Is China's Soft Power Rising, Or Is America's Just Crumbling?

2026-04-23 01:07:36

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Soft power is notoriously hard to quantify, but it's difficult to argue that global soft power has been shifting steadily toward East Asia in recent decades. A few years ago, I wrote a post about how South Korea became a cultural superpower on purpose, while Japan became one by accident.

The big question then was: When does China get its turn? China is a lot bigger than either Japan or Korea, so you might assume that if the world loves East Asian stuff, we might eventually get a Chinese Wave.

So far, it's been slow to arrive. In my post about the Chinese Century last year, I argued that China's closed political system meant that its cultural influence would lag its technological and geopolitical might:

In a follow-up post on Sinofuturism, I reiterated this prediction.

But as I noted in that post, the past year has seen the rise of breathless“I went to China” videos by American social media influencers. Although so far the videos are pretty shallow stuff - mostly just breathless videos and photos of China's grandiose infrastructure - there's a possibility it could be the start of the long-awaited Chinese Wave of soft power.

The“Chinamaxxing” trend feels a bit fake

Fast forward a year, and some people are claiming the wave has begun. There has been a“Chinamaxxing” trend on English-language social media:

And here's Fortune:

But despite all the stories about this trend (here's Slate, NPR, the AP, and the BBC if you want some others), it doesn't feel like the kind of soft power wave we've seen from Korea and other countries.

There are few actual Chinese products or creations involved here. Western youngsters are not, in general, watching Chinese dramas or microdramas, listening to Chinese music or playing Chinese video games. Adidas, with its viral Chinese-style jacket, is a German company.

The most trumpeted Chinese cultural products still don't seem to be finding much purchase outside China. Ne Zha 2, often trumpeted as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, earned over 99% of its revenue in mainland China.

Black Myth: Wukong, the most famous Chinese video game, got over three-quarters of its Steam sales from China.[1] Other than the rapper Skai Isyourgod, who has had several songs go viral on TikTok, there are not many Chinese musicians known in the West.

Instead, the“Chinamaxxing” trend seems to consist mostly of Western youngsters doing stuff they think of as stereotypically Chinese - drinking tea, doing exercises, etc. This is the kind of thing that might have gotten dinged as“cultural appropriation” eight or ten years ago. Today it's more reasonably viewed as an expression of fascination and respect - but it's fascination and respect from a great distance.

Then there are those videos of Chinese cities. I covered these in my post last year, but the trend is still going. There are also now a bunch of influencers who relentlessly post about how Chinese cities are the greatest. For example, there's Jostein Hauge, an assistant professor at Cambridge who relentlessly posts about how China is ahead of the West in every regard. The alleged supremacy of China's cities is a regular talking point:

Cynics have noted that these accounts are pretty one-note; it seems more like a deliberate publicity campaign, abetted by a few amateur enthusiasts, than an organic outpouring of enthusiasm for Chinese urbanism.

The same is true of the continuing parade of breathless videos from Westerners traveling in Chinese cities - they tend to feature shots of the exact same grandiose train stations and architectural landmarks, or the insides of factories or restaurants or other buildings, rather than videos or photos of life at ground level.

That's telling, because it stands in stark contrast to the videos and photos you tend to see from Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, or other popular older cities. And there's a reason for that - as I wrote in my Sinofuturism post, Chinese cities were built incredibly quickly instead of growing organically over time.

This means that they're dominated by sterile gated tower blocks (called xiaoqu, or microdistricts), large surface streets, and huge shopping malls. There are relatively few walkable mixed-use streets lined with shops near to people's homes. External shots of China's newly built city centers tend to show vast concrete plazas and soaring towers - impressive, but fairly sterile.

In fact, there's hard data to support the notion that the appeal of China's megacities is still shallow. As of 2024, tourism to China was still way down from the years before the pandemic, and the number of Americans studying in China had collapsed even further:

Contrast this with Japan and Korea, which both get many more tourists from the US than China does (despite being far smaller), and which have both seen a more complete rebound since the pandemic:

2025 numbers are harder to come by. Tourism to China is still recovering - up about 10% from 2024 - and American travelers are presumably part of this trend. But it's still nothing compared to the tourism booms to Japan and South Korea, which are well above their pre-pandemic levels.

For all the breathless YouTube videos and glowing testimonials, Americans are still not going to China in large numbers, either to visit or to live.

So overall, the“Chinamaxxing” trend feels a bit fake and forced - the combination of a deliberate marketing campaign and social media influencers looking for a new niche. But there's something else going on here as well - a statement about the declining appeal of America and the West.

Chinamaxxing is really about the decline of America

I think Fortune really puts its finger on something here:

And CNN gets it too:

In other words, American youngsters idealizing China - without actually engaging with China or knowing much about it - is really about expressing their dissatisfaction with America.

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