Britain Discovers Chinamaxxing

Britain Discovers Chinamaxxing: Or How We Quietly Started Drinking Hot Water and Calling It Enlightenment

Let us be clear about one thing. Britain was always going to end up here. A nation that spent three centuries sailing around the world exporting its culture, its crockery, and its inexplicable enthusiasm for queuing has now, quite voluntarily, started drinking boiled apple water and wearing indoor slippers because a woman in New Jersey told it to via a six-second video. We call this progress. We used to call it the East India Company. The branding has improved considerably. The power dynamic has also, it turns out, reversed.

Welcome to Chinamaxxing — the social media trend in which otherwise perfectly sensible Westerners declare themselves “newly Chinese,” swap their trainers for house slippers, and film themselves drinking hot water with the focused intensity of someone who has recently discovered mindfulness at a retreat they cannot afford to return to. The phenomenon exploded across TikTok and RedNote between late 2025 and early 2026, largely driven by young Americans — though the British, as ever, have been watching from a polite distance and are now doing exactly the same thing while telling everyone they got there first.

Hot Water: The Chinese Wellness Secret Britain Has Been Sitting On for Four Hundred Years Without Realising

The centrepiece of the Chinamaxxing lifestyle is hot water. Plain. Unbagged. Possibly with a slice of apple floating in it like a confused garnish. Traditional Chinese medicine holds that hot water aids digestion, warms the body, and prevents a catalogue of ailments that cold water apparently causes — a belief that fits rather elegantly into the British tendency to treat suffering as a personal failing that can be addressed with the right beverage.

The difficulty, for the British, is that we already have hot water. We put a teabag in it. We have been doing this since the seventeenth century. The idea that plain hot water is a Chinese wellness secret is, from a British perspective, roughly equivalent to being informed by a foreign national that chairs exist and are good for sitting on. “Yes,” Britain would like to say, kettle already boiling, “we’ve been doing that. We added Yorkshire Tea. We thought we had improved it. We may have been wrong.”

Nevertheless, a new generation of British Chinamaxxers is now brewing plain hot water — deliberately, consciously, and with an air of cultural rediscovery that suggests they believe they have invented something — and posting it to Instagram with captions suggesting they have located inner peace. Older relatives watching from the kitchen cannot quite articulate what has gone wrong, but they sense, on a cellular level, that it has.

The Great Slipper Uprising: British Homes Finally Do the Obvious Thing for the Wrong Reasons

Alongside the hot water devotion, Chinamaxxing promotes removing outdoor shoes at the front door and wearing indoor slippers — a practice that, in China, reflects genuine concern for hygiene and floor cleanliness, and that, in Britain, reflects the fact that our pavements are genuinely, objectively, scientifically revolting and we should have been doing this before the concept of TikTok was a coherent thought in anyone’s mind.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the British interior is already one of the more cluttered in Europe. It is now becoming more cluttered with slippers. Retailers describe customers buying multiple pairs “just in case another part of them becomes Chinese tomorrow” — a sentence that made no sense twelve months ago and makes only fractionally more sense now. The BBC has not yet commissioned a documentary about this, which is uncharacteristic restraint and frankly an opportunity missed. Four episodes. David Attenborough narrates. The slippers multiply.

Comedian Jimmy O. Yang posted a TikTok in the Adidas Chinese New Year tangzhuang jacket while deploying the catchphrase. The jacket sold out across multiple markets simultaneously. This is either soft power or extremely effective product placement, and at this stage the distinction is a matter of academic debate that nobody except the Adidas finance department cares about.

Congee Conquers Britain: Avocado Toast Is Asked to Clear Its Desk

Congee — rice porridge, a dish that has been sustaining the human population of East Asia for approximately three millennia with minimal complaint — has become the unlikely centrepiece of the British wellness conversation. Influencers are posting photographs of themselves beaming at steaming bowls with captions including “found enlightenment at the bottom of this bowl,” which is either a genuine spiritual breakthrough or the most aggressive marketing congee has ever received, and quite possibly both.

Congee has now been declared more spiritually nourishing than yoga, more fashionable than overnight oats, and more morally defensible than avocado toast — which, let us be honest, was always going to collapse eventually under the weight of its own self-satisfaction. The remarkable thing is that it took a three-thousand-year-old Chinese recipe to finish it off. Avocado toast had a good run. It lasted roughly seven years, which in trend terms is an eternity, and in geological terms is the blink of an eye. Congee has been going since the Zhou dynasty. It is not going anywhere. Avocado toast is going to Pret.

China’s Soft Power Arrives, Britain’s Soft Power Quietly Weeps Into Its Thermos

Diplomats in Beijing must be observing Chinamaxxing with the quiet satisfaction of someone who planted a seed three decades ago and has just returned to find a forest. China’s Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index ranking rose to second in the world in 2025, surpassing the United Kingdom. This is the sort of sentence that would have caused emergency meetings in Whitehall in 2010 and caused slightly less emergency meetings in 2025, because Whitehall has had a rather full decade and everyone is very tired.

