Panelists Brian J. Chen, Julie Y. Chu, Jasmine Ehrhardt, and Paul Kim discuss current social media trends and technology in relation to the United States and China, moderated by Lisa Nakamura.
by Lauren Brace
Image Credit: Misri Modi
On Sept. 23, 2026, the DISCO Network hosted its first panel of the semester: “Feeling the Future: Asian/Americanist Takes on Techno-Empire, Chinamaxxing, & the ‘American Century of Humiliation.’” Audience members from across the university gathered to enjoy free boba and listen to panelists Brian J. Chen, Julie Y. Chu, Jasmine Ehrhardt, and Paul Kim discuss U.S.-China competition, technological consumerism, and Chinese sentiments as viewed on social media. Panelists were asked about how young Americans view China in 2026 and how social media trends reflect current perceptions.
[The following responses have been edited for length and clarity.]
Q. How does your research inform your approach to U.S. feelings and affects towards Asian, especially Chinese, technology in 2026?
Paul Kim [UC Santa Barbara, PhD Candidate in Film and Media Studies]: I study what algorithms for short-form content such as TikToks or Instagram Reels reveal about race. I was particularly fascinated with the China-maxxing trend, a viral trend that shows Western social media users adopting Chinese lifestyle habits and aesthetics. What does the popularity of this trend reveal about the way that race is operating right now in and alongside technology, in our historical context?
Jasmine Ehrhardt [University of Michigan, PhD candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies]: I research the way that digital technologies and their industries shape and are shaped by social movements for liberation. How do we build, subscribe to, and interrogate certain myths about digital technology? How do users critique technology that comes from China vs. the U.S.?
Julie Chu [Sociocultural Anthropologist]: One resonant quality that both the U.S. and China have always embraced is an enumerative beat of “bigness.” We can think about America’s giant public works of the 20th century, China’s Great Wall, and the big tech projects we have today. This bigness and its overwhelmingness produce the simultaneous terror and awe—the sublime.
Q. How do you read this turn of U.S. influencers, but also just of U.S. people towards China as a site where “the good life” could actually be possible?
Brian Chen [Data & Society’s Policy Director]: We're viewing things through a market logic, which ignores some of the drawbacks that are in “the good life” that China seems to offer. If China has such an abundance of cool or futuristic technology, that technology has been made possible by a level of automation that is contributing to a high degree of unemployment in China. Maybe they do produce all this cool stuff, but a cost to that are the intense and brutal work practices.
Paul Kim: I'm thinking of streamers such as IShowSpeed, Marques Brownlee, and Michael Reeves going to China. We’re experiencing this idea that life in the West is getting a little bit worse and we just wanna be comfortable, and it looks like we can do this more easily in China. But simply striving for the awesome new technology in China doesn’t seem like a stable political position.
Julie Chu: Think about the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and Obama saying, "Look at the powerful infrastructure in China.” This was a moment when the U.S. was in a financial crisis, and we saw real structural political economic shifts. China has its own sort of ball of complexity in terms of social life, and the media picks up what the party-state would like to feature.
Q. Are the current meme trends around Chinese identity part of a long-term pattern that you all have observed, or is there something new or distinctive that's happening here?
Jasmine Ehrhardt: I think the meme of "You've met me in a very Chinese time of my life" is super fascinating, and I personally don't read it as a desire to become racially or ethnically Chinese. I read it instead as a desire to be part of a strong state that is shaped by all these myths, abstractions, and the particular algorithms that we're exposed to.
Julie Chu: This is a recurring theme, both good and bad. We can look back to the 1700s of these moments of admiration of some sort of exemplary abundance and in the Chinese sphere with Marco Polo. This meme-ification precedes the digital.
Brian Chen: I would say that memes are not especially durable. I was looking at some memes from the 2000s era, and I immediately felt like a senior citizen. There is something historically different now, like China’s real rise in productivity and GDP and the U.S.’s terrible decisions in foreign policy. The Western perspective views Asia as an escape—a concept or a dream that doesn’t fully look into reality.
To learn more about this event, you can watch the full video here.
