"Becoming Chinese" Is Now a TikTok Movement

The first video in my feed was a Norwegian woman in a hanfu, awkwardly drinking tea in a Chengdu teahouse, narrating in voiceover that she had decided to “live like a Chinese grandmother for a day.” Her form was wrong. Her tea was over-steeped. Her face was utterly serene.

The second video, three swipes later, was an American couple in a small Beijing hutong, learning to fold dumplings from an aunty whose patience visibly thinned with each malformed jiaozi. The aunty laughed. The couple laughed. The video had millions of likes.

This is the trend. There is no single organizing hashtag, exactly. Sometimes it is “becoming Chinese,” sometimes “a day in,” sometimes nothing. But the genre is stable enough to recognize. And as a Chinese person watching it from the inside, I want to say two contradictory things at once.

First: it is better than the previous version of foreign-travel-to-China content

For two decades, the dominant Western image of China was either economic threat or human-rights anxiety. Factory floors, GDP charts, border disputes, surveillance, Xinjiang. The country existed in foreign media as a proposition to be argued about, not a place where ordinary days happen.

The “becoming Chinese” genre, whatever else it is, is one of the first widely shared images of China in Western social media that treats the country as a place where people drink tea, fold dumplings, nap, queue, joke, shop, and waste afternoons. The image can still be naive. But it is at least human-scaled.

So I do not roll my eyes at the trend. I think it is a mild corrective.

Second: there are things foreigners get backwards

Hanfu is the obvious tell. In many travel videos, “wearing hanfu” gets coded as connecting with ancient Chinese tradition. The reality is more interesting: contemporary hanfu is also a modern youth fashion and identity movement, shaped heavily by urban consumers, online platforms, photography businesses, and post-2000s cultural confidence.

That is not a reason to avoid it. Hanfu rental shops in Xi’an, Suzhou, Luoyang, Chengdu, and other cities can be beautiful and fun. But a visitor should understand what they are doing. You are not stepping cleanly into “the China of 3,000 years ago.” You are participating in a contemporary cultural revival, fashion economy, and tourism performance that borrows from history while belonging to the present.

The same is true of tea. Slow tea in a Chengdu teahouse is real. It is also not how every Chinese person drinks tea every day. My daily tea life is closer to a thermos and repeated refills than to a cinematic tray of tiny cups.

Third: the videos are not only about China

This is the part I find most interesting. The videos are ostensibly about Chinese practices: hanfu, tea, dumplings, calligraphy, public parks, hotpot, night markets. But the reason many of them resonate is something else. They are about slowing down.

A Western audience watches a foreigner spend an afternoon in a Chengdu teahouse and what they envy is not only the tea. It is the time. The teahouse legitimizes three hours of social non-productivity. Many modern lives have very few places where that feels allowed.

So when the videos work, what they are really proposing is an escape from tempo. China is the stage. The actual desire is for unhurried afternoons, collective ease, and the feeling that an experience can matter even when nothing was optimized.

What I would suggest if you come

If you want the version of China these videos depict, you can find it. Chengdu teahouses, Xi’an hanfu streets, Beijing hutong cooking classes, Suzhou gardens, Kunming wet markets, Guangzhou morning tea. They are real, welcoming, and not especially difficult to access.

But here is a better framing: do not try to recreate the video. Give yourself a week where the goal is not maximum sights covered. Pick three or four things, do them slowly, and accept that you will miss most of the country.

That, paradoxically, may be the more Chinese way to travel China. Not the costume, not the calligraphy class, not the algorithm’s version of authenticity. Just the willingness to let an afternoon disappear.

I’ll see you at the teahouse.

Sources and context

• This is an opinion essay by Dr. Zhang Zhiyu. It reflects the author’s personal perspective, not a policy or travel advisory.
• For context on China’s contemporary inbound travel push, see the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the National Immigration Administration.
• For readers researching hanfu as a modern cultural movement, start with museum, university, and cultural-history sources rather than relying only on short-form video captions.