If the last Cold War were a beauty pageant, America won because its political-economic system was more attractive than the Soviet Union’s. But if we are now in Cold War 2.0, the outcome might be very different. As Francis “end of history” Fukuyama recently admitted, “These days I’m not sure that it’s such an attractive model for many people,” he said.

China might not be a conventional or classic beauty. But compared to the contemporary US, Israel and some of their Western allies, it doesn’t look so ugly.

There is now something called China-maxxing. Jostein Hauge, an associate professor in development studies at the University of Cambridge, explains: “There’s a term that’s been floating around Gen Z corners of the internet: ‘China-maxxing.’ It kind of started as a joke – young Westerners enthusiastically embracing Chinese lifestyle habits, fashion, and culture. But underneath the meme is a serious political signal. A growing cohort of people, mostly young, don’t share their parents’ reflexive suspicion of China, and are increasingly willing to say so. I find myself broadly sympathetic to the younger generation.”

China’s rise has been treated as threatening in the West, but that narrative is being challenged by China-maxxing.

“I call this ‘Western hegemonic anxiety’,” Hauge wrote. “This idea, rarely stated openly but pervasive in Western media and policy discourse, is that development is only legitimate when it happens in ways that don’t disturb the existing hierarchy – with wealthy Western nations at the top, everyone else ascending only insofar as the climb is permitted and supervised by those already up there. China’s rise has exposed just how deeply this assumption runs. Challenging this discourse is, in my view, one of the more important intellectual tasks of this moment.”

But there is also another side to China-maxxing – Western democracies have been failing of late. The US calls itself the greatest democracy in the world while Israel is (self-) promoted as the only democracy in the Middle East. Their conduct, though, has disillusioned an entire generation of young people in the West. Let’s leave their complicated illegal Iran war for another time.