Gen Z is ‘Chinamaxxing’—and it’s less a love letter to Beijing than an indictment of America

The American century — a phrase coined by Fortune founder Henry Luce — had a soundtrack. It was Chuck Berry on the radio and Coca-Cola in the cooler, Levi’s jeans, and Marlboro billboards stretching across Europe. American culture didn’t conquer the world through military force—it did it through desirability. People wanted to be American. That aspiration was a kind of geopolitical superpower that no missile silo could replicate.

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Now something is shifting, at least online. On TikTok, a growing wave of Gen Z creators—American first, then European, then global—are declaring themselves to be in their “Chinese era.” They’re drinking hot water. They’re eating hotpot. They’re wearing slippers indoors and marveling at the electric buzz of Chinese city life. They’re calling it “Chinamaxxing.” And increasingly, they mean it as more than a joke.

Welcome to the “Becoming Chinese” moment. Beneath its ironic, meme-friendly surface, the trend has ignited a genuine debate: Is this the first credible crack in American soft power dominance—or is it simply Gen Z doing what Gen Z does?

What they’re actually glamorizing

Spend five minutes in the Chinamaxxing corner of TikTok, and a clear aesthetic emerges. The videos cluster into a few recognizable genres. There’s “wellness and longevity mode” — warm water with fruit, herbal teas, gua sha, early bedtimes, gentle morning exercises, all framed as ancient secrets to soft living. There’s “uncle core,” in which creators affectionately mimic Chinese retirees: tracksuits, sidewalk squatting, communal street-side beers, a whole visual argument against American hustle culture.

And then there’s the infrastructure porn. Bullet trains gliding into spotless stations. Drone shows over neon-lit Shenzhen skylines. Chinese EVs. Walkable, dense neighborhoods. Drone food delivery. Contactless payment for a noodle soup that costs the equivalent of two dollars. These clips, often set to ambient or synthwave music, are edited to make American commuters watching on cracked phone screens feel something specific: that the future is being built somewhere else.

As tech commentator Afra Wang put it, “These young people have watched their physical reality remain frozen while China built entire cities. When you can’t build high-speed rail, but you can scroll through videos of Chinese infrastructure, of course, the future starts to look Chinese.”

The subtext of every “very Chinese era” video isn’t really about China. It’s about what young Americans feel they’ve been denied. Chinamaxxing romanticizes things that feel structurally out of reach at home — compact, affordable-looking apartments; public transit that works; streets safe to walk at night; multigenerational households as an antidote to loneliness; communal meals as an antidote to atomization. The comparison is implicit but unmissable: they have this, and we don’t.

A mirror, not a window

The numbers underneath the memes are brutal. A four-year U.S. public university costs $50,000 to $60,000 for in-state students; the equivalent in China runs $3,000 to $5,000 for the whole degree. American households spend roughly $5,177 a year on healthcare, with medical debt touching nearly half of all adults. China’s subsidized system costs somewhere between $350 and $565 annually. Housing eats 25% to 35% of an American paycheck. In China, rent in major cities often runs 60% to 70% lower.

Gen Z Americans now carry an average of $94,000 in student-loan debt, and the psychological weight of that number is fueling what Fortune‘s Jacqueline Munis has called “disillusionomics” — a generational rejection of traditional financial prudence rooted in the belief that the old rules no longer apply. One-third of Gen Z says they believe they’ll never own a home. Many are planning to forgo children. Youth unemployment hit 10.8% last year against a 4.3% national average.

This is the context in which “becoming Chinese” lands. It isn’t that Gen Z has carefully studied comparative political economy and chosen Beijing. It’s that they were raised on a promise — get the degree, get the job, get the house, get the healthcare — that increasingly feels like a lie. American higher education, once the most reliable on-ramp to the middle class, now generates crippling debt in exchange for credentials that pay less in real terms than they did for their parents. Tuition at U.S. public universities has increased 153.8% since the early 1980s in inflation-adjusted terms, growing 65% faster than currency inflation and 35% faster than wages. The institution, sold as the gateway to prosperity, has become its single largest private obstacle.

Slate‘s Nitish Pahwa captured the emotional logic cleanly: “You told us we couldn’t have a high-speed railroad and universal health care, and it turns out they have it across the street! I’m going to live at their house now!” It is, as he described it, a petulant-toddler reaction to a broken promise — and one that Western institution