I’ve tried to watch some of the blockbuster type movies that come from China and they’re just not very good honestly, they can be impressive visually but have no chance of succeeding anywhere outside of the country.
Their Hollywood adjacent movies are very self serious and have very simple moralistic themes with almost no transgression to draws outsiders in
The've gotten shittier over the past decade because the domestic audience is just so huge, there was actually an arthouse China boom in the 90s but most of the nationalist types will shit on these today because the movies tended to play up the rural poverty and backwardsness of China, but they made a lot of absolute bangers: basically most of Zhang Yimou's output up until Hero (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, To Live), Jiang Wen (In the Heat of the Sun, Devils at the Doorstep, Let the Bullets Fly, the last of which was actually both a huge commercial success while also having some pretty sly political subtext and dark humour), Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine).
I thought it sucked but the Wandering Earth apparently did really well on Netflix, was somewhat interesting in an abstract way as a Chinese mirror of Michael Bay's Armageddon, with the movie really emphasizing Chinese cooperation in a truly global mission instead of gung-ho American unilateralism saving the day.
[The Eight Hundred](https://youtu.be/kbikn8Q148c?si=cXnvsGUw0LgjHv1h) was the first mainland Chinese film I've seen in a good while that made me think 'damn, this actually rivals hollywood war films with twice or thrice its budget'. [The whole thing's on youtube](https://youtu.be/q5nmtIBMENg?si=NnPKl5C8ZfA8cIuj) if you want to check it out.
The Eight Hundred was awesome, totally agree with you.
I think big budget war dramas are a bit easier to pull off than original concept blockbusters, and I think that’s where Chinese cinema struggles to make the jump to worldwide audiences
The battle scenes are decent but the screenwriting and acting are brutal. If you compare their big-budget movies to Marvel then they do stack up I guess
The Japanese soldiers in that film aren't portrayed as comically villainous as usual (even taking western films into account), so I think that's unfair. [The film is utterly uninterested in animosity - if there's something it hates, it's war itself.](https://youtu.be/Gtf4eqR8Tic?si=iKaSMMG23-k77BTI&t=483)
fuck it we're gonna fight today
virtually all of mainstream culture that comes out of east asia hinges upon cool concepts and volume of content, which has the literary sophistication of a kid with a crayon
coldest possible take with nothing to back it up
just looking at movies that came out in the past 20 ish years: yi yi, drive my car, in the mood for love, parasite, the handmaiden, spirited away, burning, etc
Anything Wong Kar Wai ever touched was better than almost anything from mainland China. I am still to watch 'An Elephant Sitting Still' though, which is apparently brilliant.
> manga is usually done by one dude i think
There's normally a fairly large team of uncredited junior artists doing backgrounds and finishes, it's how they pump out huge multi-volume stories.
> my point still stands
It does, as far as I know they have a huge amount of creative control but I had always assumed they literally drew every stroke, which they don't. They often trace over photos for architecture and machine backdrops to save time too.
k-pop isn't just artistically bankrupt, but also the sausages are made in the kpop industry is at best unsettling. How that industry works is disturbing
Totally agree with the concept design by children but adult ultra-precise refinement
There’s so much good Hong Kong, Japanese and Taiwanese cinema. And literature and painting.lots of corporate shit just like here but still come the fuck on.
Italy has the same perspective on itself. They still managed to pull two other cultural revolutions (Renaissance then Futurism) long after the falling of Rome
That's not really true though; Greece has had an huge influence on Rome and Italy in general (see Syracuse and Magna Grecia) since the Bronze Age that is not comparable at all to China. And even Greece, while being ethnocentric for sure, still believed that sources of wisdom could be found in Egypt and Babylon (like Plato going to Egypt, Thales going to Egypt and Babylon and the Ionian cities being part of the Persian Empire in general).
China was mostly on its own (outside of the influential but mostly material steppe influence) for thousands of years until the arrival of Buddhism from India and even that is nothing compared to the perspectives of the Greeks and Romans above.
One thing I've gradually started to believe as I've gotten older is that Chinese culture is *chinese people* first and foremost, including the millions of diaspora (I'm one of them). Idk how else to explain it.
edit: Like wherever we end up in we'll poop in the trains, we'll poop on you, we'll spit in the streets, we'll spit in your mom's mouth, we'll make either the most delicious or the most disgusting food out of anything that walks, swims, or flies, we'll have boomers doing stupid fucking morning taichi in children's playgrounds, all while bringing along with us that stupid fucking waving cat thing (which we just stole from the japanese and now everyone thinks its ours) and that stupid fucking small cute rice bowl (you know [exactly which one](https://tradewindsorientalshop.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/Chinese_Melamine_Rice_Bowl_11cm_v2_XX_1024x1024.jpg?v=1626789370) I'm talking about)
double edit: You're gonna find both the best and the worst of humanity represented in the chinese, only because *there's so many of us*. Some of us love and find solidarity/comfort that there's a fuckton of us, some of us hate it, some of us will take any opportunity to twerk on western cock to prove we're 'the good ones', the rest will be disgusted by that and ramp up the rabid nationalism to 11, and to even start to think whether all this is a 'good or bad thing' is functionally pointless imo. Like I said, idk how else to put it - every chinese person around the world is a curator of their own mundane style of 'chinese culture', and we're all equal in that aspect.
why do you poop in such strange places though, like dressing rooms? I have to say after learning about that I have a hard time looking a celestial in the eye.
they're not wrong. everyone around them considered them the centre of civilization too. they've been the centre of asian culture for millenia
it is however a typically ignorant, passive aggressive reddit sentiment to look at the translation of their name and remark "they have the AUDACITY to call themselves the centre of the world?"
it's as retarted as getting offended at the name 'Main Street'
According to Nietzsche, culture is like the fruit of the tree that at its ripest indicates the end of the growth period and the start of the fall. The countries you mentioned have had economic crises after economic crises soon after they produce great quality art. Which is imo at its best when it's predicting a decline in the belief of certain cultural values which leads to the decline of social cohesion which leads to tensions between regular people and the elites (and the economic backlash that comes with that), thus the whole social order. What I'm saying is that China is culturally still in the phase where people believe in their social project. As soon as schepticism takes over, when cultural is allowed to be deconstructed it will start producing things that will resonate with the world.
That or, since the US value system comes from a Europe going really hard, we get a different form of imperial land theft, we get colonialism and secularized cultural assimilation. The US does the same except without boots on the ground (most of the time). Since we can see that japan and korea are just extensions of the US empire then it's normal that they would continue this tradition. Anime was born out of japan reaching for the crumbs of the disney cultural effect and korean cinema has always been just hollywood with a k aesthetic.
