Some Progressive Americans Are 'Chinamaxxing'

Some Americans are now "Chinamaxxing." 

According to Mary Julia Koch, an associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression page, progressive Americans are "fangirling" over high-tech Chinese cities, their public infrastructure, public transit, their cultural practices, and how quickly the Chinese Communist Party is able to build them. 

The trend, which blends "China" with the Gen Z slang term "-maxxing," has exploded on social media, with hashtags like #Chinamaxxing racking up billions of views. Young Western creators are even using visits to Chinese cities as a cudgel against their own country and the United States, contrasting the communist country's sleek transit systems and rapid construction with the U.S.'s infrastructure delays, poor public transit, and how long it takes for the country to finish similar projects. 

But, as usual, the comparison is not only part of a Chinese propaganda campaign, but deeply misleading.

America's Chinamaxxers marvel at the rapid buildout of Chinese tech and infrastructure. They don't ask about what it cost—labor exploitation, mass surveillance, political repression. My latest in @WSJFreeEx:pic.twitter.com/25gqwMEDTd

— Mary Julia Koch (@MJ_Koch) September 8, 2026

"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."

"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."

"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."

The reasoning behind the "Chinamaxxing" trend, of course, isn't even true. 

China does build faster and at a vastly greater scale than the U.S., but what's conveniently left out of these stories is that Chinese infrastructure is, more often than not, not built to last. There's even a well-known, common Chinese term for shoddy, fast-tracked construction projects, typical of a centralized, tyrannical government. Bridges and highways regularly collapse less than a year after construction finishes, buildings have an average lifetime of about 25 years about half of what it is in the U.S., and corruption among construction contractors is rampant. In other words, what they make up for in speed, they lack in quality. 

Their high-tech cities aren't quite as impressive either, once you learn that 60 to 80 percent of many developments sit empty for decades, resulting in "ghost cities" that act as propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, the only things that are regularly better in China than in the U.S. are their rail system and some of their airports.

So when progressives marvel at China's gleaming skylines and lightning-fast construction, they're admiring a facade. America has her problems, her fair share of red tape that needs cutting, a severely tainted free market that results in delays, and the ability to go over budget on nearly every project we undertake. But in the U.S., we maintain our freedom, preserve the integrity of our projects, and don't need to rely on propaganda to explain to the world how great we are.

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