View / ‘Chinamaxxing’ isn’t enough. Superpowers need to talk in real life, too.

After a decade of animosity, opinion polls show Americans’ views of China are softening, especially among the young. Online, Gen-Z influencers are “Chinamaxxing” — posting video clips of themselves sipping hot water, shuffling around in bedroom slippers, and eating hotpot, habits they encountered after last year’s ban on TikTok drove them to Chinese apps.

A budding fascination with all things Chinese is boosting US tourist travel to China, albeit from a low base. Likewise, scholarly exchanges are picking up. And American business leaders are trickling back to China: Executives from about 30 US companies, led by Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook, showed up at the recent China Development Forum in Beijing.

But a combination of catchy memes, holiday excursions, and earnest seminars don’t add up to a broad détente between the US and China. If anything, they highlight the gulf that now separates them, minor signs of progress in a relationship once described, at least aspirationally, as “Chimerica” – a melding of sorts between two superpowers, with deep scientific collaboration, complementary innovation ecosystems, and widespread cultural and educational links.

Instead, the slight thaw suggests a more modest agenda that the countries should now pursue, one that acknowledges that tensions between them over fundamental issues — trade, technology, global status — are more likely to intensify than abate. A realistic measure of the success of next month’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be whether they can agree on practical steps to advance a tentative goodwill between their two peoples, in hopes of preventing tensions from spilling into confrontation, or even war.

The bar is low: Increasingly, Americans and Chinese are becoming strangers.

In large part, this is Beijing’s doing. To cite just one example of problems that stand in the way of a real cultural opening: Chinese academics are generally allowed out of the country for only five days each year, severely restricting their participation in conferences and joint research projects.

And ironically, few Americans actually live and work in the futuristic Chinese cities — with their high-speed rail links, EVs, and drone deliveries — that “Chinamaxxers” rave about on social media. Even if they would like to go, work visa restrictions, the “Great Firewall,” and pervasive surveillance keep them away. Draconian pandemic lockdowns forced expat families to pack up and leave, emptying international schools. In the early 2000s, foreigners were an unremarkable part of China’s megacities, but on a recent trip to China, where I once lived, worked, and raised a family, it was disconcerting to be stared at as a curiosity — much as I was in the 1980s, when precious few non-Chinese would visit.

Xi’s brand of resentful nationalism, meanwhile, comes with a strong anti-American streak, and security apparatchiks see CIA spies everywhere. The paranoia deepens the Communist Party’s ingrained culture of secrecy. Under Xi’s watch, China has restricted access by US and other foreign nationals to financial databases, criminalized business due diligence by consulting companies and law firms, and closed national archives to academic researchers, robbing foreigners of the information they need to understand the country. Only a handful of American journalists operate in China after tit-for-tat expulsions. Fewer than 2,000 US students are currently registered at Chinese universities, down from around 15,000 a decade ago.

Washington has, of course, reacted to Chinese hostility with its own aggressive measures. Visiting Chinese academics complain about being pulled aside for secondary screenings at US airports, even when they hold valid visas. Some 30 US states have slapped restrictions on foreigners owning land, many explicitly targeting Chinese nationals. On US college campuses, rising suspicions about the loyalties of academics of Chinese descent have driven an exodus of top talent: Almost 20,000 ethnic Chinese scientists left the US between 2010 and 2021, according to one survey, many ending up at top Chinese universities.

There are a number of easy initial steps Trump and Xi could take to advance “people-to-people” exchanges and rebuild a measure of lost trust. For a start, they could mutually agree to reopen consulates in Houston and Chengdu that were closed in 2020 at the low point in relations, and expand the number of accredited journalists in each country. Washington might consider restoring the Fulbright Program, and work on better coordination between the US State Department, which issues visas, and Homeland Security, which guards entry points. For its part, Beijing could allow unfettered access to the internet in places where foreigners congregate, like tourist hotels, office buildings, and trade zones.

Don’t dismiss “Chinamaxxing” outright. Cultural shifts matter: What first brought Americans and Chinese together in the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, was ping pong.

The difference is that the US table tennis players who paved the way for Nixon’s “opening to China” flew to the country to play actual matches, with real paddles, in physical stadiums. That’s not the same as fantasizing about Chinese lifestyles from afar.