This is why I’m Chinamaxxing

And you probably should be too

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

There's a term that's been floating around Gen Z corners of the internet: "Chinamaxxing." It kind of started as a joke — young Westerners enthusiastically embracing Chinese lifestyle habits, fashion, and culture. But underneath the meme is a serious political signal. A growing cohort of people, mostly young, don't share their parents' reflexive suspicion of China, and are increasingly willing to say so. I find myself broadly sympathetic to the younger generation. This essay is about why I ended up Chinamaxxing and why the case for doing so rests not only on a cultural embrace of China but also its material achievements.

My Chinamaxxing initially had little to do with China

Over the years, my thinking has coalesced around something I’d broadly call cosmopolitanism. From a moral perspective, it starts from a simple premise: every person has equal worth, and that should translate into equal opportunities and prospects for material well-being, for everyone, everywhere. This sounds like an obvious conviction when stated plainly. Yet, for myself, this conviction had consequences for the direction of my career. When I was studying for an economics degree at university, it led me to focus heavily on questions of economic development and global inequality. The idea of eradicating economic inequality between nations, by supporting the development of poorer nations, was morally compelling to me.

This led me down an academic career as a development economist and, eventually, led me to take a greater interest in China. China’s scale and pace of material transformation in the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history. Most people interested in the process of economic development will have been drawn to China’s achievements to some degree. About two years ago, I started sharing data about China’s impressive economic achievements on social media. The comments I received were not always what I expected. Alongside genuine engagement, I started receiving a recurring type of comment, especially from accounts based in North America and Europe: “yeah, that’s super impressive — and we have to stop them.”

I noticed that China’s rise was, by some, treated as inherently threatening. The implicit logic was that China’s development, precisely because it was succeeding on China’s own terms, represented a problem to be managed rather than a fact to be celebrated. I call this “Western hegemonic anxiety.” This idea, rarely stated openly but pervasive in Western media and policy discourse, is that development is only legitimate when it happens in ways that don’t disturb the existing hierarchy — with wealthy Western nations at the top, everyone else ascending only insofar as the climb is permitted and supervised by those already up there. China’s rise has exposed just how deeply this assumption runs. Challenging this discourse is, in my view, one of the more important intellectual tasks of this moment.

The case for economic and political Chinamaxxing: what China has actually achieved

The scale of what China has accomplished in the past half-century demands to be stated plainly. Here are the facts.

Poverty reduction. Since 1990, China lifted more than 900 million people out of extreme poverty within its own borders. This constitutes somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of all global poverty reduction during that period. The story of declining global poverty over the past half-century is, in the most literal sense, a story about China. If you believe human wellbeing matters regardless of nationality, this is one of the greatest achievements in the history of civilisation.

Material development under constrained resources. China’s GDP per capita remains around one-sixth that of the United States (one-third if you adjust for purchasing power). In other words, China is still, by some measures, a developing country. And yet, compared to the United States, China has higher life expectancy, broader basic healthcare coverage, a superior public transport system, more sophisticated urban infrastructure, and fewer people living in extreme poverty in absolute terms. Delivering that standard of living for 1.4 billion people, with those resource constraints, is an extremely impressive feat of governance and state capacity.

Clean energy. China now accounts for at least two-thirds of global production across the cluster of every major clean energy category — solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles. Its share of new global wind and solar capacity installation grew from under 1 percent in 2001 to over 63 percent in 2024. And yes, although China burns a lot of coal and emits a lot of greenhouse gases, since early 2024, China’s CO₂ emissions have been flat or falling, even as energy demand continues to grow. This is thanks to China’s massive clean energy boom.

A counterweight to US hegemony. The past three decades of US unipolarity have delivered an almost unbroken string of military interventions, regime changes, and coercive sanctions across the Global South. While China is a superpower that acts according to its own interests, it does not do any of these things. The emergence of China as a genuine geopolitical counterweight to the US is the beginning of something we should welcome — a world in which the rules are not written exclusively by Washington.