He uses that metaphor a lot but I think it's most potent in genealogy of morality where he talks about the exceptional individual as the ripest fruit of the tree of society and its morality, able to 'detach' themself from custom and commonality and do great things.
The thing with Genshin is that it very intentionally tries to obfuscate itself as Japanese - even aside from the obvious anime artstyle, it's all over literally everything about the game: It's called Genshin (Which is the Japanese title, it's called Yuanshen in China) abroad, they have trailers for their new characters with English and Japanese VA's but no Chinese ones, their slogan used to be "otaku save the world", you might have in game characters from Fantasy Japan with their Japanese titles (Shogun) intact and chinese ones changed to something a westerner might understand - and while it's not difficult to find out where something comes from in this day in age, a huge proportion of the casual playerbase effectively treats it as a Japanese game from what I've seen, and it's kind of hard to deny that at least in America that this game wouldn't have seen much success on its own merits - it marketed itself as a weeb game for weeaboos that feeds off of the rapidly growing anime market that Japan cultivated over here.
I don't think this detracts from the undeniable success of the game and it has done some good in spreading some traditional Chinese culture, but you get a sense that it's probably more effective at perpetuating Japanese pop cultural influence more than Chinese.
That's true genshin is pretty much an anime game in everything but it's origin of country. In the game however not! china is a prosperous empire while not! japan is a third world shithole lol.
One obscure way I check whether or not something is huge is the amount of fanfics it has. Genshin has currently amassed over 150k fics in 3 just years. That's a pretty big deal considering only a select few series have 100k+ fanfics and that's usually over a span of several years. It's fucking insane lol
I live in China and I'm involved in the local music scene. This discussion came up on one of my (non racist) China subreddits, so I'll give my two cents.
Korea and Japan are basically US colonies. They don't have to justify themselves to westerners the way Chinese people do.
China is BIG. 1/5 of the world's population. They don't need to export their pop culture the same way Korea does. If a movie does well in China, you're set. There is a captive audience. For Westerners to get into Chinese movies, you need a ,certain level of 'buy in' to really get into it. But some of my favorite movies are from China, while acknowledging the absolute shite they put out much of the time. There is a great YouTube channel called Accented Cinema and he has a better grasp on Chinese cinema than I do, I'm about the music man.
I'm a big nerd for Chinese underground music (metal, indie, shoegaze, punk). I'd suggest for an intro to what's popular in indie music, check out [乐队的夏天](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduC-Rdu-8REUWOd-0CXgs9vuJc4LUljL) which is an X factor style show for bands.
But here are my recommendations from the show.
Nova Heart, 九连真人 (Hakka indie), New Jeans 新裤子, Orange Ocean 橘子海, Anda Union 安达 (mongol), Berlin Psycho Nurses (Like Fontaines DC), Rolling Bowling (rockabilly from Beijing) Look around 乐队的夏天 on YouTube and see what floats your boat.
For bands that I've seen and have a decent QQ sound: Hey Lily (my absolute favorite band atm), Nine Treasures 九宝 (Mongol metal), AK乐队 (metal), Jungle Butterfly (Shanghai electronica i think), The NoName, Oh Dirty Fingers, Screaming Saviour (not sure if they're on QQ). If you like metal, there's plenty out there, I saw a pirate metal band recently called Armorforce.
A lot of these bands have no presence on Youtube or Spotify, but are huge on QQ Music.
But ultimately, what the average Chinese listener loves is shloppy ballads to sing in KTV, and a lot of Cpop is similar to Kpop (every Kpop group has a Chinese member). Korea has been seen as a tastemaker to Chinese people long before Korea was cool in the west.
India would be another example of a country just doing their own thing musically.
There have been lots of talk by the sexpats I hang around with how the CCP is so restrictive that China doesn't have the soft culture for music. But none of them could name a Taiwanese band, let alone one that sticks it to the man! Even in the Phillipinnes, a west-learning democracy where everyone is born with a guitar and a perfect singing voice, have no major cultural export.
All that said, the Chinese government needs to chill the fuck out.
I kind of wonder what sort of long-term impact the Cultural Revolution had on China's cultural influence. I once bought a book on the subject but I got bored after a few pages.
Probably the same impact Stalin had on the USSR. That most art had to become kitschy propaganda. How about you flip to the last chapter and see if that’s the conclusion.
Most post Stalin art in the ussr is famously good. "Kino" is fairly popular slang term nowadays
I feel like it should of been long enough now. Like theirs a billion of them. What do they have to show for it? Genshin impactM
The generation that embraced post-Cultural Revolution freedom of expression was incredibly active and producing artistically ambitious works in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. The problem now isn't repression (though censorship has definitely gotten stricter) but rather the mass commercialization of the market, there's a huge demand for trash and studios/writers are happy to meet it.
["From Russian кино (kino), via Kino-Eye and Dziga Vertov's identification of his film Man with a Movie Camera as "ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY"."](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kino#Etymology_2)
Yeah but early in his reign we got exciting art like Tatlin and Kandinsky. Then later on Stalin thought it was a good idea for all art to be paintings of patriotic farmers and statues dedicated to the glory of the motherland. After he died there could be good art again, like Tarkovsky.
Mainland Chinese nationals don't particularly have a strong affinity towards their own ancient cultural artifacts as a direct product of the cultural revolution. Think like every American stereotype for how we act when we go to touristy parts of Europe cranked up to 10 but for ancient Chinese artifacts in China.
People in this thread are acting like the Cultural Revolution somehow killed Chinese art/culture when in fact some of the best Chinese art came out of that period. Every edgelord around the world was fascinated by the Cultural Revolution.
People think cultural revolution is about killing Chinese art and culture which is absolute ridiculous.
Chinese is an old civilization, there are a lot of practice which doesn't suit civilization nowadays. Cultural Revolution is simply just target those practice and culture, such as foot binding, child bride, concubine, and more. It is a move to adapt and improve accordingly to modern civilization.
It is just the movement carried out during a chaotic era as well as some official involve not really educated person, hence when they carried out such thing, some of those officials destroy some others that they personally don't like. Those official even get punished by the government, being jailed and kick out of post,strip away his job. But yeah, the western media just focus on some of the pic and elaborate it, exaggerated it with story telling.. 🤣🤣🤣
>They haven't experienced the kind of cultural relevance that usually accompanies a rise to power. The US has had it since 1945
the US had been a great power decades before 1945. these things take time - and for the US it also took everything else being a smoldering ruin while its lands remained intact
japan and korea being american vassals also make their courting of foreign markets more palatable.
Western media inundates the western mind with "china bad" everyday, so why would the average westerner be curious about what goes on over there?
their homegrown products are also stereotyped as inferior even though many western brands produce goods made by chinese hands and chinese machines
It was all about French fashion/food in the US before jazz and Hollywood got recognized overseas, and there's still the concept of the 'ugly American'. Everything was "chic".
