The internet doesn’t ask for permission before it borrows your culture. Chinese traditions are flooding TikTok, Instagram, and X — and the speed at which Western influencers are picking them up tells you everything about how digital culture moves in 2025. This isn’t a niche phenomenon. This is the feed.
According to a recent report from the New York Times, Chinese cultural traditions — from Lunar New Year rituals to lucky red envelope aesthetics to ancient idioms turned into Gen Z punchlines — are getting absorbed into mainstream internet culture at a pace that would have seemed surreal five years ago. Influencers aren’t just reposting. They’re performing. Adapting. Claiming.
The Algorithm Has No Passport
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: the algorithm doesn’t care where something comes from. It cares whether you watched the whole video. Whether you sent it to your group chat. Whether it made you feel something for three seconds before you scrolled again.
Chinese meme formats have a sharp visual grammar. The humor is dense. The references stack on top of each other. And when Western creators lift that grammar — sometimes with context, often without — it spreads because it works, not because anyone stopped to ask why it works.
That’s the machine doing what the machine does. And influencers, who live and die by engagement numbers, are rational actors. They see what performs. They borrow it. They post it before anyone else does. There’s no malice in that process. But there isn’t much reflection either.
What “Embracing” Actually Looks Like
Let’s be precise about the word “embracing” here, because it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting. There’s a wide spectrum between genuine cultural curiosity and aesthetic strip-mining.
Some creators are genuinely engaging. They explain the Lunar New Year traditions they’re adopting. They tag Chinese creators. They credit the source. They treat the culture like something with depth, not a filter pack to throw on their content.
Others are using the red and gold color palette because it’s popping in the algorithm right now. The aesthetic without the meaning. The vibe without the history. That’s not engagement. That’s decoration.
The Diaspora Is Watching
Chinese diaspora creators — particularly those in the US, UK, and Australia — have been making content about their own traditions for years. Many of them built small, loyal audiences. They explained things carefully. They navigated the tension of being between cultures.
Now a creator with three million followers drops a “Chinese New Year aesthetic” video, uses the same images, and gets ten times the reach. That’s not a new dynamic. That’s the internet’s oldest power imbalance. Large platforms still reward large accounts. Novelty beats authenticity in the feed almost every time.
The diaspora creators who’ve been documenting this in real time are frustrated but not surprised. They’ve seen this before with other cultures. The internet amplifies everything — including appropriation at scale.
The Hot Take
Western influencer “embracing” of Chinese culture is mostly soft appropriation dressed up as cross-cultural appreciation, and the platforms are actively incentivizing it. If TikTok or Instagram actually cared about cultural context, they’d build systems that surface original creators first — not boost whoever has the most followers doing the trend second. The fact that they don’t tells you the embrace is one-directional: culture flows in, credit flows out.
Memes Are Political Whether You Think So or Not
Chinese meme culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists inside a geopolitical moment where US-China tensions are high, where Chinese-owned platforms are under regulatory scrutiny, and where Asian communities in Western countries still fight for basic representation. When you reduce that context to a trend, you’re making a political statement — even if you think you’re just posting a funny video.
This isn’t disconnected from bigger conversations happening across tech and culture right now. Pope Leo’s call for AI disarmament is partly about the same thing: who controls the systems that shape what we see, what we believe, what culture gets amplified and what gets buried. The feed is not neutral. It never was.
And as platforms chase the next version of digital community — Meta pushing its metaverse vision onto mobile devices — the question of whose culture gets encoded into those spaces becomes more urgent, not less.
Where This Goes From Here
Cultural exchange online isn’t going to slow down. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the current system has no built-in mechanism for accountability or credit. A meme travels faster than its origin story. Trends outlive the people who started them. And the creators who were there first get pushed to page two of the search results.
What would actually help: algorithmic credit trails. Better discovery tools that surface original creators. Platforms that treat cultural context as a feature rather than an obstacle to engagement. None of that is technically impossible. It’s just not profitable enough to prioritize.
Until platforms change the incentive structure, “embracing” will keep meaning whatever is most convenient for whoever has the largest following. And the cultures being embraced will keep asking the same question: is this appreciation, or are you just wearing our clothes?