Becoming a "Spiritual Chinese Person" is trending, with Western netizens imitating: drinking hot water, eating goji berries, and wearing slippers!
Over the past few months, the topic of becoming a Chinese person has been continuously popular on overseas social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. Tens of thousands of young people in Europe and the United States have started to showcase their "Chinese daily life": brewing a cup of hot tea with goji berries and apple slices in the morning, changing into fluffy slippers before going out, making cola ginger soup when they have a cold, and even some people have seriously recorded their physical changes after not touching ice water for seven consecutive days. These seemingly trivial life details are forming a global "Spiritual Chinese Person" imitation trend.
The wave of this trend is a collective response to "health anxiety." In Western countries, medical costs are high, mental health issues are common, and chronic fatigue has become a norm. The Chinese health preservation concept emphasizes "prevention first," "following the seasons," and "warming the body," which provides a low-cost and operable self-healing path. Hot water is not magic, but for people who have long drunk ice water and had a cold diet, it may indeed bring a sense of improved gastrointestinal comfort; goji berries are not a miracle drug, but in today's context of widespread antioxidant awareness, they have been given a new label of "natural superfood."
Secondly, the Chinese lifestyle is highly replicable. Unlike the symbolic elements such as pandas, kung fu, and cheongsams that were previously promoted, what is now popular is what ordinary people do every day - wearing slippers, covering up, and boiling ginger tea. These behaviors have a low threshold, strong visual impact, and are easy to turn into short videos, making them very suitable for social media dissemination. A British university student showed in a video how he used a thermos to brew rose apple tea and added a caption: "This is the third time this week that I feel like a real Chinese person."
In fact, a deeper reason is closely related to the transformation of China's overall image. Over the past decade, China's progress in infrastructure, logistics, digital payments, and urban safety has been intuitively presented through short videos. The night view of Shanghai, the street-side atmosphere of Chengdu, and the technological feel of Shenzhen have broken the stereotypical image long shaped by Western mainstream media. When foreign young people see an efficient, convenient, and vibrant social picture, its underlying lifestyle naturally becomes more attractive.
For this, Dao Ge summarized with one sentence: When your economy holds a dominant position, your culture will be unconsciously imitated by others! That's profound, isn't it? Listen to the applause.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1854890816271436/
Statement: This article represents the personal views of the author.