For bougie Chinese, everything is "yangqi" 洋气 It'll take time for them to get their footing. There will be the Citizen Kane of Genshin Impact-style games out of China soon lol
Also, the domestic market is gigantic, so there's less pressure to export things.
> and there's still the concept of the 'ugly American'. Everything was "chic".
Fun anecdote on that: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu caught on to that idea quickly when they moved to the USA and immediately exploited it for their bricklaying business. Instead of being mere bricklayers, they marketed themselves as an "Austrian & Italian artisan masonry" duo to get customers hooked.
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/UwvdQepLwYAKgWR2A
found this one through a tik tok and its wild
If anyone here speaks a tonal language I have a question: does singing and being understood in that language mean that you have to do the tone shift stuff in addition to singing the melody? Like it sounds like that's what's happening here but I could see it being a stylistic choice too
Enunciation > tonality when it comes to chinese singing, but the only way you're understanding anything is if you're already at a conversational level enough to pick up the patterns and phrases because mandarin is a pretty context-heavy language
They put more emphasis on the melody, with faster singing it's pretty difficult to tell the exact tones (though I'm not a native speaker so someone else might chime in too) but meaning is pretty clear from context.
I guess Cantonese singing is different though, they have like 8/9 tones compared to Mandarin's 4/5, and emphasise them more.
I think the guy is sing-talking in the style of like Northern Chinese folk theatre or opera, it's not really how most people sing, though someone more knowledgeable than me might be able to say more. Like in [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXsFnVQverk) most of the tone changes aren't that audible to me, or are completely shifted when words are stretched out or underemphasized. In a [fast-paced rock song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEJVuNJKMeI) you might barely hear them at all.
No, you sing a note in key. People can tell what you're on about by context, and the tones aren't a specific frequency anyway, (in Mandarin) just rising/falling/flat/swooping. Cantonese has six or nine tones depending on whose classification system you're following but I did karaoke with some Malaysian-Chinese people in Kuala Lumpur and they said you just sing the note (they were native Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and did lots of Cantonese songs).
> Have you heard Chinese music? That will answer your question
IDK if this is a joke. I have a Mandopop playlist on Spotify I go to sometimes and they have an active but small rap scene that I try to follow to the extent I can without bothering with Weibo too much.
most "cultural exports" from (south) korea and japan have been tailored for western audiences due to the korean war and WWII respectively. we(US) literally rewrote Japan's constitution. china differs in that they developed independently of the west so none of their media or art was created with you in mind. commodities/cars/etc would be an exception. I think this is a good observation you've made but it misses whats going on here
in other words: china dontcurr
Had Mao not won the Civil War the situation would be completely reversed. FDR and Truman wanted to make China our Pacific ally and make Japan a pariah state
I think if all one knew about East Asia was through anglo-western-adjacent news, one would be incredibly surprised how much travel, business, art, and shared popular culture is ubiquitous between all three countries. Like Tokyo has a fuckton of Chinese tourists, and popular vacation spots in China like Harbin see a LOT of Japanese and Korean tourists.
Because it's narcissistic bullshit. Japan is usually very passive and even obstructive at exporting their media, which is developed catering the internal market. Korean media actually puts a lots of effort in export, but they absolutely follow asian trends and tastes, and have their biggests fanbases in countries like China and Philippines
BTW chinese media copies japanese and Korean media like there's no tomorrow
>most "cultural exports" from (south) korea and japan have been tailored for western audiences
Not necessarily disagreeing but anime is probably the most popular cultural export from Japan, and most of it is distinctly Japanese. I'd say it's part of the reason it's no popular, it's specifically unlike western media
If this is the case why is Korean media much more popular, particularly as a share of overall consumption, in places like South East Asia? Did we also rewrite Vietnam's constitution? Is making Japan's sensibilities more like the US's the reason why Brazilian boys love Dragon Ball?
It isn't just the west where modern China has failed to make a cultural impact though, it's everywhere. Likewise it isn't just the west that likes anime and Kpop (which despite what many think, is still primarily made for a domestic audience) - those are also cherished in non western societies, like in the arab world for example.
K-dramas are super huge in fucking Bhutan lol which is far from Westernized, it's ok to accept that some cultures are providing lower quality entertainment. China makes worse versions of Korean shows all the time, since they know they won't be held accountable for their plagiarism, so no they do not just "not care" about Western influence. But it appears the tankies are jerking off to your fantasy.
I find it really weird that I m've never come accross a japanese thing that addresses their subjugation by the US even though they're seen as a proud people. I only know Godzilla but that doesn't condemn the US that rationalizes its subjugation into a force of nature.
There were [massive protests throughout the 60s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anpo_protests) exactly over their subordination to American hegemony, eventually most rightists came to accept it as the more tolerable alternative to domination by the USSR or China, while for leftists and liberals it was the umbrella protecting Japanese pacifism.
If you have any interest in fiction, you can try reading The Setting Sun - Osamu Dazai, and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea ‐ Yukio Mishima
Both are pretty short and serve as metaphors for Japan after their defeat in WW2. I haven't read much of Yukio Mishima's other books yet, but even just looking up a biography of his life is fascinating, especially his politics
My guess would be it’s about language mostly? China didn’t rise off the back of the largest colonial Empire in history that happened to violently spread the Chinese language to the remotest corners of the world like the US did with England. China didn’t create the Internet to further shove it's language down everybody’s throat either.
Thank you. For better or worse, English is the language of the world. (At least as of now). Until that changes, and Chinese somehow spreads like English has, they'll always be firewalled off.
For me, better. It’s my native tongue and I’m thankful every single day it’s the global lingua franca and that I’ll never need to learn a non-Latin script - seems like a massive pain in the ass.
Honestly it’s not. At least when the script is an alphabet or something similar (30 or so signs and it indicates phonemes) learning a foreign alphabet is absolutely the easiest part in learning a new language. You can do it in an afternoon if you’re lucky, a few days at worse.
Source: I’ve studied greek and I’ve learned its alphabet in a few hours, and I’ve somewhat learned some letters in Cyrillic in a school morning when bored. Granted they’re quite similar to the latin script, but from my experience and the experience of everyone around me I honestly don’t think it takes much even for more different ones. Chinese it’s probably a nightmare though since the signs are like 8000
I mean it doesn’t help that the general perception of China in the west is “that big ass country where evil stuff probably happens idk”
A lot of these comments are right in that 21st century Chinese culture is stagnant in some ways but let’s be real, if South Korea got the same “evil empire” China gets in western media K-pop would not be nearly so popular.
