Why should we in Southeast Asia care about a frivolous Western social media trend like "Chinamaxxing"?
Because, let's be honest, it hasn't really gained traction in the Global South in the same way [as in the US]. The tropes of "Chinamaxxing", drinking hot water, eating rice porridge, wearing indoor slippers aren't particularly novel in Southeast Asia. We have a long history of Chinese migration, deep cultural overlap, and large Chinese diasporas.
So yes, the memes are fun, funny even, and they're welcome in a general kind of counter to anti-China sentiment. But if we're talking about "Chinamaxxing" just as a Western viral phenomenon, it falls short. It doesn't land the same way it does in in the West.
So the question that I would have first, instinctually, would be: by amplifying its importance, are we still seeking Western validation? Are we just welcoming cultural appropriation? What is the point of this?
And certainly, if we are just thinking of it as a Western apolitical social media meme, the answer to those questions would be yes. However, this is not about just social media. The phenomenon of "Chinamaxxing" is that it signals a new stage for humanity, and that is why it holds a much deeper significance.
For decades in Southeast Asia, we have lived with a Cold War era dichotomy:
On one side is US imperialism with their propaganda machine built on disinformation, smears, and the erasure of the atrocities committed in this region during its anti-China, anti-communist campaigns.
When I interviewed the Indonesian journalist Febriana Firdaus, who faced consequences as recently as 2016 for reporting on Indonesia's 1965 US-backed genocide, where anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million people were reported to have disappeared due to suspected socialist affiliations, she recounted her own personal experience of finding out years after the fact that her grandfather had been taken by government officials on this pretext. No one ever heard from him again, and no one ever talked about why he disappeared.
My father in Malaysia also recounted a similar experience of a classmate disappearing for having anti-colonial socialist leanings, and the teacher's reprimand was silence when questioned.
It is a measure of how effective US anti-China, anti-communist propaganda was that all 30 of his classmates believed that this boy that was taken and detained deserved it because he was a communist.
Ultimately, these tactics worked. In the words of my father, nobody would even dare to whisper the word socialism, and the generation after my father's, my generation, knows nothing about our country's socialist histories. US imperialism disappeared a whole generation of socialist thought leaders and revolutionaries, and consequently, in the war of ideas, completely obliterated socialism in the region outside of the two countries, Vietnam and Laos, that achieved their people's revolution.
There is a trauma embedded in this erasure, and it has lasting psychological consequences. Instead of understanding underdevelopment as the direct outcome of imperialism in the forms of extraction, military aggression, and coercive economic structures, people were encouraged to internalize it as individual or cultural failure, and that extended to our view of China. China was poor because they were inferior.
We internalized an inferiority complex and a set of very potent self-limiting beliefs that corruption is innate in our populations, that incompetence is cultural, that the West is morally superior, that Western intervention is benevolent, and most importantly, that resistance is futile because there is no alternative. These beliefs were cultivated in the vacuum of historical memory and political education.
China's socialist achievements directly challenge this. They show in concrete, measurable terms that an alternative exists, and this is the other side of the Cold War that US imperialist narratives worked so hard to bury: A socialist system rooted in people's power and collective prosperity, and operating with a completely different strategy for winning the war of ideas.
China's approach is encapsulated by Deng Xiaoping's well-known quote, "Socialism is not poverty. Development is the hard truth." In other words, while the US requires us to deny reality and accept fabrication in order to uphold its imperial system, China, by contrast, argues that the most persuasive case for socialism is not messaging tactics at all, but material improvement, the ability to deliver concrete gains in people's lives.
And as China has delivered these concrete gains, we can see that it is a strategy that is currently bearing fruit.
In the West, we have "Chinamaxxing" born out of people seeing video evidence on Red Note or on social media, and celebrating that in their own way through a fun meme. In Southeast Asia, because of proximity, people are more likely to actually travel to China themselves to witness this in person.
I witnessed this myself going to China for the first time when I was nine, and then in the 2000s, and again last year. And it did aid and galvanize my own political education, which is still ongoing. It drives my curiosity, and it is a huge part of the reason for my belief that we can do better in the West, and that we have to do better.
And as my father tells me too, the very classmates who held on to their anti-China, anti-communist beliefs for decades have now themselves traveled to China and are reversing their opinions. Their first-hand experiences have led them to question the narrative that they accepted without question decades ago, and to seek answers for what happened to their classmate. (Unfortunately, he was detained, obviously without trial. No one really knows how long he was detained for, and he was quietly released.)
But this is just a testament that if we can witness with our own eyes China's achievements, the 850 million people lifted out of poverty, life expectancy gains, clear measurements of life improvement improvements, massive infrastructure systems, the deep indoctrination of Western imperialism can be broken through.
The evidence is all across Southeast Asia in the regional frameworks that provide a clear alternative to Western coercive institutions: China's prosperity for all extends outward. The countries in Southeast Asia who seize on the opportunities that China is offering are reaping the rewards.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, is currently China's biggest bilateral trade partner, and the Belt and Road Initiative has already delivered Southeast Asia's first high-speed railway in Indonesia, the China-Laos railway, Cambodia's first expressway and a new airport, Malaysia's East Coast Rail Link, and dozens of hydropower plants and special economic zones across the region.
In total, China has built or is building over 1,800 km of new rail, thousands of megawatts of energy capacity, and billions of dollars in ports and industrial zones.
On the flip side, to illustrate what happens when you embed yourself more further into US imperial systems, we have the example of the Philippines, which after decades of US-aligned neoliberal policy has been the first country to declare a national energy emergency due to the US-Israeli war on Iran.
So in conclusion, China is significant because it marks a new stage in humanity. It is still useful because it it invites curiosity in a pretty low-stakes way, safely, playfully, openly, and we don't have to manufacture anything to meet that curiosity. The reality of what people can see, measure, and experience is more persuasive than any propaganda we are fed. And I, personally, I'm hoping that this opening will allow the next generation in Southeast Asia to heal the wounds of imperialism and to rebuild the political socialist movements we need because, as "Chinamaxxing" definitively illustrates, US imperialism has failed, and the path forward for human progress is socialist.
