinctly, “You don’t get to love China only when it becomes powerful.”
Yes, it is a good thing that people want to learn about China now. Yes, it’s perfectly fine for an American to play some mahjong, speak a little Mandarin, or drink some Tsingtao beer. But being Chinese is not just a trend, a joke, or a No Kings protest sign. It’s a culture, not a lifestyle hack you pick up for a few months and then toss aside when it no longer becomes convenient. And here’s a parting thought. I’ve seen so many people want to “become Chinese”—but I have yet to see a single one who wants Chinese parents.
