Apparently, 2025 was the year when China became cool.

Influencers and live-streamers have been flocking there, producing videos of amazing, futuristic cities full of driverless cars, drones that deliver your food and dancing robots.

Young people in the West are Chinesemaxxing, and sharing memes about it on a social media app owned by a Chinese company. Even the country’s creative products have finally started to hold their own, with a Chinese animated movie taking the world by storm for the first time, after a Chinese video game had done the same in 2024.

Surveys show that global perceptions of China have improved significantly over the past few years, especially in Western countries. When even the Economist is running articles about how China is cool, it’s clear something has shifted.

International views of China have a way of swinging back and forth. There was a period, around 2018-2022, when the country didn’t look good in the news. Everything seemed to be about protests in Hong Kong, re-education camps, the removal of term limits on the presidency… Especially in Europe and America, the previous excitement about China’s rise gave way to a certain dread.

And then came Covid, with the controversy over the pandemic’s origins shining a spotlight on China’s opaqueness. China’s success at stamping out the virus may have been a source of pride at home, but it never attracted much admiration abroad (if it was even believed).

The disastrous Shanghai lockdown of 2022, when people literally went hungry in China’s richest city, made the country look almost insane. That same year Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Chinese government’s obvious closeness to Putin also didn’t exactly improve its reputation in the West.

Well, over the last couple of years the pendulum seems to have swung decisively in the other direction. China is cool again. It’s the future. The country appears from the outside to be stronger than ever. The general feeling is that it has come out on top in Trump’s renewed trade war, after using the leverage offered by its global monopoly on rare earths to devastating effect.

Chinese tech is on the ascendant, with DeepSeek rivalling ChatGPT and BYD taking over the world’s market for electric cars. Chinese brands are no longer associated with low quality and imitations, and their dominance of “green technologies” serves to promote a narrative that China is saving the world from climate change, in spite of it being the world’s top polluter by quite a margin.

It helps that there has been a decrease in the amount of dark, dramatic news coming out of China. The country has settled into neo-authoritarianism with one man in power indefinitely, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been “pacified” and fallen off the world’s radar, and the pandemic is all but forgotten. In addition, Trump’s unpredictable antics are making China look like the adult in the room to much of the world.

The Chinese government has also stopped being its own worst enemy in this department, reigning in its notorious “wolf warrior” diplomats. The shift became obvious when Zhao Lijian, the most infamous wolf warrior, was sidelined in 2023.

This followed Xi’s calls for an "improvement" in China's international communication in May 2021, after the realisation dawned that an excessively aggressive posture was only hurting relations with key trading partners at a time when the country couldn’t afford it. It was time to put on a friendlier face.

After the pandemic ended, a decision was also made to open China up to foreign tourism. Over the last two years it’s become possible for 74 nationalities to travel to China visa-free, something quite unprecedented. Real work has been put into making the country more accessible to foreigners (it used to be almost impossibly hard to travel there independently).

While the number of foreign visitors has only just got back to where it was before the pandemic, it’s easy to see it growing further. Here in Bangkok, where I am based, everyone seems to want to holiday in China, or to have recently been (it’s now visa-free for Thais as well). Even Chongqing has become a trendy destination, after videos of its “cyberpunk” landscape spread on social media.

China’s authorities seems confident that if foreigners visit, they’ll like what they see. As the People’s Daily bragged a year ago in an article on the new visa regime: “the firsthand experiences of millions of tourists are reshaping how China is perceived globally. (…) For decades, Western media has painted a one-sided and often hostile picture of China. However, visitors to China quickly realize that the country is a land of innovation, cultural depth, and unparalleled hospitality.”

Their confidence seems to have some basis. The impression most tourists bring back is a good one. All the travel bloggers and TikTokers making videos with titles like “the TRUTH about China that the Western media don’t want you to see!” may well be getting paid for it, but their propaganda is finding fertile ground.

Following years of economic growth and conscious planning, China has become quite impressive to the casual visitor. When I lived in Beijing I struggled to see this, since I was so used to my surroundings. Now that I’ve been out of China for a few years, I can see it more clearly.

Modern Chinese cities project an air of wealth, order and confidence. There is still plenty of grimness and ugly tower blocks, but they are eclipsed by all the skyscrapers, beautifully redeveloped areas, fancy malls and modern infrastructure. The streets are safe and clean, the air is not as horribly polluted as it was a decade ago, and public transport is top-notch.

Public behaviour has also improved. It’s become much less common to see people spitting on the ground, smoking in elevators or casually chucking rubbish onto the street. And, apart from the censorship of the internet (which can be circumvented with international roaming), the average visitor will see little that reminds them of authoritarian rule or oppression. Never mind that, while foreigners can visit China more easily than in the past, the Chinese are being increasingly restricted from travelling abroad. Chongqing by night

China’s current “coolness” has led to a predictable amount of bad takes, uncritical admiration, romanticisation and dubious calls to learn from China which erase the country’s continuing problems, poverty and injustice. China remains a poorly understood place in the West, and reimagining it as some sort of technologically-advanced utopia is much easier than actually putting in the hard work necessary to understand it.

