Adam captures a real shift: Western imagination about China is beginning to grow a second branch alongside the “threat narrative”: the rediscovery of Chinese everyday life, urban order, infrastructure, consumer culture, technocratic governance, and daily convenience.
But the analysis in this article still has one limitation. He mainly understands Chinamaxxing within the framework of “soft power” and “cultural influence,” without going one step further to see that, at a deeper level, this phenomenon is really about China becoming visible as a living system, an industrial system, and a governance system.
The core of Chinamaxxing is system visibility. American-style soft power mainly relies on movies, music, universities, consumer brands, financial centers, internet platforms, and global narrative power. What is being rediscovered in China today is often not traditional cultural products, but the living system itself: subway networks, mobile payments, food delivery systems, public safety, the price-performance ratio of manufactured goods, the speed of urban renewal, supply-chain responsiveness, charging stations, express delivery, public infrastructure, engineering construction, and digitalized daily life.
This is not Hollywood, K-pop, or Cool Japan-style soft power. It is something more fundamental: a country’s productive capacity and governance capacity being perceived by ordinary foreigners through lived experience.
Dan Wang’s mistaken framework lies in assuming that China’s most globally penetrating force today should come from “free cultural creation.” In reality, China’s most powerful global force today is not traditional free cultural production, but industrialized modern life itself.
This is precisely what the Western narrative is unwilling to confront: TikTok, Temu, Shein, BYD, DJI, Pop Mart, DeepSeek, Huawei, CATL, Xiaomi Auto, cross-border e-commerce, mobile payments, and the experience of Chinese urban infrastructure do not depend entirely on traditional free cultural creation. They depend on engineering capacity, supply chains, design iteration, price-performance ratio, organizational efficiency, and massive user feedback.
In other words, the foundation of Chinese soft power is not simply cultural freedom, but industrial modernity at scale.
This is exactly where China differs from Japan and South Korea. China is not exporting a single cultural industry sector. It is, almost unintentionally, displaying the operating results of a complete modernizing system.
China maxxing, or just China curious, the benefits of cultural exchange can be enormous. Think how quickly Japan emerged as a peaceful trading partner rather than a deadly enemy in WWII. We in the UK discovered that Japan is even more particular about how to make tea, while the Japanese became fond of western pop music and Beatrix Potter characters…
The more China and Europe interact the better (perhaps give America a couple of years…). The Chinese seem to like watching English premier league football, while they can currently win Snooker championships at the home of Snooker (Sheffield’s Crucible theatre in the North of England, strange but true).
China has been a unified state for 2000 years. The more we understand them, and they understand the West, the better.
This is complex, an analysis of whether it is China unleashed, or the US self-hamstrung. If you read Dan Wang, it is both. Wang gives very cogent analyses on some of the key issues, such as social goals and the balancing of the individual against larger society. What is not addressed in all of these discussions is the degree to which the "policeman for the world" actions of the US have tapped so much of the US resources and wealth in the last 80 years, with the result that our infrastructure and social programs have stagnated. In the minds of Trump and many of his key donors, were the US to be totally isolationist, the restored wealth would be returned to those oligarchs. In the minds of many MAGA, isolationism and a reduction in foreign expenditure would be returned as better personal income and, somehow, a better quality of life. How that would work long-term is a key question.
Part of the explanation here also has to do with the chaos in American/American policy see-saw/ American misadventures contrasted with a superpower who has chosen to 'keep its head down' & push back against the over-reach but in effective & quiet ways. In that frame, this is a relative decline in American soft power rather than an increase in the other.
Perhaps an odd angle to come at this issue of China’s cultural reach into “western” culture but here in Australia our fascination with all things American is quite pervasive whereas despite having over a million people either of Chinese descent or Chinese it gets nothing like the same media attention. The broadly pro American disposition is driven by a combination of fear of Asia both historically and presently , our long standing security dependency on the US and importantly decades and decades of American style consumerism and local US car manufacturing ( now long gone). I suspect that is now changing quite significantly given the chaos unleashed by the US economically and militarily, a growing awareness that Australia’s future prosperity is found within our region and quite importantly more and more people driving high quality Chinese made vehicles. Australia has the largest penetration of rooftop solar and increasingly storage batteries. Over 90% of that is made in China. In a chaotic world the perceived stability offered by China is made more attractive than ever. A freer China would undoubtedly accelerate a broader acceptance of all things Chinese and counter the constant media and political anti Chinese sentiment. Whilst Australia’s political class remains wedded to the US security alliance and investing vast amounts to prop it up with new submarines we will never get or make the Australian population are making up their own minds of what is in their best interests. It’s a lived experience thing.
