Chinamaxxing Comes for the Avocado Toast

"Chinamaxxing" is the practice, undertaken largely by young people in the West, of deliberately adopting the small daily habits of ordinary Chinese life. The word fuses China with the suffix "-maxxing," borrowed from "looksmaxxing," which denotes throwing oneself wholly into the improvement of some trait. In practice it means drinking hot water rather than iced coffee, wearing slippers indoors, eating congee for breakfast, taking up traditional remedies, and walking about with one's hands clasped behind the back. The notion took shape online during 2025 as a loose assortment of jokes and resolutions.

Its passage into wider view owed much to a single visit. In March of last year the American streamer known as IShowSpeed toured China before an enormous audience, marvelling at its high-speed trains and its gadgetry, and the footage travelled far. Through the early months of this year the platforms filled with Westerners narrating their conversion, abandoning the iced latte for a steaming mug and reporting, with some surprise, that they felt rather better for it. The hot water, in particular, became a kind of shorthand for the whole endeavour.

For all its slippers and congee, the trend is less a costume than a comment. Most who take it up are not so much praising Beijing as registering a quiet dissatisfaction with life at home, casting about abroad for something that seems to hold together. It has not gone unexamined. At least one analyst has pointed out that this is a China largely imagined from afar, bearing little resemblance to the actual lives of Chinese people, and that a share of the material shades into mockery rather than admiration. What remains, once the jokes are set aside, is the faintly remarkable sight of a generation pursuing the good life by way of a glass of warm water.