Progressive fascination with China’s rapid urban projects and transit has exploded online, but that admiration often ignores the political, moral, and quality problems behind the shine.
What people call “Chinamaxxing” blends China and the Gen Z suffix “-maxxing” to describe online worship of Chinese cities, transit, and rapid construction. The trend has gone viral on platforms like TikTok, racking up massive views and turning glossy footage into a political talking point. Young creators use these trips to shame the United States, scoring cheap hits by contrasting sleek foreign systems with American delays and bureaucracy. That contrast looks good in short clips, but it leaves out crucial context.
Creators praise high-speed rail, gleaming subways, and skyline shots while glossing over how those projects are funded and managed. Viral videos reduce complicated tradeoffs to envy-inducing montages, and many viewers take that footage at face value. Social media rewards spectacle, not nuance, which makes it easy for propaganda and selective storytelling to spread. The result is admiration without accountability.
“A subculture of the internet is Chinamaxxing,” Koch said. “Scroll on TikTok and you’ll find videos of users fangirling over Chinese cities, subways, high-speed rail, even mimicking Chinese cultural practices. These trends aren’t entirely organic. They’re part of China’s campaign to flex its technology abroad. Many online are falling for it. Some DSA activists are praising Chinese socialism, but these useful idiots are blind to the economic and moral failures of the Chinese system.”
The comparison is not only part of a Chinese propaganda campaign, but deeply misleading.
“Many of the industrial projects they praise in China, they’d make harder to accomplish in the US. Take the example of data centers. While seven in 10 Americans oppose when being built near their home, many online are praising Chinese AI, claiming that it’s more energy efficient and environmentally friendly.”
Speed and scale do not automatically equal sound policy. China builds fast because its system concentrates power and forces through projects that would face far more pushback here. That same concentration also enables corners to be cut, and oversight to be weak or politicized. Americans who cheer the outcomes while ignoring the methods are embracing a package deal they might not like when they learn the full cost.
https://x.com/MJ_Koch/status/2097367645733441653
The construction quality argument is a real counterweight to the hype: bridges and highways have been known to fail shortly after completion, and many Chinese buildings average about 25 years of useful life, roughly half what comparable structures last in the U.S. Corruption among contractors and uneven standards contribute to those outcomes. If you value durability and transparency, flashy speed can be a poor bargain.
The “ghost cities” problem undercuts the glossy skyline narrative, too: estimates that 60 to 80 percent of many large developments sit empty for years show how appearance can be manufactured. In practice, the only systems that frequently outpace ours are certain rail networks and a few major airports, not an across-the-board superiority. The rest is design, staging, and state-directed investment that serves political goals as much as citizens.
“Yes, China accounted for more than half of global solar additions last year, but it also went on a spree of building new large coal plants, and it’s still the world’s largest carbon emitter,” Koch added. “And let’s not forget that China’s able to build its infrastructure so quickly and cheaply, in part because it uses state-sponsored forced labor of Uyghurs and prisoners. But Chinamaxxing videos aren’t going to showcase the state’s crushing of individual liberties or the country’s extreme economic inequality. China is far from the egalitarian utopia of DSA dreams.”
We should want better projects and faster timelines in America, and conservatives argue for cutting needless red tape and empowering markets that deliver. But that shouldn’t mean trading our freedoms, tolerating forced labor, or accepting shoddy construction for the sake of a quick headline. Admiring the finish without asking how the work was done is a poor basis for national policy, and Americans deserve a debate that keeps both values and outcomes in view.