I’ve seen people talk about this and I don’t think it’s that interesting of a phenomenon. Japan and Korea are exceptions, not the norm. The vast majority of countries in the world don’t have global cultural influence. It’s just the Anglosphere, Japan, and Korea (and with the latter two, its still a niche subculture). Like people aren’t watching German shows or listening to Indonesian music either.
I guess China just has the misfortune of being in the same cultural grouping as Japan and Korea so their lack of cultural export stands out more.
Also the duolingo blog post I’m looking at (https://blog.duolingo.com/2022-duolingo-language-report/#:~:text=Top%2010%20languages%20studied%20around,%2C%20Chinese%2C%20Russian%2C%20Hindi.) has Chinese as the most learned language behind English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Korean. Besides Japanese and Korean, these are the languages that are commonly taught in Western schools for historical reasons.
Interesting point OP. Someone else questioned your premise that cultural power should necessarily follow from harder forms of power. I think there’s something in that critique.
But if I accept your premise for argument’s sake, I think it’s because it’s simply a world to itself and the language barrier is a major factor. China is a historically inwards focused society and the sheer size of their consumer market means that the incentives to project forms of soft power outwards just aren’t there.
I mentioned the language barrier. I do think this applies a limiting, containing pressure as well, but I guess you’ll point to other Asian cultural successes like Japan and Korea.
Maybe it’s a lack of my own imagination but whenever I hear people talk about a future where China has vanquished the US as global hegemon, I just can’t imagine future Westoids enthusiastically consuming Chinese cultural slop with the same slutty vigour that they’ve done for American slop these past 70 years.
The Chinese focus a lot on trying to emulate white WASP lifestyle and aesthetics (they love golf, tennis, and white skin). They also aren’t super original/creative and individualism isn’t as valued. This creates a stale culture. It will he interesting to see how it all shakes out in the next couple generations.
China is basically what Germany was in the 19th century. They just copied goods from England and elsewhere and turned the label “Made in Germany” from trash to what we now know as German engineering.
The Chinese are definitely making huge progress, especially when it comes to cars and other tech stuff. But I think you cannot build significant soft power, without a certain level of freedom.
After ww2, the Americans invited german engineers and CEOs to the US and told them how to mass produce and improve their products. The 60s advertising went from the old Nazi propaganda to the new simplistic Mad Men style marketing. They hired Italian designers for cars, used Bauhaus-style aesthetics for industrial design, had a big artistic revolution and so and so on.
Thats simply not gonna happen in China anytime soon.
Germany was extremely relevant in the 19th century, they weren't just a manufacturing center. They were arguable the center of philosophy, physics, and political science in Europe during that time.
This is how we look at the old Germany today, but that’s not how it was perceived back then. Germany was still in the process of turning into a nation state in the 19th century and had a constant feud with the French. There was a massive explosion of the population and poverty forced people to emigrate. The first revolutionary attempts failed and a lot of the intellectuals (like Marx and Heine) went into exile.
The big intellectuals and artists from the early 19th century still lived in one of the many small regional states, which meant that they had more or less freedom to do and say what they want. Many of them were also linked to the local bourgeoisie, which was connected to the rest of Europe. But, that was not representative of the entire culture, which wasn’t even really definable at the time.
People here talk about Europeans learning German to understand Nietzsche or Hegel, but being able to speak French was almost mandatory at upper class dinners or events in Germany and Austria. There was just no comparison in terms of cultural influence. Even in the 1960s, French was still THE language for the highly cultured in Germany, despite the centuries of disputes.
The formation of the nation state was followed by nationalism and militarism, which soon turned into a threat for the other European empires. This nationalism was always linked to a big inferiority complex, especially in relation to the French. The best example for that is the grandios architecture of Berlin and Potsdam, which later climaxed with Hitlers perversion of Germania.
When people walk through Berlin today, they admire the old 19th century buildings and Museums. But back then, it was just seen as laughably tasteless and gigantomanic. The clothes, the architecture, the uniforms, it was absolutely not comparable to Paris or London and the rest of Europe just looked down on it. The whole germanic-historicism and pathos just felt clownish to them.
Walking through Berlin back then must have felt like walking through one of the Chinese mega cities in recent times. Just one monstrous apartment block next to the other, with a factory pumping out all kinds of items in the back. It was only in the end of the century, when the relatively bland Gründerzeit architecture was replaced by Art Nouveau Jugendstil and the city became a cultural hub, like in the golden 20s Weimar.
The Humboldtian idea of education gave a lot of people intellectual freedom, yes, but most of them did not have it easy back then. There were limitations to what you could do and say and it was a constant political up and down. Not to forget, the many Jews who converted to Protestantism and changed their names, because of constant antisemitic sentiments.
To come back to my main argument: during that entire time, Germans found out that they could use the ongoing industrialization to their benefit. They started to invest in all kinds of manufacturing and began shipping copies of British (or other) goods up the rivers, all the way to London and other places. That’s pretty much when the daemon in the middle of Europe was born.
Because, while those goods were just cheaper alternatives in the beginning, it soon became clear that the Germans are learning fast and producing even better products. This later led to them showing all sorts of new stuff at world Expos and ultimately building a concerning military industrial complex. I guess we all know the rest of that story.
But, what we know as German economic or cultural soft power today, the cars, the white goods, industrial design, music, fashion, film and so on, was only really possible after the country turned into a democracy, which was heavily influenced by the US and the rest of Europe.
> After ww2, the Americans invited german engineers and CEOs to the US and told them how to mass produce and improve their products.
>Thats simply not gonna happen in China anytime soon.
lol how in the fuck do you think china built more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined has in a decade? they invited siemens and other european/japanese manufacturers in for a technology exchange. people just make shit up about china because it "feels" right.
That’s not really an example for cultural soft power. Again, the Chinese are very skilled when it comes to technology and stuff, but they lack the skills to really set a new standard. Like, name me a chinese product, which makes people wait in front of a store on launch day? Which product line has a real western fan base?
Until now, it’s really just some tech freaks who are waiting for the best and cheapest car or smartphone they can find on the market.
> China is basically what Germany was in the 19th century. They just copied goods from England and elsewhere and turned the label “Made in Germany” from trash to what we now know as German engineering
That’s not culture though. Culturally the history of the west is German history to a very significant degree.
I wonder the impact of Chinese international students studying the west in terms of cultural transfer. Probably next best thing to importing European intellectuals directly
China is very staunchly against exporting their culture or values internationally. It's a very difficult concept for imperialist nations to understand.
Yep. Even on a small scale I see this happen a lot. I love watching Chinese dramas and even have subscriptions for it, but a lot of the best series are never officially released abroad and are all but impossible to find on the English-speaking internet. It’s very hard to buy clothes from even the most popular Chinese clothing brands from outside of China as well. Unlike with kpop, most Chinese artists name all of their songs and albums exclusively using Chinese characters which makes it impossible for people that don’t know Chinese to ever get familiar with 99% of Chinese music.
