“You’ve caught me at a very Chinese point in my life” is the latest TikTok cultural trend consuming the platform. What first started as a tweet by Twitter user @girl__virus has since been quoted across thousands of social media posts, referencing everything from morning routines to food shopping hauls, exercise habits and more inspired by Chinese culture. Similar hashtags such as “Newly Chinese” and “Chinese Baddie”, also serve the same purpose of showing people trying these new routines and additions to their lives.
There’s no denying the positivity: people are openly curious, sharing tips about herbal teas, skincare, warming foods, and alternative routines. But as this enthusiasm grows, so does a harder question relating to where was this same appreciation during times of hardship, such as the pandemic, when East Asian communities faced a surge in racial violence and discrimination?
Many of the most viral videos centre on tangible goods such as clothing, skincare, and ingredients. This is where most criticism of these trends lies. When cultural practices are framed through products, they become easier to monetise and cycle through trends by being adopted, aestheticised, and eventually discarded once they lose popularity. In this process, culture risks being treated like a trend rather than a lived practice with history and meaning. This tension between appreciation and commodification isn’t new; similar patterns can be seen across many cultures, from fashion and food to language, beauty routines, and wellness practices.
The Trend and Selective Appreciation
Typing “Newly Chinese” into TikTok opens up thousands of videos with hundreds of thousands of views. Creators share everything from lymph-opening morning routines and winter warmth tips to financial advice, like videos by @airic.z, a London-based accountant explaining “how to be Chinese with your money”. Comment sections are full of encouragement, questions, and progress updates, forming mini communities built around shared routines. The appeal is global, with people of different backgrounds, ages, and locations all participating in what’s framed as a “better lifestyle”.
At the same time, counter-videos are gaining traction. These clips remind viewers that appreciation can’t exist in a vacuum. During the pandemic, many East Asians felt pressure to hide their culture for fear of harassment or violence. TikTok turns culture into an aesthetic, while the racism faced by the people behind it remains very real.
The majority of the engagement with different ethnic cultures take the form of quick, surface level gestures, such as hashtags, captions, and generally aesthetic content. Most of these efforts don’t connect back to real people, history, or struggle, so in other words, most creators just partake in performative allyship. In a Forbes article on performative allyship, the writer explains that this term is used to describe support that’s more about being seen to support than doing anything that actually helps, essentially, “talking the talk without walking the walk”. Surface level gestures like changing a profile image or posting a trend can make someone feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but without sustained action, it doesn’t actually challenge racism or inequity. Performative allyship is also described as prioritising appearance over impact. This means someone may post a statement or jump on a trend because it looks good, but no deeper engagement follows. This can even create a false sense of progress: audiences might think that because they use a hashtag or celebrate a trend, they’re supporting a community, when in fact nothing systemic has changed.
What ties into this is tokenism, which happens when inclusion looks intentional but is actually shallow. According to CultureAlly (2025), this practice creates the appearance of inclusion while offering little real support or empowerment. For example, featuring diverse cultural elements simply because they look appealing, without engaging with their context or significance. When culture is tokenised, it’s reduced to recognisable symbols (so in this case study of being “Newly Chinese”, we can see the symbols as ingredients, recipes, or routines) instead of being understood as something lived and meaningful. So, while the trend might look like appreciation, it can also feel like cultural elements are being picked up for clicks and then set aside when they’re no longer “trendy”. The danger here frequently pointed out is that superficial gestures can actually reinforce the status quo rather than challenge it, letting people feel like they’ve done their part even when deeper issues of racism, discrimination, or inequity go unaddressed. Celebration becomes conditional: welcome when it’s visually pleasing, profitable, or popular, but often absent when solidarity actually takes effort, discomfort, or accountability.
This selective adoption becomes even clearer when cultural items are repackaged for mass appeal. In a Washington Post article, writers discuss backlash after a fashion brand and influencers appeared to rebrand a South Asian dupatta, a long piece of fabric deeply embedded in everyday life and tradition, as a “Scandinavian scarf”. The issue wasn’t just copying; it was erasing cultural context and origin while making the item more “palatable” to Western audiences. Similarly, an episode of Canada’s Dragon’s Den, which involved a bubble tea brand and highlighted criticism of how brands often try to “improve” or repackage cultural foods, implying something was lacking in the original. For many viewers, this reinforced how cultural heritage items are often treated as raw material rather than complete, meaningful practices.
Exoticism at the Core
Exoticism sits at the centre of all of this. In a Medium article by author Alexa on Asian appropriation and fetishisation, the author explains how elements of Asian culture such as matcha, boba, or skincare rituals are often consumed as trends detached from the people and histories behind them. They’re desirable because they’re perceived as different, foreign, and aesthetic.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. A Springer academic chapter on Asian luxuries and consumer culture explains that European consumption of Asian goods historically relied on the same logic: Asian products were prized for their “exotic” status rather than their cultural significance. What’s changed is the platform: from trade routes to TikTok, but the dynamic remains strikingly similar.
You can extend this logic beyond lifestyle trends to tourism, another form of consumption. In an International Business Times article, a travel influencer sparked backlash after asking whether a typhoon-ravaged area could “clean up in time” for her holiday. The moment perfectly captured how people often want access to the beautiful, marketable parts of a culture while ignoring hardship, history, or responsibility.
As we can see, these trends force us to face uncomfortable truths. Appreciation is meaningful, but only when it’s paired with education, solidarity, and support. Otherwise, culture becomes just another aesthetic, and cultures, customs and communities are left behind once the trend moves on.
How Social Media Could Do Better
If social media is going to move beyond surface level trends, it needs to do more than just make culture look cool. It has to create space for genuine understanding, context, and voices from within the community. As short as our attention spans have become, reducing cultures and customs to short 15-second hauls and vlogs is just aestheticising long-standing traditions, ethnic histories, and lived experiences. Instead, creators need to go beyond quick visuals and share the histories, meanings, and lived experiences behind cultural practices rather than just the aesthetics. Meaningful allyship online involves consistent action and amplification of voices from the community itself. Many advocacy experts explain that authentic allyship requires listening, educating oneself, and taking sustained action rather than simply posting trend‐driven content, otherwise support can feel performative or self‐serving rather than genuinely supportive. Additionally, creators cannot be apolitical. The “don’t know enough’s” and general silences that fall on my creators when communities they profit off need them cannot be an acceptable excuse anymore.
Culture Without Community
Social media has made it easier than ever to access culture. However, it has simultaneously made it easier to detach it from the people it originates from. When appreciation exists only through trends, products, and aesthetics, it stops being appreciation at all. Real engagement demands more than curiosity; it demands accountability, context, and care. Until that shift happens, cultural trends like “Newly Chinese” will continue to reflect a familiar pattern: culture celebrated when it’s convenient, and communities forgotten when they are not. There’s nothing wrong with curiosity, learning, or wanting to engage with cultures different from your own. But appreciation has to be active, not passive. It has to move beyond algorithms, aesthetics, and trends, and into education, empathy, and real support. Social media has the potential to be a space for genuine cultural exchange, but only if we’re willing to look past what’s trending and start asking harder questions about who we’re supporting, and when.