What marketers need to know about Chinamaxxing

Chinamaxxing is over, the traffic is about to reverse.

While western creators have been Chinamaxxing to get a bigger piece of the Asian market, and you can see the results with MrBeast doing very well on China’s YouTube Bilibili.com, North Asia will probably follow the K-pop lead and max the rest of the world.

TikTok has already become a mainstay platform, Xiaohongshu (RedNote) has shown it might have broader appeal. Micro dramas and their associated platforms such as DramaBox or ReelShort are popping up everywhere. Live e-commerce continues to grow outside China.

China, Korea and Japan are exporting their versions of the creator economy and they’re finding willing audiences in the west. As home to Xiaohongshu’s first office outside the mainland, Hong Kong is a test bed for the platform as it heads westward.

In the west, the creator economy has almost a ‘build it and they will come’ flavour, in that if you make great content the audience will follow and that will open up various monetisation opportunities. TikTok and Instagram feeds are largely short videos of things audiences are interested in - it might be commercial but more often not.

In North Asia the key difference is monetisation. It’s more of an earn-as-you-go model. What you might call commerce-native content is the norm.

The transaction happens inside the content, not after it, or around it. For the marketer it means switching your thinking from being a sponsor to being a merchant or a creator yourself.

Search fast selling on China’s Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok, and you will quickly find Zheng Xiang Xiang surrounded by orange (Hermes) boxes shoving one after the other past the camera giving you a quick look at a product in each.

Xiang Xiang appeared in 2023 and her super-fast style was quite quickly curtailed by Douyin. But her example is emblematic of how in China, content, search and shopping are all wrapped into one. It’s not just fast selling. Go onto Xiaohongshu and the flavour is different, slower but pervasive. More reviews and first-person content prevails on this platform that started out in 2013 as a PDF shopping guide for Chinese travelling abroad.

In North Asia becoming a creator is a pathway to fame, success and wealth. You can see it in one of the region’s biggest cultural exports of recent times, the micro drama.

The two-minute dramas, called duanju in China, are a cultural and commercial powerhouse that in 2024 were valued at USD7billion - more than China’s domestic box office at the time. They're the digital equivalent of pulp fiction, a cliff hanger at the end of every episode. A bigger one at the end of every five to eight episodes, just when the paywall kicks in. Before you know it you’re paying to watch and you’ve got through an 80-90 episode series. Brands are very successfully getting in on the act, Starbucks and KFC each produced series in China that scored many millions of views.

In Japan and Korea the creator economy is also booming but in slightly different ways. Japan is home to V-tubing which is defined by real people appearing behind digitally-generated avatars on screen. This is predominantly on YouTube.

The avatar is the character, typically anime style, mapped to the genuine hosts expressions and movements. Many of the videos involve gaming, some are singing and performing, a lot are just chat live streams with users. And this is where the commercials come in, the hosts get paid through “super chats”. Fans pay to have their chats read out and see the reaction of the host. It is a parasocial relationship much like the type that have made podcasts so popular.

The content in Japan is closer to the west but with direct fan participation in the commercials. Fans are paying creators directly for the connection and also the craft. This is particularly evident in a platform such as note.com where creators sell articles directly to users. If you like an author you can buy a subscription much like paying for a newsletter on Substack. Some ‘articles’ are quite expensive, up to 100,000 yen, and might involve a package of resources, like buying a how-to guide or a course. Many articles are as little as 300 yen and are more familiar, such as personal essays, poetry or fiction.

Korea is more like China in its commercial model with live commerce, albeit slightly more restrained with higher production values. It has Japan’s fandom features like with Weverse which integrates community, livestreams and merchandise. And then it has mukbang, watching people gorge themselves on food, which it has in turn exported to everyone else.

But the exports aren’t just the content.

In China the country’s internet giants such as Baidu have begun doing away with the hosts by using incredibly lifelike AI-based avatars of real celebrities who can banter and sell their way through hours and hours of live streaming. It’s like watching the old telethon fund-raising drives but never ending and utterly virtual.

In a breakout moment in June 2025 serial entrepreneur turned livestreaming celebrity Luo Yonghao’s avatar appeared in a six-hour stream that was viewed 13 million times and achieved RMB55 million in sales, beating his previous human-hosted session.

The trend in China now is to license faces to appear in streaming to eliminate talent fees and create a new asset class, your likeness. And this is where the creator economy in North Asia gets interesting. North Asia’s regulatory regimes are ahead of the rest of the world and may be the region’s most consequential output in the next few years.

It doesn’t get mentioned in all the breathless YouTube Shorts but Zheng Xiang Xiang’s speed selling was short lived because the platform Douyin brought in a rule that required sellers to slow down and give more product information. That’s self regulation. Then there’s government regulation.

In South Korea AI laws now mandate broad disclosure, albeit with modest penalties and deferred enforcement. Japan has its strict stealth marketing ban that puts the liability on the advertiser. And China’s powerful Cyberspace Administration, the CAC, began enforcing strict rules requiring creators discussing professional topics such as finance, medicine and law to hold verified credentials nearly a year ago. AI-generated content on Chinese platforms also requires visible labels and embedded metadata.

Hong Kong by contrast has no dedicated influencer, livestream or AI-content laws and relies on sector-specific laws covering misleading trade practices, financial promotions, fraud and harmful content. These are in turn supplemented by regulatory guidelines.

North Asian regulatory regimes are a blueprint for western audiences worried about the growth and influence of unregulated AI slop and brands looking for certainty. Chinamaxxing might soon look like risk management.

This article was written by Simon Kearney, co-founder, Click2View.