Why read this: This feature inverts a debate students already know — cultural appropriation — and asks them to watch what happens when the usual script fails. For Chinese-L1 readers in EMI classrooms, the piece is doubly useful. It uses practices the readers grew up with (hot water, congee, slippers) as the concrete surface of the article, but the real subject is the Western reception: who welcomes it, who is cautious, and what kind of national mood makes borrowing from a rival country feel attractive rather than threatening. Students should finish it noticing how a trend piece does argumentative work without ever looking like argumentative writing.
What to notice: Three things reward close reading. First, the placement of the thesis — this is a 'delayed-thesis' feature: the author's strongest claim (that the trend reflects a geopolitical mood) arrives in the closing paragraph, not the opening. Students trained on topic-sentence paragraphs will miss it if they stop skim-reading three paragraphs in. Second, the density of hedging around that claim — 'perhaps reasonable to suspect,' 'for a season,' 'begin to read less like' — each hedge does real work, protecting an interpretive rather than declarative move. Third, the article's treatment of the cultural-appropriation debate: the author does not argue for or against appropriation framing; they report that Chinese creators themselves have collapsed the usual script, and let that fact reframe the debate for the reader.
Skills practised: Reading: tracking a delayed thesis across an anecdote lede; identifying hedging words as argument-bearing rather than decorative; following cross-paragraph reference chains (the trend / this case / the appetite / the algorithm); recognising literary and subcultural allusion (Fight Club, the '-maxxing' internet suffix, the Moshfegh book title) as cohesive devices. Writing: modelling calibrated modality — 'perhaps,' 'might,' 'for a season' — deliberately rather than as filler; pivoting between register blocks (formal analysis adjacent to direct TikTok-register quotation). Analysis: weighing an interpretive claim ('about more than hot tea') against its evidence base; distinguishing what the Chinese creators do from what the author reads them as signalling.
Why ‘becoming Chinese’ is taking over social media
A TikTok wellness trend inverts the usual appropriation script — and arguably reveals a geopolitical mood.
Tap any green word in the article to see its meaning.
A Chinese creator on TikTok, Emma Peng, opened one of the app's more unexpectedly popular clips of the year with a compliment many viewers did not expect: “You're doing really well at hydrating yourself. I'm proud of you.” The clip — three million views and counting — names, and gently praises, the growing roster of Americans who have begun drinking hot water with lemon, eating congee, and trading cold salads for boiled apples. Peng is one of dozens of Chinese and Chinese-American creators whose videos have this winter for doing something a previous internet cycle would have scolded: inviting outsiders in. Another creator the movement, TikToker Sherry Xiiruii, issues a warmer directive to her 1.4 million viewers: “Tomorrow, you're turning Chinese.”
The catch-all name for the movement is “becoming Chinese,” and while the phrasing might , the substance is cheerfully specific. Habits traditional Chinese medicine — warm drinks in winter, house slippers indoors, congee over yogurt — are being repackaged as wellness guidance for Western audiences who, by the creators' own framing, have been under-hydrating, under-slippered, and under-comforted for years. The comment sections play along. Americans report back on what they have tried; Chinese commenters, meanwhile, ask what took them so long.
Usually, a trend that involves adopting, or “becoming,” someone else's culture draws cries of . Here, the usual script has collapsed. A few users have been cautious — practices they were once are, overnight, being sold back to them as lifestyle content — but the response from Chinese creators has been overwhelmingly warm. One joke going around is that it is about time the rest of the world . Framed this way, millennia-old wellness reasoning is not being stolen; it is finally being heard.
The Chinese culture is not confined to TikTok's wellness algorithm. A viral post on X, Fight Club's , reads: “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” In a register closer to internet parody, posts about — which mostly amounts to smoking a cigarette , wearing , and adopting other image-marked mannerisms — have been since early 2025. The videos do not read as , because there is a and genuine admiration beneath the costume. As the Substack writer Minh Tran put it, things may have always been made in China, but Westerners are increasingly making themselves the Chinese.
Commerce has followed. The of 2025 — a year when Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the collectible, tripled its profits and set off a that — was the single most visible object of that admiration. And for a brief moment earlier in the year, as a potential US ban on TikTok loomed, Western users began migrating to Rednote, a Chinese-owned feed, bidding farewell to what many of them had taken to calling, half-jokingly, their “personal spy.” The ban did not come. Most of them stayed logged in anyway.
Given the current — a US politics many at home describe as a source of national embarrassment, a cross-Pacific rivalry that now touches everything from chip exports to short-form video — it is perhaps reasonable to suspect that the becoming-Chinese trend is about more than hot tea and slippers. When one country looks, for a season, as divided and tired as the United States looks now, the cultural scripts of a competitor can begin to read less like a provocation and more like an option. People are looking beyond their borders for alternative ways of living, and the algorithm is, as ever, ready to help them shop.