A different, yet popular, political model. China does not hold competitive national elections and practises considerable censorship. China’s authoritarianism deserves real scrutiny. But the reflexive Western verdict — that China is “just another authoritarian regime” — obscures more than it reveals. A recent survey by the Alliance of Democracies, a Danish-based NGO with no sympathy for authoritarianism, found that perceptions of democracy are stronger in China than in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. China’s system is also considerably more meritocratic than many Western democracies. You cannot buy your way to national office in China. Politicians typically spend years demonstrating competence at the provincial level before being considered for senior roles. Whether you’re a fan of China’s governance model or not, it’s undeniably a model characterised by high levels of legitimacy and commitment to delivering economic development for its people.

Did my travels in China change my mind?

In April, I spent three weeks travelling across China. I had been before, but not with this kind of time or freedom to move around. I wanted to see, in person, how the country matched the data that illustrated a staggering pace of economic development.

Some things actually exceeded expectations. The high-speed rail network, now over 50,000 kilometres — more than the rest of the world combined — left an impression of technological sophistication, comfort, and scale I haven’t experienced anywhere else. In 2^nd class (the lowest out of four tiers), the seats recline to nearly 45 degrees and there’s ample leg space. I’m 195cm tall and had zero complaints. There’s a well-known story about placing a coin upright on these trains without it falling over, because the ride is so smooth. I didn’t try, but I’m not surprised people have managed it. The stations themselves were another revelation: enormous, modern, efficiently designed, and easy to navigate even without being familiar with Chinese.

More broadly, the quality and scale of infrastructure is astonishing for a country at China’s relatively low income level. Near-universal electricity, mobile data coverage, housing, and transport options — for a country with a population of 1.4 billion people. The population of China’s megacities dwarf those of any major European city, yet they felt less congested than London. Everywhere I went carried evidence of a society that knows how to build and make things: high-tech and low-tech, across the full spectrum of the value chain. Almost all of it made in China.

But the deeper point is not just that China is good at building things. It’s that China is good at building things that deliver tangible material outcomes for a lot of people. The infrastructure is not a vanity project. It is the physical expression of a developmental state that takes seriously its obligation to improve people’s lives.

Of course, China isn’t paradise. And I say this not as a ritual disclaimer but because it’s genuinely true. The air in most cities is still heavily polluted. Labour conditions can be brutal: precarity and intense competition in the labour market are visible realities. The welfare state remains thin. These are real structural problems, and the enthusiasm you see from some Chinamaxxers can slide into a kind of mirror-image of the Western hawkishness it is reacting against — swapping one set of clichés for another.

However, there is genuine progress on some of these fronts. Particulate pollution (PM2.5) fell by roughly 40 percent between 2013 and 2022, the result of a clean-air campaign that has been described as the fastest large-scale air quality improvement ever recorded. Between 1978 and 2022, the average real wage in China’s urban areas increased a staggering 25-fold, one of the largest real wage increases recorded in a 45-year period.

“Chinamaxxing,” as a cultural phenomenon, is mostly playful. But I think the instinct behind it points to something worth examining more seriously. The n+1 magazine recently ran a piece on what they called “Sinophobic Sinophilia” — the contradictory condition of a Western world that simultaneously fears and envies China. The hostility is familiar. Less examined is the enthusiasm, which can carry its own distortions: the breathless travelogue full of bullet trains and gleaming cities that flattens a country of 1.4 billion people into an aesthetic.

My own position admittedly leans very close to the Chinamaxxing meme. If you ask me if I’m Chinamaxxing, I’d easily answer: “yes, and you should be too!” But I’d argue that my position is even simpler, and I think it follows from my values rather than from any particular affection for the Chinese state or Chinese culture. When a poor country becomes less poor, when hundreds of millions of people escape material deprivation and are able to lead longer, healthier, more dignified lives — this is worth celebrating. Not conditionally. Not selectively. Not only when it happens in ways convenient for those already wealthy and powerful.