The transmission of Zen ideas after WW2 had a profound effect on American poetics. Same goes for Tibetan Buddhism on wellness. The false consciousness of American politics could do with a healthy dose of Confucianism. The fundaments of Chinese philosophy are remarkably rich and valuable though the Chinese themselves treat them as old hat and can sound trite when translated into English.
China is presenting an image of a far better future than what’s being offered here in the land of the free. Primarily, it’s heading forward while we are being taken back to the 1890s. Not a joke if one knows their history: Imperialism on the march, pre-vaccines, capitalists fully free from any state restraints, racism, sexism…
Your seven vectors capture the surface current, but the magnetic field driving it is material rather than cultural. When Western visitors are 'shocked by Chinese reality,' what is shocking is not the advertising screens—it is the infrastructure. A city where the subway arrives on time, the EV charger works, the express delivery shows up, and the power does not flicker. That is not soft power. That is the physical yield of a state that has spent two decades pouring reinforced concrete into its territory at a rate no Western democracy can match. I have argued elsewhere that we should stop using 'soft power' as an analytical category and replace it with infrastructure.
The L.A. port queues of 2021, the German gas turbine shutdowns of 2022, the British railway strikes—these are hard power failures dressed as management problems. China's Chinamaxxing moment is, at its gravitational core, an encounter with a physical substrate that still functions: tens of thousands of kilometers of high‑speed rail, millions of public EV chargers, a grid that absorbs hundreds of gigawatts of solar.
When a Berlin twenty‑something watches a TikTok of a Chongqing light rail threading through a residential building, she thinks she is looking at Chinese culture. She is actually looking at a country whose grid can guarantee that light rail's acceleration 24 hours a day. The cuteness, the humor, the retro‑authenticity are epiphytes—they grow on top of that physical layer.
The question you close with—how do we reimagine soft power beyond hegemony?—is to my mind best answered by replacing the premise. The power that matters now is not the power to project a brand. It is the power to keep a city's worth of people fed, cooled, connected, and moving. Chinamaxxing is not China winning a cultural war. It is two physical orders coming into direct sensory contact, and people mistaking the infrastructure for the aesthetic.
I suspect in part the phenomenon is a reaction against the relentless drumbeat of negative propaganda about China that we have been subjected to courtesy of the usual suspects in western corporate media organs over the course of the past decade (“unfree,” “collapsing,” etc), none of which has any basis in reality.
A sort of “‘soft power” rebound as the US itself becomes increasingly an object of global loathing.
“Imagine the possibilities if Kaiser Kuo is right in his exciting prediction that China is on the “cusp of a genuine cultural renaissance”.
That Prof. Tooze takes this seriously suggests how far afield his perspective is.
1) Stalinist regimes are paranoid, by definition. Marketing in the common non narrow Stalinist ideologic sense is beyond them. The current Chinese regime has not shown itself to be otherwise.
2) China had a socialist revolution (generic sense). Were the Stalinist regime overthrown, spreading workers revolution and building and supporting its spread throughout the world would be its primary form of cultural marketing. That the current Stalinist regime makes not even the slightest pretense of this indicates how far away from boosting China-made it is.
Its a lot simpler than what we've so far seen. According to the IMF there are three kinds of economy, low-income, emerging-market and advanced. And China is the only country currently transitioning from a lower level, i.e emerging-market to advanced.
China however is still a poorish country; it will probably achieve advanced economy sometime in the last third of the 21st C.
It will slowly oust the West from the economic advantages it currently has, and become the source of much economic power.
The question will then be if China has found the secret of making this transition, and my answer would be partially.
But China will have to do things of use to all humanity, such as all seriously to life expectancy worldwide, eg develop as many new vaccines as the West, many new discoveries to compare with the circulation of the blood, DNA, viruses, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, etc.
Thats how you really show that your system has value. They're spending on R&D and they may achieve these things.
And most important to improve on the West's record of reducing world poverty, at which we in the West have only a very mixed record so far.
But that also means China becoming a lot more honest about its role in incubating the covid pandemic, and decreasing the chances of new pandemics.
Oh and actually cut its emissions of greenhouse gasses BEFORE more gigatonnes of these end up in the atmosphere, not afterwards.
