- "Chinamaxxing" trend sees U.S. Gen Z adopting Chinese wellness practices.
- Trend began online during 2025 U.S. China trade tensions.
- Wellness company Elix reported surge in traffic and social media engagement.
- Global traditional Chinese medicine market estimated at $282 billion in 2026.
Created out of irony and a trade battle, a viral meme turned into a $282 billion cultural one - and a very astute inquiry, who has the privilege of their traditions being so wellness.
One such social media phenomenon is the so-called Chinamaxxing, in which Gen Z Americans are turning to goji berry tea, hot water and gua sha stones, or wholesale adoption of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its redefinition of the US wellness industry, becoming objects of criticism by Chinese American communities.
The trend itself was ironically created in response to the trade war with China in 2025 that pitched Donald Trump against strategic weakness compared to US. With the technical restrictions going both ways and the Tik Tok ban blowing up, young Americans started recording videos in which they said they were in the very Chinese time of their lives.
At the beginning of 2026, fuelled by Lunar New Year posts and cold season health advice, the absurdist meme had become a quantifiable consumer behavior. Elix, a wellness company that offered herbals, revealed the 250 percent growth in the organic social media impressions and a growth of 40 percent the week-over-week growth in web traffic when the trend reached the peak in January.
RFK Jr, Long Covid and the Gaps Among Experts
The most glaring scepticism of the American healthcare system is the foundation of the TCM fervour. The founder of the Elix, Lulu Ge maintains that the specialisation of the US medical system makes patients with many symptoms like long Covid or autoimmune disorders, which are not in the purview of either specialist, frustrated. She said that Chinese medicine would work best on chronic illnesses, when it overlaps on several different systems of the body.
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The political culture that RFK Jr has produced, where he has publicly expressed skepticism toward vaccines and has been actively recommending the use of other culturally backstopped remedies in the position of health secretary, has rendered a holistic system, no longer quite so woo-woo as it was before.
Congee Videos and Cultural Costumes: The Unattractive Side
There is no easy sailing in the trend. The aspect of dissonance between a cultural moment where Asians of Asian descent are harassed and murdered in the time of Covid and non-Asian creators currently dedicating their time to telling you how to be like your Chinese grandmother or captioning congee videos as Day one of being Chinese has not escaped the attention of Chinese American creators.
It feels like a privilege to try on another person one day to assume all the consequences of that in a fashion life, Faith Xue wrote in her capacity as editor in chief of Coveteur. Others also bring out a geopolitical aspect: Chinamaxxing overlaps with the Chinese approach of soft power.
In 2016, the government of Xi Jinping made a decree to spread TCM all over the world, and the tendency is actively followed by Chinese national media as the sign of the US institutional decline.
The $282 Billion Market and the Search of Humanness
Practitioners are less also. Dr Felice Chan, co-founder of skin care company Moonbow and an acupuncturist herself embraces the attention, as long as it brings acupuncturists employment, light to other Chinese medicine brands, why not? but as he warns against what he refers to as a flattening of a tradition that a family serves better than a set of algorithms.
The more attractive aspect of TCM, according to its practitioners, could be its inherent human nature: a structure that is highly symbolic and emotionally diverse, that cannot be translated into AI-driven healthcare. This Medicine is so humane As to be human, Minjung Hwangbo, a student and content maker of TCM said.
I believe that meaning and re-humanness are what people are seeking with the advent of AI. The TCM market in the world was estimated to be worth 282 billion in 2026 with the market expected to hit 513 billion in 2035.