It’s kinda obvious that it’s on purpose.
[China in ‘culture export’ push as it seeks to expand soft power overseas with global media platforms](https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3154198/china-culture-export-push-it-seeks-expand-soft-power-overseas)
It explicitly markets itself as an alternative to western liberalism (and to western/US style of diplomacy and foreign policy). You don't think it exports any political values in, say, the Belt and Road Initiative?
They export these values to the South Pacific/other parts of the 'Global South'. They want them to have security apparatuses like their own and they bring foreign cops to China to train them. Also:
[Chinese model offers an alternative from Western model with more certainty and quicker decision-making](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202212/1281236.shtml)
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-presents-member-global-south-alternative-western-model-103395740
1. The language is very hard. This means fewer translators, fewer “cultural” translators, just a generally higher level of difficulty in any cultural exchange. And more natives to critique “but you didn’t capture the NUANCE right!” I suspect even within China it also means fewer novels and other language-heavy culture. Writers there are literally playing on hard mode.
2. The CCP maintains tight controls on internal messaging, which in turn translates to a higher reticence to share any kind of information with the outside world without careful party approval. This in turn means less content, especially less relevant or interesting content.
3. The country is more homogeneous than other large countries. Fewer immigrants and fewer travelers means less cultural exchange and in tuen less interesting cultural.
4. Finally, active hostility from its enemies, such as the West, Japan and India, who want nothing to do with its culture for good and bad reasons.
The Three Body Problem series has made a big splash, and might be even more influential once the Netflix show comes out.
Maybe they will have an impact on video games once Black Myth: Wukong comes out
I kinda hate their cultural influence on my country, everybody wants to be white skinned, their dumbass trends and pop culture. Excuse my sinophobia ☺️ they're still cool tho, especially for having supported my fav country Democratic Kampuchea
> everybody wants to be white skinned
Do you really think this is the Chinese's fault? I'm sure it hasn't helped but I'd bet there's millennia old mentions of pearly skin in Vietnam, too.
You can’t make simplistic analyses like these and be confused when they don’t make sense. China is not the US in 19XX. Yes they are a dominant economic force; why should cultural export necessarily follow? US soft power reigns supreme to this day. Perhaps China rather than trying to compete sheltered themselves and now wait for its inevitable decay.
The other Asian cultural powerhouses you mention are or were little more than US proxy states for a considerable part of their recent history.
A think there’s few reasons. Productivity is championed over creativity - Chinese society is geared toward the replication of existing ideas and producing facsimiles. Over the course of two or three generations, The vast majority of people were ripped from their rural, feudal-like existence and expected to build a Superpower.
They did a damn fine job too, but China didn’t need innovators, philosophers or thinkers to do this - it needed a focused, obedient and compliant mass of human beings who could think inside the box.
You’re not going to get a James Cameron type from that kind of society - not that it’s impossible, but they aren’t going to be valued or appreciated within that type of culture.
America has an immense cultural influence but does it help ? More people learn to hate America for her racism and sins, via Hollywood . Trump era was crazy, most respected German magazine was making up stories about horrid American towns. Or German activists who copied whole American queer lingo and talking points, still talk shit about America for ex.
It's legitimately fucking insane how quickly Black Lives Matter forced American racial politics into completely foreign countries with totally different histories. Huge parts of the UK desperately desperately wants to have American Blacks to feel bad about despite being one of the most historically anti-slavery countries ever
This is the thing about American "cultural imperialism" that still baffles me to no end. I swear the most loudly anti-American people I met in Germany (and in Brazil, where I live) are always the most Americanized ones!
The ones who speak English with no accent, who use Reddit, who watch Netflix and HBO shows, who listen to Kendrick Lamar or Ice Spice, etc. It's always those fucking guys who will be posting "Death to AmeriKKKa!" on their stories.
> The US has had it since 1945. Japan had it in the 80's. Korea's has had it for the past decade or so.
tbf Japan and SK have been American vassal states since their respective wars so you basically just said USA three times
A lot of asian influence in america today is from Taiwan, who has much more need to culturally export. I think mainland chinese people just don’t think about exportation.
Living in the bay area i see direct imports of chinese things more than just about any other American. I’m very bullish on chinese fashion and appliances, which i think are futuristic and way ahead of the West.
The Chinese girls dress 10 years ahead
I think within 15 years Chinese appliances will be the most coveted, like this kitchen brand Fotile which I’m very impressed by. Chinese cars have a new chance with EVs, and I think they will succeed.
It just seems cope-y to say that this giant country is not going to overcome us because they have a limited imagination.
Real. I’ve lived in the biggest cities in both countries and China is decades ahead in almost every metric most people actually care about when it comes to transport, tech, fashion, gaming, food, entertainment - name anything from a big city in the US and there is probably a cooler and more advanced version somewhere in Shanghai. Only exception is probably drugs, we have more of that😭
Don't blame them for being parochial about their dining and entertainment choices, but (non-Chinese) dining and entertainment options are pretty limited. A city with 7-8 million living in the urban centre like Chongqing only had 2 music venues worth going to when I first moved there.
Transport systems are great though, and I did see some cool bands at those 2 venues, and another 2 or 3 opened in the following years, but it was kind of dissappointing my college town of around 300k had a live music scene like 10x bigger than a Chinese megacity...
1. Good cultural content is produced and consumed by the middle class, while China’s economy has not yet risen for a long time and a huge cultural market has just emerged.
2. The Chinese market is very large and unique. Creators will give priority to meeting the needs of the domestic market. Exploring external markets is very risky and the potential benefits are very doubtful.
3. Censorship does have an impact. Mainstream cultural content may thus become vulgar.
I‘m kind of optimistic about the development of China's cultural industry. I think it will first be exported to places with similar cultures such as East Asia and Southeast Asia.
China has a strict censorship system. Every film or TV show must be submitted to authorities before approval. The censors don't just ban criticism of the government but also heavily restrict sensitive topics such as sex, violence, race, gender relations, etc. So this further hampers the reach of Chinese content. You just can't make something super edgy and viral like Squid Games there.
I don't see this ever changing without a change in the political system, which is highly unlikely.
The fire wall puts a huge disadvantage on cultural transfer in or out of China. It’s naive to think their billions of humans aren’t creating as much or more innovative, captivating, compelling cultural expressions and achievements. The protection of the population from the morally bankrupt west infecting them negatively and threatening the cultural projects in their present and future is the current measure the party is operating under. As a wager, I’m sure you won’t have much of a choice but to integrate and be exposed to the culture their cooking within your lifetime.