A Chinese creator on TikTok, Emma Peng, opened one of the app's more unexpectedly popular clips of the year with a compliment many viewers did not expect: “You're doing really well at hydrating yourself. I'm proud of you.” The clip — three million views and counting — names, and gently praises, the growing roster of Americans who have begun drinking hot water with lemon, eating congee, and trading cold salads for boiled apples. Peng is one of dozens of Chinese and Chinese-American creators whose videos have this winter for doing something a previous internet cycle would have scolded: inviting outsiders in. Another creator the movement, TikToker Sherry Xiiruii, issues a warmer directive to her 1.4 million viewers: “Tomorrow, you're turning Chinese.”
The catch-all name for the movement is “becoming Chinese,” and while the phrasing might , the substance is cheerfully specific. Habits traditional Chinese medicine — warm drinks in winter, house slippers indoors, congee over yogurt — are being repackaged as wellness guidance for Western audiences who, by the creators' own framing, have been under-hydrating, under-slippered, and under-comforted for years. The comment sections play along. Americans report back on what they have tried; Chinese commenters, meanwhile, ask what took them so long.
Usually, a trend that involves adopting, or “becoming,” someone else's culture draws cries of . Here, the usual script has collapsed. A few users have been cautious — practices they were once are, overnight, being sold back to them as lifestyle content — but the response from Chinese creators has been overwhelmingly warm. One joke going around is that it is about time the rest of the world . Framed this way, millennia-old wellness reasoning is not being stolen; it is finally being heard.
The Chinese culture is not confined to TikTok's wellness algorithm. A viral post on X, Fight Club's , reads: “You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.” In a register closer to internet parody, posts about — which mostly amounts to smoking a cigarette , wearing , and adopting other image-marked mannerisms — have been since early 2025. The videos do not read as , because there is a and genuine admiration beneath the costume. As the Substack writer Minh Tran put it, things may have always been made in China, but Westerners are increasingly making themselves the Chinese.
Commerce has followed. The of 2025 — a year when Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the collectible, tripled its profits and set off a that — was the single most visible object of that admiration. And for a brief moment earlier in the year, as a potential US ban on TikTok loomed, Western users began migrating to Rednote, a Chinese-owned feed, bidding farewell to what many of them had taken to calling, half-jokingly, their “personal spy.” The ban did not come. Most of them stayed logged in anyway.
Given the current — a US politics many at home describe as a source of national embarrassment, a cross-Pacific rivalry that now touches everything from chip exports to short-form video — it is perhaps reasonable to suspect that the becoming-Chinese trend is about more than hot tea and slippers. When one country looks, for a season, as divided and tired as the United States looks now, the cultural scripts of a competitor can begin to read less like a provocation and more like an option. People are looking beyond their borders for alternative ways of living, and the algorithm is, as ever, ready to help them shop.
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
Which best explains why the 'becoming Chinese' trend has not been met with the usual accusation of cultural appropriation?
- 02
The author uses the Labubu mania and the brief Rednote migration to support which broader claim?
- 03
The closing paragraph is heavily hedged — 'perhaps reasonable to suspect,' 'for a season,' 'begin to read less like.' What does this hedging achieve?
- 04
Argue whether the 'becoming Chinese' trend is best understood as a wellness movement, a cultural exchange, or a reflection of American political fatigue. Use evidence from at least two different sections of the article.
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
The author hedges the thesis that the trend reflects a geopolitical moment rather than asserting it directly. Assess the decision to hedge: does it strengthen or weaken the argument, and what effect does the hedged framing have on the reader's response?
Suggested length: ~100 words
Questions
Check your understanding
- 01
Which best explains why the 'becoming Chinese' trend has not been met with the usual accusation of cultural appropriation?
- 02
The author uses the Labubu mania and the brief Rednote migration to support which broader claim?
- 03
The closing paragraph is heavily hedged — 'perhaps reasonable to suspect,' 'for a season,' 'begin to read less like.' What does this hedging achieve?
- 04
Argue whether the 'becoming Chinese' trend is best understood as a wellness movement, a cultural exchange, or a reflection of American political fatigue. Use evidence from at least two different sections of the article.
Suggested length: ~100 words
- 05
The author hedges the thesis that the trend reflects a geopolitical moment rather than asserting it directly. Assess the decision to hedge: does it strengthen or weaken the argument, and what effect does the hedged framing have on the reader's response?
Suggested length: ~100 words