By Aurora Sung
The name of the author has been changed to protect their identity.
Drinking hot water with lemon, putting on Douyin makeup, cooking with soy sauce, wearing slippers indoors, trying acupuncture and cupping. Chinese people’s normal everyday life is now trending on social media.
For the past couple of months, phrases like ‘becoming Chinese’, ‘in my Chinese era’, and ‘in a very Chinese time of my life’ have been spreading like wildfire on social media. While some see it as just another harmless fad, others are pointing out how disrespectful this mode really is as the people participating in this craze only seem to be fetishizing Chinese culture without actually understanding it.
However popular this movement is on social media, it is fascinating that most of the practises that are popularised have to do with traditionally more feminine roles. The “becoming Chinese” trend leans heavily toward wellness, domesticity, and aesthetics, domains that are historically coded as feminine and often trivialized. But by reducing an entire lifestyle to highly marketable, gentle routines, this trend actively sanitizes and ignores the severe problems of gender inequality and social pressure in modern China.
Behind the curated, slow-living videos pushed by foreign creators lies a society built on immense domestic and professional pressure, particularly for women.
Toxicity of Chinese gender inequality
In a Chinese household, filial piety is the law. The duties women are expected to fulfill includes but is not limited to domestic responsibilities at home, like cleaning, cooking, and taking care of all the elderly in the household.
Women also face a looming social expiration date. Those who remain unmarried after the age of twenty-seven are explicitly branded as Sheng Nu (剩女), or “leftover women”, a weaponized stigma popularized by state-run media in 2007. According to Census figures, the proportion of unmarried men aged 25–29 is actually over a third higher than that of women due to the long-term gender imbalances of the historical one-child policy. Yet, single men never face this harsh social branding; even in their forties, they are celebrated as “golden bachelors,” entirely free from stigma.
These constant judgement and inequality on every aspect of a woman’s life makes being a woman a much more intense and pressurised experience than being a man in China.
While this double standard has remained intensely relevant for two decades, it rarely goes viral. Online trends prioritize what is marketable; a woman being shamed for remaining unmarried does not fit the aesthetic. Instead, what becomes visible on the global stage are curated videos of women putting on Douyin makeup and wearing cozy slippers at home, masking a much harsher social reality.
Cultural Appreciation vs. Shallow “Cosplay”
This phenomenon started with a social media video by Sherry Zhu Xirui (Chinese born and raised in New Jersey) that went viral displaying Chinese cultural practices (with over 20 million views on TikTok), accidentally starting what is now a global trend, focused on adopting Chinese lifestyle habits. Since then, many expressions have been used to refer to it, including ‘you met me at a very Chinese time in my life’, a phrase facetiously drawn from the final scene of Fight Club. But this viral adoption begs an important question: what is the actual line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation?
True appreciation requires effort; it demands that an individual spends time learning about a tradition’s history and significance rather than blindly adapting practices based on a 30-second clip.
When fast-fashion giants commercialize Chinese heritage, they teeter dangerously on the edge of “cultural cosplay.” Most of these pieces focus more on female fashion because Chinese women are the ones that are fetishised, rarely the men. Many non-Chinese women have worn dresses with Qipao-like designs on Halloween, feeding into the idea that these pieces are costumes amplifying the fetishisation of Chinese women.
Controversy of the Adidas “Tang Jacket”
Recently, however, a more nuanced phenomenon has emerged: the aesthetic has transcended gendered marketing to become a complex vehicle for diaspora identity. Take the Adidas “Tang Jacket.
While popular across genders, its rise highlights a bittersweet paradox. For creators like Chris Zou, the jacket represents a bridge to a heritage left behind. Yet, this attempt at reconnection is a double-edged sword; for some, the look is dismissed as performative, the “uniform” of the overseas Chinese person desperately grasping for a culture they no longer fully inhabit.
Most garments marketed today as “Tang jackets” are actually heavily inspired by the Magua, an item originating from the Manchu people who established the Qing dynasty. For the Han origin population — who make up more than 91% of China — the Qing dynasty was a terrifying historical period marked by immense state atrocities.
Under Manchu rule, strict laws were implemented to force the population to adopt the Magua instead of the traditional Han clothing that had been worn for a thousand years. For men, it meant forcing the adoption of the Manchu queue — where the front of the head was shaved and the rest was bound in a long braid. Anyone who refused to comply was executed for treason.
Since fast fashion brands do not take the time to understand Chinese history and the significance of certain clothing styles, their designs easily feel like cosplays that make Chinese people feel disrespected and outraged.
The Geopolitics of Soft Power
The intersection of fashion and politics is rarely straightforward. However, looking closely at today’s digital landscape reveals a striking correlation: fashion has become a quiet vehicle for state-level soft power. Recent data from the Pew Research Center reveals that China’s global reputation is undergoing a gradual recovery, especially after the 2020 pandemic sent opinions to historic lows. This shift suggests that Beijing is successfully recalibrating its influence on the world stage, leaning into the strategic importance of soft power to mend its international standing.
Heavy investments in technology, infrastructure, and exports are now paying off. China “became more visible as it reopened post pandemic, relaxing visa rules to bring back tourists”. Combining this with the viral ‘becoming Chinese trend’, we can clearly see how a decade-long make-over has transformed the country’s image from a tough communist threat to a friendly and welcoming neighbour.
Could there be a connection between this transformation and the feminine aspects of this trend? By leaning heavily into the gentle, nurturing, and traditionally feminine elements brought to light by social media influencers, the trend taps into a global gender bias, one that frames femininity as innocuous and safe. This approach not only showcases the gender inequality that still exists in the country, but it also successfully masks the problem on the global stage by glorifying feminine practices that were once trivialised.
This phenomenon also has a direct impact on how Chinese people view their country. There was a time when some Chinese people yearn for the Western life, believing that things in the West were much better, but now “the tables have turned, and it is foreigners who envy the leisurely comfort and the profound sense of security in China”, leaving some Chinese people confused as they are not used to being the point of envy.
As Sun Fei, a social work professor at Michigan State University, observed in an interview with the South China Morning Post, the phenomenon underscores a growing disillusionment among Western individuals with their own societal norms, using Chinese wellness practices to redefine their perceptions of comfort and justice.
The ‘becoming Chinese’ craze is fundamentally disrespectful when it treats a thousands-of-years-old heritage as a disposable internet commodity.
This trend only allows people to become a superficial version of Chineseness as it just sells a curated, feminized, apolitical China with a cozy and wellness-focused aesthetic. It overlooks both the gendered labour that sustains those practices and the Chinese women who have been mocked, fetishized, or excluded for the same behaviours that are now deemed aspirational.
When a culture is celebrated, we must take a closer look and ask ourselves what is being recognised, and what is being erased?