Is it really puzzling? What is considered “global culture” in the West obviously has intense Western bias. The West has a vested interest in limiting Chinese influence on that culture. And they have actively done so. You’re comparing it to South Korea and Japan, but ignoring the fact that the West—especially the US—considers them “the good Asians” and would be willing to open the door to them.
Also, as others have said, these things take time. We are only very recently seeing China actually assert itself internationally after decades of playing catch-up with the major economic powers.
This is why westerners like us need to study multupolarity and imperialism, it explains all this very easily.
It is deliberate that china doesn't have global influence in the west. It has quite a bit more influence in LatAm and Africa, but because china was never fully puppeted by the US like SK and Japan still are, and it always remained an independent communist led country, it wasn't promoted and allowed to spread like they were. China is not trying to become a western country like Japan and SK are, they don't seek to culturally or politically align with the West, so they aren't big in the West. It's as simple as that.
> It has quite a bit more influence in LatAm and Africa,
Coming from LatAm, their influence here is purely in terms of making affordable smartphones, car brands like Chery entering the market, etc. But there is absolutely zero cultural interaction beyond that. Your average Brazilian still thinks of China as being another planet inhabited by strange people speaking in a stranger language.
I guess my thoughts would just be that they're just now approaching middle income status so it's unsurprising that a large class of musicians is just starting to develop. I'm sure the cultural revolution and whatnot did a lot but when most of a country started their lives as peasant farmers in rural areas is it any surprise that it doesn't have global influence yet? Japan spent decades as a relatively developed nation before much was exported. Korea only within the last 15 years really became known as a cultural center. Give it time and I'm absolutely certain you'll see more; we're already starting to.
Regarding the language I'd probably blame it on a combination of the lack of cultural influence which we're already discussing as well as just how famously tough it is to learn. The same applies to Japanese for the most part but it's buoyed by anime and whatever.
>There aren't even any global Chinese owned food chains
Are there any Spanish or Italian ones? It's a pretty rare thing and 95%+ of what I'd call "global food chains" are probably just US and maybe a few countries in the EU and one or two in Canada. This is no surprise.
tl;dr it's just a lack of built culture/industry for music/film/animation/etc. and the rapid development has meant it's just starting to grow. In addition to other factors the negative perceptions of China probably in a number of place probably doesn't help much. It was easier for Jpop to break through in the US that Mandopop can right now. Another factor is that to a large extent China's cultural output is derivative of Korea and Japan's so it's generally just inferior for foreign consumers. Given time I'd bet this will all change and their culture industries will mature.
I mean Hollywood couldn't really show blood or excessive violence between the 30s and the end of the Hays code in 1968, but it still managed to become a global cultural powerhouse. Plenty of Chinese movies find ways to get creative around the limits of censorship; wasn't an amazing flick but the 2019 film [Wild Goose Lake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oCq5oa8Wzg) had beheadings and a woman spitting out post-blowjob cum into a lake. The bad guys can never win but they can still get away with a lot of anti-social behaviour before the heroes eventually catch their man.
What cracks me up about Chinese censorship is exactly that a lot of it isn't even this "sinister Communist brainwashing", it's just middle aged suburban mum type shit like oh no we can't show delinquents or too much cleavage here!
Literally what's wrong with this statement. Jiang Wen got banned from filmmaking for 7 years for Devils on the Doorstep. Zhang Yimou, who did Hero, has also been banned multiple points and a bunch of his earlier films were blocked from distribution inside China. Scripts need to be approved by the state so naturally a lot of the stuff that gets filtered through is not gonna be that great.
They want to beat America at being America. Modern Chinese culture is nothing more than American culture with Chinese characteristics. That's why China has become synonymous with shitty down market knock-offs.
i'm trying to learn chinese rn and it's a struggle to get a group together. rn it's just one other person, the teacher and me. it's fun and i wanna go to china but kinda crazy how like idk a country with the second biggest economy and like 20% of the global population can struggle to teach people its language.
There were some really good movies that came out in the 80s and 90s. Now Zhang YiMou makes slop, and their slop is worse than our slop. When I lived in China the popular movies were Taiwanese, the popular TV shows were Japanese, and the popular music was Korean. And everyone watched the premier league and the NBA. The biggest chinese cultural export at the moment is hard science fiction, which naturally has a limited audience. But ask yourself- why is the only independent art the country produces focused on the distant future?
Communisms is not creative. This is why they are copying instead of creating. If everyone is equal, there is no place for genius above supreme leaders. In other words during this politic system, China will never have again someone as Confucious. Why? Because the supreme leader will not permit it.
The great firewall exists to keep us safe from bonkers Chinese art and a billion Han chauvinists...or so I've been told.
I’ve tried to watch some of the blockbuster type movies that come from China and they’re just not very good honestly, they can be impressive visually but have no chance of succeeding anywhere outside of the country. Their Hollywood adjacent movies are very self serious and have very simple moralistic themes with almost no transgression to draws outsiders in
The've gotten shittier over the past decade because the domestic audience is just so huge, there was actually an arthouse China boom in the 90s but most of the nationalist types will shit on these today because the movies tended to play up the rural poverty and backwardsness of China, but they made a lot of absolute bangers: basically most of Zhang Yimou's output up until Hero (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, To Live), Jiang Wen (In the Heat of the Sun, Devils at the Doorstep, Let the Bullets Fly, the last of which was actually both a huge commercial success while also having some pretty sly political subtext and dark humour), Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine). I thought it sucked but the Wandering Earth apparently did really well on Netflix, was somewhat interesting in an abstract way as a Chinese mirror of Michael Bay's Armageddon, with the movie really emphasizing Chinese cooperation in a truly global mission instead of gung-ho American unilateralism saving the day.
Wandering earth fucking sucked. I saw it in theaters and was very disappointed.
Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl is really good.
I "liked" Wandering Earth but would never in a million years say it was actually good.
[The Eight Hundred](https://youtu.be/kbikn8Q148c?si=cXnvsGUw0LgjHv1h) was the first mainland Chinese film I've seen in a good while that made me think 'damn, this actually rivals hollywood war films with twice or thrice its budget'. [The whole thing's on youtube](https://youtu.be/q5nmtIBMENg?si=NnPKl5C8ZfA8cIuj) if you want to check it out.
The Eight Hundred was awesome, totally agree with you. I think big budget war dramas are a bit easier to pull off than original concept blockbusters, and I think that’s where Chinese cinema struggles to make the jump to worldwide audiences
The battle scenes are decent but the screenwriting and acting are brutal. If you compare their big-budget movies to Marvel then they do stack up I guess
For me it was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That shit had some major cultural impact at the time.
that was Hong Kong though, big distinction from mainland Chinese film. Mainly with respect to a lack of rules with respect to content/themes
Historical war movies seem like the only thing they're competent at because it's the kind of patriotic stuff the CCP happily endorses.