Here are some good challenges and some good measures. Ian
Adam captures a real shift: Western imagination about China is beginning to grow a second branch alongside the “threat narrative”: the rediscovery of Chinese everyday life, urban order, infrastructure, consumer culture, technocratic governance, and daily convenience.
But the analysis in this article still has one limitation. He mainly understands Chinamaxxing within the framework of “soft power” and “cultural influence,” without going one step further to see that, at a deeper level, this phenomenon is really about China becoming visible as a living system, an industrial system, and a governance system.
The core of Chinamaxxing is system visibility. American-style soft power mainly relies on movies, music, universities, consumer brands, financial centers, internet platforms, and global narrative power. What is being rediscovered in China today is often not traditional cultural products, but the living system itself: subway networks, mobile payments, food delivery systems, public safety, the price-performance ratio of manufactured goods, the speed of urban renewal, supply-chain responsiveness, charging stations, express delivery, public infrastructure, engineering construction, and digitalized daily life.
This is not Hollywood, K-pop, or Cool Japan-style soft power. It is something more fundamental: a country’s productive capacity and governance capacity being perceived by ordinary foreigners through lived experience.
Dan Wang’s mistaken framework lies in assuming that China’s most globally penetrating force today should come from “free cultural creation.” In reality, China’s most powerful global force today is not traditional free cultural production, but industrialized modern life itself.
This is precisely what the Western narrative is unwilling to confront: TikTok, Temu, Shein, BYD, DJI, Pop Mart, DeepSeek, Huawei, CATL, Xiaomi Auto, cross-border e-commerce, mobile payments, and the experience of Chinese urban infrastructure do not depend entirely on traditional free cultural creation. They depend on engineering capacity, supply chains, design iteration, price-performance ratio, organizational efficiency, and massive user feedback.
In other words, the foundation of Chinese soft power is not simply cultural freedom, but industrial modernity at scale.
This is exactly where China differs from Japan and South Korea. China is not exporting a single cultural industry sector. It is, almost unintentionally, displaying the operating results of a complete modernizing system.
Excellent comment, thank you.
China maxxing, or just China curious, the benefits of cultural exchange can be enormous. Think how quickly Japan emerged as a peaceful trading partner rather than a deadly enemy in WWII. We in the UK discovered that Japan is even more particular about how to make tea, while the Japanese became fond of western pop music and Beatrix Potter characters…
The more China and Europe interact the better (perhaps give America a couple of years…). The Chinese seem to like watching English premier league football, while they can currently win Snooker championships at the home of Snooker (Sheffield’s Crucible theatre in the North of England, strange but true).
China has been a unified state for 2000 years. The more we understand them, and they understand the West, the better.
This is complex, an analysis of whether it is China unleashed, or the US self-hamstrung. If you read Dan Wang, it is both. Wang gives very cogent analyses on some of the key issues, such as social goals and the balancing of the individual against larger society. What is not addressed in all of these discussions is the degree to which the "policeman for the world" actions of the US have tapped so much of the US resources and wealth in the last 80 years, with the result that our infrastructure and social programs have stagnated. In the minds of Trump and many of his key donors, were the US to be totally isolationist, the restored wealth would be returned to those oligarchs. In the minds of many MAGA, isolationism and a reduction in foreign expenditure would be returned as better personal income and, somehow, a better quality of life. How that would work long-term is a key question.
Part of the explanation here also has to do with the chaos in American/American policy see-saw/ American misadventures contrasted with a superpower who has chosen to 'keep its head down' & push back against the over-reach but in effective & quiet ways. In that frame, this is a relative decline in American soft power rather than an increase in the other.
Perhaps an odd angle to come at this issue of China’s cultural reach into “western” culture but here in Australia our fascination with all things American is quite pervasive whereas despite having over a million people either of Chinese descent or Chinese it gets nothing like the same media attention. The broadly pro American disposition is driven by a combination of fear of Asia both historically and presently , our long standing security dependency on the US and importantly decades and decades of American style consumerism and local US car manufacturing ( now long gone). I suspect that is now changing quite significantly given the chaos unleashed by the US economically and militarily, a growing awareness that Australia’s future prosperity is found within our region and quite importantly more and more people driving high quality Chinese made vehicles. Australia has the largest penetration of rooftop solar and increasingly storage batteries. Over 90% of that is made in China. In a chaotic world the perceived stability offered by China is made more attractive than ever. A freer China would undoubtedly accelerate a broader acceptance of all things Chinese and counter the constant media and political anti Chinese sentiment. Whilst Australia’s political class remains wedded to the US security alliance and investing vast amounts to prop it up with new submarines we will never get or make the Australian population are making up their own minds of what is in their best interests. It’s a lived experience thing.
