{"id":1409515,"date":"2026-01-19T12:29:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T09:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1409515"},"modified":"2026-01-19T12:29:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T09:29:00","slug":"everyone-wants-to-be-chinese-now-in-a-respectful-non-colonising-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1409515","title":{"rendered":"Everyone wants to be Chinese now (in a respectful, non-colonising way)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After a strong season of Yoghurt Bowl Summer, I wanted warm breakfast ideas for winter. Something that would help me reach the same euphoric flow state as when I dust ground flaxseeds on some raspberries and think I\u2019ve created art. I came across <\/span>a video of an earthy concoction<\/span><\/a> using Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ingredients \u2013 the creator of the video was a white American girl living in Paris. While I listened carefully to how she soaked the snow fungus for 20 minutes before adding it to her bubbling soup of black sesame, jujube and lotus seeds, I looked down at my peanut butter oatmeal, beige and unworldly by comparison, and thought: damn, this white girl is more Chinese than me.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a big absurdist joke online right now that everyone is Chinese. It all began when Sherry Zhu<\/a>, a 22-year-old in New Jersey with family roots in Shandong and Zhejiang, China, decided to assertively tell everyone on the internet, regardless of their race or ethnicity, that <\/span>they are Chinese<\/span><\/a>. People gleefully ran with it. The joke has continued to evolve to the point where ostensibly non-Chinese people are showing off habits that would make my grandma\u2019s eyes water with pride: <\/span>drinking hot water<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>teas with TCM ingredients<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>eating congee<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>wearing house slippers<\/span><\/a> and starting their mornings by whacking their armpits and <\/span>doing fifty jumps<\/span><\/a> to get those lymph nodes moving. This cohort of newly inducted Chinese people are taking their cultural identity seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

This \u2018everyone is Chinese now\u2019 trend reflects a general growing interest in wellness practices rooted in Chinese culture and TCM \u2013 a health system stemming from thousands of years of East Asian medicine that encompasses food therapy, herbal medicine, acupuncture, cupping, movement (qigong) and massage. Zoey Xinyi Gong, a TCM food therapist and registered dietitian whose work focuses on bridging Eastern and Western medicine, and Dr Felice Chan, a Chinese medicine doctor and educator in Los Angeles, have both seen a recent uptick in interest for TCM, which Chan says is \u201cboth online and in clinic\u201d. While Google searches for TCM in the UK and US have been steady for the past five years, this shot up and doubled in December 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why have people been so enthusiastic to start eating and moving like a Chinese grandma? This new interest in TCM may be an inevitable progression of existing beauty and wellness trends that already stem from TCM, like gua sha, <\/span>acupuncture<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>eating your skincare<\/span><\/a>. However, while those trends have health benefits, they ultimately have aesthetic goals in mind, feeding into an always-growing and increasingly-complicated list of things we can do <\/span>to optimise our appearances<\/span><\/a>. The new interest in TCM feels like a welcome, and accessible, deviation from this. The barriers to entry are low \u2013 everyone has apples and water at home, slippers are easy to buy and no equipment is needed for qigong, just your own body.<\/span><\/p>\n

Crissa Jewel, a 30-year-old therapist based in North Carolina who hopped on the \u2018becoming Chinese\u2019 trend, says TCM-inspired practices feel like an antidote to our current demanding beauty and wellness culture. \u201cTraditional Chinese practices are a lot more accessible than what our ways of getting healthy tend to be in our culture,\u201d Jewel says. In Western wellness culture, fitting in regular gym sessions while being a full-time worker is the mere baseline, a standard that Jewel says feels strict to the point of being a \u201cmoral measure\u201d. TCM has shown her ways to look after herself that are simpler to achieve: drink hot water, slap on some house slippers so your feet don\u2019t touch the floor, add jujube to your oatmeal. \u201cI\u2019m like, OK, not a huge adjustment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While this movement might make it seem like every Chinese person is deeply in tune with ancient healing methods and begins their day with a longan and goji tea, Chinese people are also learning something new here. Emma Peng, a 27-year-old \u201cwitch\u2019\u201d and creator of spiritualist content, responded to the \u2018everyone is Chinese\u2019 trend by <\/span>welcoming non-Chinese people<\/span><\/a> to her culture and sharing her everyday practices that stem from her upbringing in Henan, China, like eating sweet potato congee and doing lymphatic jumps. However, she admits to prefer drinking room temperature water rather than hot water and for a long time associated TCM with the bitter herbal stews her mum made her eat when she was a kid.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u200b\u200bI\u2019m Chinese, but I don\u2019t cook those meals,\u201d she says of the TCM-inspired food she\u2019s seen making the rounds online. \u201cBut I see these Americans that are obviously not Chinese taking it so seriously and getting their snow fungus, their goji berries, their dates. They know what jujube is now.\u201d Through this trend, Peng has felt motivated to learn more about TCM. \u201cIt\u2019s reminding me, dang, I need to go back to my roots. I need to really lock in and learn how to make snow fungus and pear stew. When people were saying they were making that, I was like, what? I’ve not had that for ten to 15 years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gong says a big portion of the new interest she\u2019s seen in TCM through her work comes from Chinese people. She hears from people like Peng who grew up with vague notions of what TCM is through their parents and grandparents. \u201cProbably grandma would be like, OK, drink this, good for you \u2013 but no explanation.\u201d Gong says in the last few years, however, TCM has become \u201ctrendier\u201d. In Shanghai, you can now find a <\/span>gelato shop serving TCM-inspired flavours<\/span><\/a> like mung bean lily bulb and sweet porridge coix seed. <\/span>TCM night markets<\/span><\/a> popped off across China this past summer, with crowds of young people lining up for moxibustion therapy, pulse readings and herbal teas. \u201cI think there is this new pride around having Chinese heritage,\u201d Gong says. \u201cThey become very interested in regaining the knowledge that they were exposed to from their family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Whoever first said they were <\/span>in a very Chinese time in their life<\/span><\/a> right now maybe wasn\u2019t making an absurdist joke but commenting on the current culture. China was ranked second in the <\/span>2025 Global Soft Power Index<\/span><\/a>, placing it ahead of the UK for the first time. Gong, who has consistently dealt with hate comments about China on social media since she started posting TCM content in 2024, says those comments have gone down by about 90 per cent in just the last few months. The mass migration to RedNote or Xiaohongshu during the \u2018TikTok is banned\u2019 panic and the expansion of visa-free entry to China, both occurring last year, has meant people in the West have had more direct contact with Chinese culture than ever before in recent history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alongside the interest in TCM, there\u2019s also been an increase in interest around the Chinese New Year, and what the year of the horse will bring. Jewel, who\u2019s been inspired recently to pick up some goji berries and jujubes, says \u201cwe all really just enjoy connection\u201d. If someone is sharing their culture and enthusiastically including you, as Zhu did when she told everyone on the internet that they\u2019re Chinese now, then Jewel says, \u201cabsolutely, we\u2019re going to jump on board\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source URL: https:\/\/www.dazeddigital.com\/beauty\/article\/69431\/1\/everyone-is-chinese-now-in-a-respectful-non-colonising-way-tiktok-trend-2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a strong season of Yoghurt Bowl Summer, I wanted warm breakfast ideas for winter. Something that would help me reach the same euphoric flow state as when I dust ground flaxseeds on some raspberries and think I\u2019ve created art. I came across a video of an earthy concoction using Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ingredients […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-1409515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-dazeddigital-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1409515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1409515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1409515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1409515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}