Drinking Tsingtao beers, eating congee, walking with hands behind their backs: for many young people in western countries, “Chinamaxxing” has become all the rage. Some content creators have even gone beyond the jokes about being in “a very Chinese time in my life” and have followed this passion to the Middle Kingdom: making TikToks in Chongqing’s multi-layered metropolis, bathing in Chengdu’s 24-hour spas, or backflipping on the Great Wall of China. This irreverent, mostly ironic trend is jarring for some, but Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao and Chinese-American journalist Melissa Chan don’t want to lecture the so-called Chinamaxxers.
They feel defeated when they see what’s happening in Gaza – there’s been protests but the government doesn’t care and is collaborating with atrocities in wars. There’s also the Epstein files in America, which show how the elite is corrupt,” says Badiucao, who, along with Chan, is in Sydney to promote their new book, You Must Take Part in Revolution. And there is the lazy way, which is finding a cheap alternative and fantasising about a faraway, oriental, communist country that might be your future,” he says.
Chan and Badiucao have both paid the price for criticising China’s one-party system. Chinese officials refused to renew Chan’s press credentials before expelling the former Al Jazeera journalist from China in 2012; and the previously anonymous political cartoonist Badiucao was forced to reveal his identity in 2019 after it was compromised and authorities threatened his family in China. You Must Take Part in Revolution, the pair’s debut graphic novel, portrays a dystopian future where China is at war with the United States in 2035.
The graphic novel features a variety of characters from the Chinese-speaking diaspora, including from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US and Tibet, as they decide what choices they are willing to make under authoritarian oppression. They started working on the graphic novel five years ago after first meeting in Germany during the late 2010s. You Must Take Part in Revolution starts off in the real-life Hong Kong protests of 2019, when almost two million people took to the streets to denounce a controversial law that would allow the extradition of suspects to mainland China.
The law was viewed as a sign of growing mainland influence in Hong Kong. While the graphic novel is geographically grounded in an Asia governed by authoritarian China, it also portrays the US as a proto-fascist state, resisting the idea that criticising one necessarily means painting the other in a positive light. Badiucao says readers across the world have contacted them about their own histories after reading it, including Ukrainian refugees who have escaped Russia’s invasion, and Czech communities who lived through the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
The artist recalls one interaction at a comic festival in New York, where a second-generation Chinese Canadian girl told him that she had hesitations about taking the book home. A few minutes later, an older woman came up to Badiucao and explained she was an immigrant whose family had been through hardship during the Cultural Revolution. Flipping through the book, she said her daughter might like it, but she didn’t know if she would be open to learning about Chinese politics.
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