The transmission of Zen ideas after WW2 had a profound effect on American poetics. Same goes for Tibetan Buddhism on wellness. The false consciousness of American politics could do with a healthy dose of Confucianism. The fundaments of Chinese philosophy are remarkably rich and valuable though the Chinese themselves treat them as old hat and can sound trite when translated into English.
China is presenting an image of a far better future than what’s being offered here in the land of the free. Primarily, it’s heading forward while we are being taken back to the 1890s. Not a joke if one knows their history: Imperialism on the march, pre-vaccines, capitalists fully free from any state restraints, racism, sexism…
Your seven vectors capture the surface current, but the magnetic field driving it is material rather than cultural. When Western visitors are 'shocked by Chinese reality,' what is shocking is not the advertising screens—it is the infrastructure. A city where the subway arrives on time, the EV charger works, the express delivery shows up, and the power does not flicker. That is not soft power. That is the physical yield of a state that has spent two decades pouring reinforced concrete into its territory at a rate no Western democracy can match. I have argued elsewhere that we should stop using 'soft power' as an analytical category and replace it with infrastructure.
The L.A. port queues of 2021, the German gas turbine shutdowns of 2022, the British railway strikes—these are hard power failures dressed as management problems. China's Chinamaxxing moment is, at its gravitational core, an encounter with a physical substrate that still functions: tens of thousands of kilometers of high‑speed rail, millions of public EV chargers, a grid that absorbs hundreds of gigawatts of solar.
When a Berlin twenty‑something watches a TikTok of a Chongqing light rail threading through a residential building, she thinks she is looking at Chinese culture. She is actually looking at a country whose grid can guarantee that light rail's acceleration 24 hours a day. The cuteness, the humor, the retro‑authenticity are epiphytes—they grow on top of that physical layer.
The question you close with—how do we reimagine soft power beyond hegemony?—is to my mind best answered by replacing the premise. The power that matters now is not the power to project a brand. It is the power to keep a city's worth of people fed, cooled, connected, and moving. Chinamaxxing is not China winning a cultural war. It is two physical orders coming into direct sensory contact, and people mistaking the infrastructure for the aesthetic.
I suspect in part the phenomenon is a reaction against the relentless drumbeat of negative propaganda about China that we have been subjected to courtesy of the usual suspects in western corporate media organs over the course of the past decade (“unfree,” “collapsing,” etc), none of which has any basis in reality.
A sort of “‘soft power” rebound as the US itself becomes increasingly an object of global loathing.
“Imagine the possibilities if Kaiser Kuo is right in his exciting prediction that China is on the “cusp of a genuine cultural renaissance”.
That Prof. Tooze takes this seriously suggests how far afield his perspective is.
1) Stalinist regimes are paranoid, by definition. Marketing in the common non narrow Stalinist ideologic sense is beyond them. The current Chinese regime has not shown itself to be otherwise.
2) China had a socialist revolution (generic sense). Were the Stalinist regime overthrown, spreading workers revolution and building and supporting its spread throughout the world would be its primary form of cultural marketing. That the current Stalinist regime makes not even the slightest pretense of this indicates how far away from boosting China-made it is.
Guess I’m chinamaxxing this morning with some dong ding oolong (Taiwanese, actually) and my new Xteink X3 micro-ereader.
Its a lot simpler than what we've so far seen. According to the IMF there are three kinds of economy, low-income, emerging-market and advanced. And China is the only country currently transitioning from a lower level, i.e emerging-market to advanced.
China however is still a poorish country; it will probably achieve advanced economy sometime in the last third of the 21st C.
It will slowly oust the West from the economic advantages it currently has, and become the source of much economic power.
The question will then be if China has found the secret of making this transition, and my answer would be partially.
But China will have to do things of use to all humanity, such as all seriously to life expectancy worldwide, eg develop as many new vaccines as the West, many new discoveries to compare with the circulation of the blood, DNA, viruses, the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, etc.
Thats how you really show that your system has value. They're spending on R&D and they may achieve these things.
And most important to improve on the West's record of reducing world poverty, at which we in the West have only a very mixed record so far.
But that also means China becoming a lot more honest about its role in incubating the covid pandemic, and decreasing the chances of new pandemics.
Oh and actually cut its emissions of greenhouse gasses BEFORE more gigatonnes of these end up in the atmosphere, not afterwards.
Here are some good challenges and some good measures. Ian