6 hours ago
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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.
“The younger generation feel like there is no meaningful method to change society. 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.
“When you want to see change, there is the hard way, which is being innovative and finding a solution. 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.
“It was intentional to show the panoply of Asian identities that have been impacted by a great power,” Chan says. “It opens up the possibility to get young people to better understand it’s not just a ‘Chinese time in my life’, that there’s a lot going on here … hopefully it can get a few people thinking about resistance movements both present and in the past.”
“We don’t want to just lecture,” Badiucao adds. “We really want readers to put themselves in the eyes of those characters as if they were a real human being with a real life.”
Chan now lives in Berlin and has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Time, and others, while Badiucao, who lives in Melbourne, has exhibited works across the world. 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.
“This book happens to focus on China, but authoritarianism everywhere is bad,” Chan says. “We don’t want anyone to engage in whataboutism and I don’t think there needs to be a balance – if things are shit, they’re shit in any country.”
Unlike other graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Badiucao and Chan’s book takes its influence from Japanese manga. “There are great works like Attack on Titan which are not necessarily about specific history or political content that have so many metaphors reflecting important things like racism, war and equity,” Badiucao says.
“It’s part of the reason this form is potentially more than just entertainment or some kid stuff, it really influences an entire generation.”
You Must Take Part in Revolution was released in the US and UK in 2025, but it is only just getting its Australian release this week.
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. “I don’t think my mum would love it,” she said.
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.
Badiucao later discovered the two were mother and daughter.
“I told the daughter her mum might be more open about political stuff, and I told the mum that your daughter might be interested too,” he says. “They ended up having an honest conversation, and they got a copy of the book … among all the interactions with readers, that was pretty special to me.”
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You Must Take Part in Revolution by Melissa Chan and Badiucao is out now in Australia (Affirm Press; $39.99), as well as in the US and UK.
