By Yan Zhuang

If you drink hot water, wear slippers indoors or shop at Asian supermarkets, you may be Chinese, according to the internet.

You might be thinking, “I’m not Chinese,” but your race is beside the point. Think of “being Chinese” as more of an absurdist joke, a wellness goal or a subtle, ironic expression of protest. Or all of the above.

On TikTok and Instagram, some users boast that their minds are so Chinese that they see Chinatowns as just “towns” and Chinese food as just “food.” Others say, “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life,” a parody of the line “You met me at a very strange time in my life” from the 1999 movie “Fight Club.”

Some have declared themselves Chinese “baddies” — confident, attractive women — while adopting mundane East Asian lifestyle habits, having been invited into the trend by Chinese American influencers.

The meme is not bound by nationality or ethnicity; anyone can be Chinese if they wish. And right now, many do.

As Labubus and other Chinese cultural exports win over global audiences, experts say that “being Chinese” memes may signal China’s growing soft power abroad. For some American creators, they are also a wry expression of disillusionment with politics at home.

“It’s partly meme logic, but it’s also a sign of growing cultural cachet,” said Shaoyu Yuan, a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs who studies China’s soft power.

The memes, he said, reflect a broader shift in which online audiences are developing a new level of familiarity with China as they engage with it through lifestyle trends and aesthetics — not as the geopolitical rival and security threat it is often portrayed as in the United States.

To read the entire article and to watch the video: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/style/chinese-meme-social-media.html

Photo credit: koldo_studio/Shutterstock