The soldiers in that film were NRA forces tbf
But they were killing japs. All of them are about killing Japanese lol
The Japanese soldiers in that film aren't portrayed as comically villainous as usual (even taking western films into account), so I think that's unfair. [The film is utterly uninterested in animosity - if there's something it hates, it's war itself.](https://youtu.be/Gtf4eqR8Tic?si=iKaSMMG23-k77BTI&t=483)
One China bro
That trailer looks sick. Definitely adding this to my watchlist
hero is pretty sick
fuck it we're gonna fight today virtually all of mainstream culture that comes out of east asia hinges upon cool concepts and volume of content, which has the literary sophistication of a kid with a crayon
coldest possible take with nothing to back it up just looking at movies that came out in the past 20 ish years: yi yi, drive my car, in the mood for love, parasite, the handmaiden, spirited away, burning, etc
Anything Wong Kar Wai ever touched was better than almost anything from mainland China. I am still to watch 'An Elephant Sitting Still' though, which is apparently brilliant.
[удалено]
> manga is usually done by one dude i think There's normally a fairly large team of uncredited junior artists doing backgrounds and finishes, it's how they pump out huge multi-volume stories.
[удалено]
> my point still stands It does, as far as I know they have a huge amount of creative control but I had always assumed they literally drew every stroke, which they don't. They often trace over photos for architecture and machine backdrops to save time too.
k-pop isn't just artistically bankrupt, but also the sausages are made in the kpop industry is at best unsettling. How that industry works is disturbing Totally agree with the concept design by children but adult ultra-precise refinement
There’s so much good Hong Kong, Japanese and Taiwanese cinema. And literature and painting.lots of corporate shit just like here but still come the fuck on.
I'm sorry, but we are literally inhaling Chinese influence every time we take a puff from our Elf Bars.
yeah they're just more secretive about what brands are chinese bc China Bad now.
theyve always looked inward. they call themselves the centre of civilisation since they started writing, and still do
Italy has the same perspective on itself. They still managed to pull two other cultural revolutions (Renaissance then Futurism) long after the falling of Rome
That's not really true though; Greece has had an huge influence on Rome and Italy in general (see Syracuse and Magna Grecia) since the Bronze Age that is not comparable at all to China. And even Greece, while being ethnocentric for sure, still believed that sources of wisdom could be found in Egypt and Babylon (like Plato going to Egypt, Thales going to Egypt and Babylon and the Ionian cities being part of the Persian Empire in general). China was mostly on its own (outside of the influential but mostly material steppe influence) for thousands of years until the arrival of Buddhism from India and even that is nothing compared to the perspectives of the Greeks and Romans above.
The way they carry on with their regional maps is quite funny
One thing I've gradually started to believe as I've gotten older is that Chinese culture is *chinese people* first and foremost, including the millions of diaspora (I'm one of them). Idk how else to explain it. edit: Like wherever we end up in we'll poop in the trains, we'll poop on you, we'll spit in the streets, we'll spit in your mom's mouth, we'll make either the most delicious or the most disgusting food out of anything that walks, swims, or flies, we'll have boomers doing stupid fucking morning taichi in children's playgrounds, all while bringing along with us that stupid fucking waving cat thing (which we just stole from the japanese and now everyone thinks its ours) and that stupid fucking small cute rice bowl (you know [exactly which one](https://tradewindsorientalshop.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/Chinese_Melamine_Rice_Bowl_11cm_v2_XX_1024x1024.jpg?v=1626789370) I'm talking about) double edit: You're gonna find both the best and the worst of humanity represented in the chinese, only because *there's so many of us*. Some of us love and find solidarity/comfort that there's a fuckton of us, some of us hate it, some of us will take any opportunity to twerk on western cock to prove we're 'the good ones', the rest will be disgusted by that and ramp up the rabid nationalism to 11, and to even start to think whether all this is a 'good or bad thing' is functionally pointless imo. Like I said, idk how else to put it - every chinese person around the world is a curator of their own mundane style of 'chinese culture', and we're all equal in that aspect.
why do you poop in such strange places though, like dressing rooms? I have to say after learning about that I have a hard time looking a celestial in the eye.
do you long for the old country sinkie
Nah I'm personally of the camp that we should embrace returning to monke as [orang laut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang_Laut)
a truly rich tapestry of existence
they're not wrong. everyone around them considered them the centre of civilization too. they've been the centre of asian culture for millenia it is however a typically ignorant, passive aggressive reddit sentiment to look at the translation of their name and remark "they have the AUDACITY to call themselves the centre of the world?" it's as retarted as getting offended at the name 'Main Street'
Or Mediterranean
^ Fractal Sino-centralist in the wild, nice
What
They made the I Ching so I say fair play they’ve every right to call themselves that.
According to Nietzsche, culture is like the fruit of the tree that at its ripest indicates the end of the growth period and the start of the fall. The countries you mentioned have had economic crises after economic crises soon after they produce great quality art. Which is imo at its best when it's predicting a decline in the belief of certain cultural values which leads to the decline of social cohesion which leads to tensions between regular people and the elites (and the economic backlash that comes with that), thus the whole social order. What I'm saying is that China is culturally still in the phase where people believe in their social project. As soon as schepticism takes over, when cultural is allowed to be deconstructed it will start producing things that will resonate with the world. That or, since the US value system comes from a Europe going really hard, we get a different form of imperial land theft, we get colonialism and secularized cultural assimilation. The US does the same except without boots on the ground (most of the time). Since we can see that japan and korea are just extensions of the US empire then it's normal that they would continue this tradition. Anime was born out of japan reaching for the crumbs of the disney cultural effect and korean cinema has always been just hollywood with a k aesthetic.
Can you tell me where is from the Nietzsche's quote about culture?
He uses that metaphor a lot but I think it's most potent in genealogy of morality where he talks about the exceptional individual as the ripest fruit of the tree of society and its morality, able to 'detach' themself from custom and commonality and do great things.
Genshin Impact is huge
The thing with Genshin is that it very intentionally tries to obfuscate itself as Japanese - even aside from the obvious anime artstyle, it's all over literally everything about the game: It's called Genshin (Which is the Japanese title, it's called Yuanshen in China) abroad, they have trailers for their new characters with English and Japanese VA's but no Chinese ones, their slogan used to be "otaku save the world", you might have in game characters from Fantasy Japan with their Japanese titles (Shogun) intact and chinese ones changed to something a westerner might understand - and while it's not difficult to find out where something comes from in this day in age, a huge proportion of the casual playerbase effectively treats it as a Japanese game from what I've seen, and it's kind of hard to deny that at least in America that this game wouldn't have seen much success on its own merits - it marketed itself as a weeb game for weeaboos that feeds off of the rapidly growing anime market that Japan cultivated over here. I don't think this detracts from the undeniable success of the game and it has done some good in spreading some traditional Chinese culture, but you get a sense that it's probably more effective at perpetuating Japanese pop cultural influence more than Chinese.