The Chinese government’s public response has been characteristically composed. Foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said he was “happy” to see foreigners experiencing the everyday life of ordinary Chinese people. The Global Times ran the headline: “Chinese lifestyles increasingly gain global appeal, offer a steadier way of being.” One imagines the editorial meeting was brief. One also imagines it was followed by a celebratory bowl of congee.

Meanwhile, Labubu dolls are selling out globally. Mixue bubble tea is opening stores across Europe. Luckin Coffee is expanding. IShowSpeed‘s China livestreams attracted tens of millions of viewers. China extended visa-free travel to UK nationals. This is what civilisational transition looks like in 2026: not Dreadnoughts, but congee. Not the Berlin Airlift, but a thermos. History is written by those who stayed warm.

The TikTok Refugee Fiasco: A Masterclass in Accidental Diplomacy

The Chinamaxxing wave was turbocharged by the great TikTok refugee migration of January 2025, in which the US government threatened to ban TikTok on national security grounds, and Americans responded by mass-migrating to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) — a Chinese-owned social media platform. The logic here is, as several commentators gently noted, somewhat difficult to defend. “We are banning your app for national security reasons,” said the US government. “Understood,” replied its citizens. “We’ve all moved to your other app. It’s Chinese. We are now learning recipes.”

Chinese users welcomed the incoming Americans with genuine warmth, naming them “cloud relatives” and sharing cooking and wellness content. The New York Times observed in February 2026 that the resulting Chinamaxxing memes could be read as “an absurdist joke, a wellness goal, or a subtle ironic expression of protest. Or all of the above.” This is the most accurate description of the entire 2020s yet committed to print, and it was written about slippers.

What the British Are Actually Doing (Hedging, Ironing, Wondering If This Counts)

The British relationship with Chinamaxxing is, predictably, considerably more tangled than the American version. Where Americans flung themselves headlong into the trend with characteristic all-or-nothing enthusiasm, the British response has involved sustained irony, considerable internal debate about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation, and at least one extended Twitter thread about whether buying a thermos constitutes an act of geopolitical submission.

A British vlogger filmed herself putting goji berries into her tea and discussing the health benefits at length. Multiple people in the comments pointed out she had lived fifteen minutes from a Chinese supermarket for three years and had never been in. She acknowledged this was fair. She has since been in twice, emerging both times with goji berries, a packet of chrysanthemum tea, and an expression suggesting she has located the meaning of life in the dried goods aisle.

Pew Research data shows under-34s view China more favourably than over-50s in sixteen of seventeen countries surveyed. In Britain, this maps onto existing generational divisions with almost eerie precision — the same fault lines already running through Brexit, housing, the cost of living, whether grammar schools are good, and whether it is acceptable to put milk in before the bag. The hot water question is simply the newest front in a war that has been going on since approximately 2016 and shows no sign of concluding.

The Verdict: One Thermos to Rule Them All

Chinamaxxing is, at its core, the cultural equivalent of someone discovering mindfulness and deciding they have found their personal philosophy: mostly harmless, occasionally illuminating, frequently absurd, and absolutely guaranteed to be followed by something Icelandic in six months. The slippers will remain. The thermos will migrate to the back of the cabinet. The congee will be rebranded as a superfood by a minor celebrity, appear on the menu of a restaurant in Shoreditch at £18 a bowl, and become briefly unavoidable before vanishing entirely.

What the trend does reveal — with more clarity than its participants probably intended — is that the era of unquestioned Western cultural dominance is over, and that the generation inheriting whatever comes next is well aware of it. They are processing this with the tools available to them: short-form video, ironic hashtags, and a great deal of warm liquid consumed with deliberate intention.

One can think of worse responses to civilisational transition. The hot water, it must be said, is genuinely quite good for you. The slippers are comfortable. The congee, if properly seasoned with ginger and spring onion, is excellent. Britain has come to worse conclusions about worse things for far less reasonable reasons. This time, at least, the evidence suggests digestion improves.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Chinamaxxing — also known as “Becoming Chinese” or being in “a very Chinese time of one’s life” — is a social media trend that went viral between late 2025 and early 2026, originating from a Fight Club parody tweet posted in April 2025. Chinese-American TikTok creator Sherry Zhu, 23, became its most prominent figure, amassing over 20 million views by encouraging non-Chinese followers to adopt traditional Chinese wellness habits including drinking hot water, wearing indoor slippers, and eating congee. The trend was turbocharged when Americans flooded the Chinese platform RedNote during a threatened TikTok ban, creating an unexpected cultural exchange in which Chinese users welcomed them as “cloud relatives.” Analysts variously attribute it to Gen Z disillusionment with Western politics, China’s rising global soft power (ranked second worldwide in the 2025 Brand Finance index, ahead of the UK), and the enduring human impulse to reinvent oneself using someone else’s thermos.