Beyond the Hashtag: What '#Becoming Chinese' Really Means

In 1978, a young Egyptian student named Abdel Aziz Hamdi stepped off a plane in Beijing. Egypt had no Chinese department at the time, and he had come purely out of "curiosity". But the real transformation happened over tea. Egyptians are devoted to strong, sweet black tea—it is a cultural constant. Yet, after a few months in China, Hamdi quietly switched to green tea. He has never switched back. "It just felt right for my body," he recalls decades later. That quiet, personal shift—from black to green—is perhaps the most honest metaphor for a much larger global wave. 

In early 2026, a wave swept across TikTok and Instagram under the hashtag #BecomingChinese. Gen Z users began posting their Chinese lifestyle rules: drinking hot water, wearing cotton slippers, making dumplings and playing mahjong. One user playfully paraphrased a line from Fight Club: "You met me at a very Chinese time in my life." To date, related content has garnered over 4 billion views. This did not emerge from nowhere—it was a natural extension of the #ChinaTravel boom. In 2025, China received 35.17 million inbound foreign visitors, of whom 30.08 million entered visa-free, an increase of nearly 50%. The average length of stay rose to 6.1 days, as interest shifted from check-in sightseeing to immersive experience.

First, they watch; then they come; then they become.

The #BecomingChinese wave is the most vivid contemporary expression of mutual learning—not passive assimilation, but active engagement that fosters two-way understanding.

This two-way understanding finds its most vivid metaphor in the kitchen. Take the tomato. It left the New World as a foreign berry, traveled the Persian trade routes, and by the time it reached a Qing Dynasty wok, it had become something entirely new—tomato stir-fried eggs, a dish that tastes like home to billions. Around the same time, the chili pepper landed in 16th-century Goa, where Portuguese vinegar met Indian heat and gave birth to Vindaloo—neither Portuguese nor Indian, but something born of their collision. Persian traders brought the tomato, and Chinese woks gave it a new soul; Portuguese techniques met Indian spices, and Goa rewrote them into a new flavor signature. The evolution of pizza tells a similar story—the tomato entered Europe via Silk Road routes, and not until the 18th century did Neapolitans top it with local mozzarella and basil, creating the classic Margherita pizza. In the 20th century, this pizza was reinterpreted in the United States, Japan and Brazil. Every ingredient's cross-border journey is a story of mutual shaping. Dr. Hamdi himself is a living example—Egyptians traditionally drank only black tea, but after coming to China and discovering green tea, he has been drinking it ever since. The essence of exchange lies in letting every local tradition bloom with new possibilities under the stimulus of foreign elements.

If ingredients are messengers of taste, then the circulation of knowledge is deep intellectual dialogue. Here, we must avoid the cliché of a simple East-to-West conveyor belt. The most fascinating historical case is the round-trip journey of ideas. During the Abbasid Translation Movement from the 8th to the 13th century, scholars from Persia, Syria and Egypt translated Greek philosophy and Indian mathematics into Arabic. After the Battle of Talas in 751, Chinese papermaking spread to the Arab world, dramatically lowering the cost of knowledge production and fueling Islamic scholarly flourishing. These same Greek philosophical works, digested and developed by Arab scholars, returned to Europe centuries later via Spain, directly nourishing the Renaissance. This was a knowledge loop spanning centuries: each transition was not mere transfer but deep re-creation. In the other direction, gunpowder, the compass and printing likewise traveled westward, and every technological crossing was reinterpreted, adapted and refined in response to new needs. Astronomy offers a particularly vivid example—in 1267, the Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din presented Kublai Khan with seven astronomical instruments from the West, after which the Yuan dynasty established the Islamic Astronomical Bureau; meanwhile, the Maragha Observatory in Persia also involved Han Chinese astronomers. This was a multi-centered, multi-directional network of interaction—two traditions calibrating each other through mutual reference.

Yet knowledge cannot flow without translation, which is one of the most delicate arts of all. 

Hamdi describes translation as "making the unfamiliar feel like home". When he translated Lao She's Teahouse into Arabic, he hit a wall. The play crams fifty years of Chinese history into three acts, and Arab readers had zero contextual hooks. His solution was radical: he wrote an introduction longer than the play itself and placed historical annotations in the margins of every page. "You must come to China; you must understand; only then can you express the meaning precisely." That is the old-school, painstaking translation.

For Dr. Hamdi, good translation is purposeful: the chosen works must have impact and serve the goal of cultural transmission. But in 2026, we have new translators. Every foreign blogger making dumplings on a Shanghai rooftop or explaining why they carry a thermos is a "citizen translator". They translate not with dictionaries, but with their bodies and daily routines. This decentralized translation has an honesty that official brochures lack.

The digital era has given rise to an unprecedented decentralized exchange: any traveler with a smartphone can become a node of cultural transmission. But mutual learning, the core of the Silk Road, has persisted to this day, even though its forms have changed.

Underpinning all this is the ancient Chinese philosophy of He (和)—harmony in diversity.  Dr. Hamdi, who has translated Confucian classics, reflects deeply on this: "The core of ancient Chinese philosophy is the relationship between people. The Analects and the Daodejing both aim to cultivate the person, to discuss the relationships between the individual and society, the individual and the state." He sees this as a model of humanism—Laozi and Confucius did not focus on science and technology but on the principles by which humans can live together.

But he is careful to note that "harmony" does not mean "sameness". The pre-Christian era envoys of Emperor Wu of Han did not go to the Western Regions to impose Han culture; they went to establish relations. Genuine mutual learning requires respecting the un-translatable—the parts of a culture that remain stubbornly foreign. The Dunhuang murals show Buddhist iconography with Greek drapery and Persian motifs; they are beautiful because they do not blend into one color, but let each hue shine in contrast.

So, where does that leave us today? We stand in an era that demands cooperation more than ever—yet is also more prone to misunderstanding than ever before. The contemporary value of the Silk Road experience lies in its offering of a way of thinking that transcends zero-sum logic: win-win is not the arithmetic summation of interests, but the capacity of every civilization to transcend its own limitations through dialogue and enter a broader dimension of existence. As Dr. Hamdi puts it: "The core of ancient Chinese philosophy is the relationship between people." The relationship between civilizations, in the end, is merely an enlargement of the relationship between people. When different civilizations are willing to sit down and exchange their respective answers to the question of how to live, difference ceases to be a source of division and becomes a flame that illuminates one another. The ultimate win-win of civilizations is not about who prevails—it is about "we" as a whole, through dialogue with one another, becoming more worthy of existence.

Guest Profile: Dr. Abdel Aziz Hamdi 

Dr. Abdel Aziz Hamdi is Egypt's foremost sinologist and a pioneer of Arabic-Chinese literary translation. Over the past four decades, he has translated more than 30 Chinese literary works into Arabic, including Lao She's Teahouse and Sunrise, as well as Confucian classics such as The Analects and the Daodejing.