The scale of people’s naiveness became particularly glaring during China’s most unexpected cultural breakthrough of 2025: the wave of Americans joining RedNote early in the year, in protest at the possible banning of TikTok in the US (which never happened). The number of Americans who opened accounts on the Chinese lifestyle app in January 2025 numbers anywhere from 1 to 3 million.

This was the first time that a few million foreigners suddenly joined a Chinese social media platform, in what seems to have been an organic, unplanned movement. Once they were on the app, the Americans started talking to its Chinese users, either directly or with the help of translation software, which has now become so good that it’s almost torn down the language barrier. The resulting “intercultural dialogue” turned into a net loss for balanced public debate on China.

What these Americans discovered about China from their interactions left them amazed. The problem is that much of it was nonsense, or at least highly biased. As many have noted, RedNote’s Chinese user-base skews young, female, and upper-middle class. The Americans who joined the app, meanwhile, tended to be contrarian young people, “protesting” their government by joining a Chinese platform.

Predictably some of the Americans started complaining about their country: the poor who have to work two jobs just to make ends meet, the unaffordable healthcare, the lack of workers’ rights, the cities riven with crime and drugs addicts…

The Chinese users expressed genuine amazement at how these poor Americans live, while sharing snapshots of the China they know and experience (or want to share with outsiders): a just and stable government, well-run cities, social harmony, rich and affordable food and an efficient, comfortable lifestyle. Many of the apps’ new American users lapped up this picture uncritically.

Some of them then went back to Western social media and produced a stream of naive, romanticised, and frankly irritating takes on China, based entirely on their interactions on RedNote. Did you know that people in China don’t need to pay for healthcare? They never have to work overtime. Their cities are mind-blowing. Everyone owns a home. They can afford to buy way more stuff than Americans. Eating out for breakfast only costs 1 dollar. Everything we have been told is a lie.

Much of this is patently untrue, but it didn’t matter. For these people, China became an idealised counterpoint to their own country and its failings. Part of the problem seems to have been some shocking levels of prior ignorance. Apparently, it was a real surprise for some to discover that many Chinese live in big modern cities and can afford rich and varied diets. Migrants crossing the Darièn Gap

What is notable is how out of sync Western (and generally international) perceptions of China are with those of the Chinese themselves.

Feelings of optimism and national pride reached a peak in China precisely when the country’s reputation in the West was at its nadir, around 2017-2021. While the increasing authoritarianism caused some disquiet among the educated middle classes, the general mood at the time was one of satisfaction with China’s progress and intense nationalism. The crushing of “separatism” in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and the government’s ultra-nationalistic rhetoric may not have looked good abroad, but it’s safe to say they were popular at home.

The disastrous last year of Covid restrictions, which turned China into a theatre of the absurd just when the rest of the world was going back to normal, led to a widespread sense of disillusionment. Anyone who lived in China at the time clearly felt the shift. Zero Covid was abandoned in December 2022 after protests and riots broke out all over the country, but the realisation that China’s leaders were not incapable of messing up, and that nobody was safe from the consequences, lingered on.

And then it began to dawn on everyone that, even after the Covid restrictions had been lifted, the economy wasn’t going back to the days of fast growth and plentiful opportunities for everyone.

Anyone who deals regularly with people in China today will hear complaints about the economy. Phrases like 经济环境不好 (“the economic environment isn’t good”) are a constant. Graduates find it hard to get the jobs they want. People are getting laid off. There’s a general feeling of pessimism, as much as state propaganda tries to paper it over.

It has to mean something that since 2022 there has been a large increase in the number of Chinese attempting to emigrate illegally, often via the most daring paths. The term 走线, or “walking the route”, has become a popular term for entering the US illegally through Mexico, usually after flying to Ecuador (which used to allow visa-free entry for Chinese nationals) and then travelling across a long, dangerous route which includes the Darièn Gap, a perilous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.

In 2023 the US Border Patrol encountered 37,000 Chinese migrants crossing the border with Mexico, a sharp increase from previous years. After US border controls got stricter following Trump’s win, and Ecuador stopped allowing Chinese to enter without a visa, many switched to taking the Balkan route into Europe or trying to get to Australia via boat from Indonesia.

Many of the migrants appear to be middle-class people who’ve fallen on hard times. When asked why they are trying to leave China they will talk about economic factors, but also their disillusionment with the country’s politics. Faced with a spluttering economy and a political system that shows no signs of liberalisation, some are voting with their feet.

Sure, these migrants might still be a drop in the Chinese ocean. None of this necessarily means that China is anywhere close to suffering real upheaval. Nor does it mean that the country isn’t making great achievements in various fields of human endeavour, or that its impressive cities are “just a facade”. But it does put the admiration that some are heaping onto China into perspective. The rest of the world may not be doing so great, but in its own way China is struggling too.

Source: https://capitalinthenorth.substack.com/p/the-year-when-china-became-cool