“You met me at a very chinese time in my life”: “China-maxxing” and the rise of intimate mediascapes

Abstract

“Chinamaxxing” is an Internet trend emerging in late 2025–early 2026, spanning ironic memes, conspiritual content, and aspirational lifestyle vlogs. Across these practices, global users construct an ambiguous project of “becoming Chinese.” We introduce the concept of “intimate mediascapes” to theorize how contemporary platform environments intensify affective engagement with images. Extending Appadurai’s notion of mediascapes, we argue that mediated images are no longer primarily encountered as representations of distant worlds, but as habitual, immersive resources that organize everyday life. In Chinamaxxing, what circulates is not an alternative “truth” about China, but a different mode of imagining through images. Drawing on dialogic auto-ethnography, we mobilize our divergent media habitus across distinct ecosystems. We show how algorithmic attention economies and multimodal user practices generate fleeting yet powerful forms of cultural intimacy, enabling a diffuse, vernacular form of soft power grounded in affect, routine, and everyday image-making rather than state-led cultural diplomacy.