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In case you<\/span> didn\u2019t get the memo, everyone is feeling very Chinese these days. Across social media, people are proclaiming that \u201cYou met me at a very Chinese time of my life,\u201d while performing stereotypically Chinese-coded activities like eating dim sum or wearing the viral Adidas Chinese jacket. The trend blew up so much in recent weeks that celebrities like comedian Jimmy O Yang and influencer Hasan Piker even got in on it. It has now evolved into variations like \u201cChinamaxxing\u201d (acting increasingly more Chinese) and \u201cu will turn Chinese tomorrow\u201d (a kind of affirmation or blessing).<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to quantify a zeitgeist, but here at WIRED, chronically online people like us have been noticing a distinct vibe shift when it comes to China over the past year. Despite all of the tariffs, export controls, and anti-China rhetoric, many people in the United States, especially younger generations, have fallen in love with Chinese technology, Chinese brands, Chinese cities, and are overall consuming more Chinese-made products than ever before. In a sense the only logical thing left to do was to literally become Chinese.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has occurred to me that a lot of you guys have not come to terms with your newfound Chinese identity,\u201d the influencer Chao Ban joked in a TikTok video that has racked up over 340,000 likes. \u201cLet me just ask you this: Aren’t you scrolling on this Chinese app, probably on a Chinese made phone, wearing clothes that are made in China, collecting dolls that are from China?\u201d<\/p>\n As is often the case with Western narratives about China, these memes are not really meant to paint an accurate picture of life in the country. Instead, they function as a projection of \u201call of the undesirable aspects of American life\u2014or the decay of the American dream,\u201d says Tianyu Fang, a PhD researcher at Harvard who studies science and technology in China.<\/p>\n At a moment when America\u2019s infrastructure is crumbling and once-unthinkable forms of state violence are being normalized, China is starting to look pretty good in contrast. \u201cWhen people say it\u2019s the Chinese century, part of that is this ironic defeat,\u201d says Fang.<\/p>\n As the Trump administration remade the US government in its own image and smashed long-standing democratic norms, people started yearning for an alternative role model, and they found a pretty good one in China. With its awe-inspiring skylines and abundant high-speed trains, the country serves as a symbol of the earnest and urgent desire among many Americans for something completely different from their own realities.<\/p>\n Critics frequently point to China\u2019s massive clean energy investments to highlight America\u2019s climate policy failures, or they point to its urban infrastructure development to shame the US housing shortage. These narratives tend to emphasize China\u2019s strengths while sidelining the uglier facets of its development\u2014but that selectivity is the point. China is being used less as a real place than as an abstraction, a way of exposing America\u2019s own shortcomings. As writer Minh Tran observed in a recent Substack post, \u201cIn the twilight of the American empire, our Orientalism is not a patronizing one, but an aspirational one.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of why China is on everyone\u2019s mind is that it\u2019s become totally unavoidable. No matter where you live in the world, you are likely going to be surrounded by things made in China. Here at WIRED, we\u2019ve been documenting that exhaustively: Your phone or laptop or robot vacuum is made in China; your favorite AI slop joke is made in China; Labubu, the world\u2019s most coveted toy, is made in China; the solar panels powering the Global South are made in China; the world\u2019s best-selling EV brand, which officially overtook Tesla last year, is made in China. Even the most-talked about open-source AI model is from China. All of these examples are why this newsletter is called Made in China<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nEverything Is China<\/h2>\n