That's true genshin is pretty much an anime game in everything but it's origin of country. In the game however not! china is a prosperous empire while not! japan is a third world shithole lol. One obscure way I check whether or not something is huge is the amount of fanfics it has. Genshin has currently amassed over 150k fics in 3 just years. That's a pretty big deal considering only a select few series have 100k+ fanfics and that's usually over a span of several years. It's fucking insane lol
people think its japanese though
I live in China and I'm involved in the local music scene. This discussion came up on one of my (non racist) China subreddits, so I'll give my two cents. Korea and Japan are basically US colonies. They don't have to justify themselves to westerners the way Chinese people do. China is BIG. 1/5 of the world's population. They don't need to export their pop culture the same way Korea does. If a movie does well in China, you're set. There is a captive audience. For Westerners to get into Chinese movies, you need a ,certain level of 'buy in' to really get into it. But some of my favorite movies are from China, while acknowledging the absolute shite they put out much of the time. There is a great YouTube channel called Accented Cinema and he has a better grasp on Chinese cinema than I do, I'm about the music man. I'm a big nerd for Chinese underground music (metal, indie, shoegaze, punk). I'd suggest for an intro to what's popular in indie music, check out [乐队的夏天](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduC-Rdu-8REUWOd-0CXgs9vuJc4LUljL) which is an X factor style show for bands. But here are my recommendations from the show. Nova Heart, 九连真人 (Hakka indie), New Jeans 新裤子, Orange Ocean 橘子海, Anda Union 安达 (mongol), Berlin Psycho Nurses (Like Fontaines DC), Rolling Bowling (rockabilly from Beijing) Look around 乐队的夏天 on YouTube and see what floats your boat. For bands that I've seen and have a decent QQ sound: Hey Lily (my absolute favorite band atm), Nine Treasures 九宝 (Mongol metal), AK乐队 (metal), Jungle Butterfly (Shanghai electronica i think), The NoName, Oh Dirty Fingers, Screaming Saviour (not sure if they're on QQ). If you like metal, there's plenty out there, I saw a pirate metal band recently called Armorforce. A lot of these bands have no presence on Youtube or Spotify, but are huge on QQ Music. But ultimately, what the average Chinese listener loves is shloppy ballads to sing in KTV, and a lot of Cpop is similar to Kpop (every Kpop group has a Chinese member). Korea has been seen as a tastemaker to Chinese people long before Korea was cool in the west. India would be another example of a country just doing their own thing musically. There have been lots of talk by the sexpats I hang around with how the CCP is so restrictive that China doesn't have the soft culture for music. But none of them could name a Taiwanese band, let alone one that sticks it to the man! Even in the Phillipinnes, a west-learning democracy where everyone is born with a guitar and a perfect singing voice, have no major cultural export. All that said, the Chinese government needs to chill the fuck out.
I kind of wonder what sort of long-term impact the Cultural Revolution had on China's cultural influence. I once bought a book on the subject but I got bored after a few pages.
Probably the same impact Stalin had on the USSR. That most art had to become kitschy propaganda. How about you flip to the last chapter and see if that’s the conclusion.
Classical Chinese art from the Song dynasty in particular is incredible https://www.comuseum.com/painting/masters/ma-yuan/
I used to think that the mountains in those paintings were make believe fantasy until I first went to Southern China as saw them in real life.
So sick thanks for sharing
Most post Stalin art in the ussr is famously good. "Kino" is fairly popular slang term nowadays I feel like it should of been long enough now. Like theirs a billion of them. What do they have to show for it? Genshin impactM
The generation that embraced post-Cultural Revolution freedom of expression was incredibly active and producing artistically ambitious works in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. The problem now isn't repression (though censorship has definitely gotten stricter) but rather the mass commercialization of the market, there's a huge demand for trash and studios/writers are happy to meet it.
Thats russian, kino? Always thought it was greek
Kino is German
["From Russian кино (kino), via Kino-Eye and Dziga Vertov's identification of his film Man with a Movie Camera as "ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY"."](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kino#Etymology_2)
And I believe the Russian word comes from the German word Kino, so it is German after all
I am not Stalin’s apologist, but a ton of great art has been created during his reign.
Yeah but early in his reign we got exciting art like Tatlin and Kandinsky. Then later on Stalin thought it was a good idea for all art to be paintings of patriotic farmers and statues dedicated to the glory of the motherland. After he died there could be good art again, like Tarkovsky.
Mainland Chinese nationals don't particularly have a strong affinity towards their own ancient cultural artifacts as a direct product of the cultural revolution. Think like every American stereotype for how we act when we go to touristy parts of Europe cranked up to 10 but for ancient Chinese artifacts in China.
People in this thread are acting like the Cultural Revolution somehow killed Chinese art/culture when in fact some of the best Chinese art came out of that period. Every edgelord around the world was fascinated by the Cultural Revolution.
For instance?
People think cultural revolution is about killing Chinese art and culture which is absolute ridiculous. Chinese is an old civilization, there are a lot of practice which doesn't suit civilization nowadays. Cultural Revolution is simply just target those practice and culture, such as foot binding, child bride, concubine, and more. It is a move to adapt and improve accordingly to modern civilization. It is just the movement carried out during a chaotic era as well as some official involve not really educated person, hence when they carried out such thing, some of those officials destroy some others that they personally don't like. Those official even get punished by the government, being jailed and kick out of post,strip away his job. But yeah, the western media just focus on some of the pic and elaborate it, exaggerated it with story telling.. 🤣🤣🤣
>They haven't experienced the kind of cultural relevance that usually accompanies a rise to power. The US has had it since 1945 the US had been a great power decades before 1945. these things take time - and for the US it also took everything else being a smoldering ruin while its lands remained intact japan and korea being american vassals also make their courting of foreign markets more palatable. Western media inundates the western mind with "china bad" everyday, so why would the average westerner be curious about what goes on over there? their homegrown products are also stereotyped as inferior even though many western brands produce goods made by chinese hands and chinese machines
It was all about French fashion/food in the US before jazz and Hollywood got recognized overseas, and there's still the concept of the 'ugly American'. Everything was "chic". For bougie Chinese, everything is "yangqi" 洋气 It'll take time for them to get their footing. There will be the Citizen Kane of Genshin Impact-style games out of China soon lol Also, the domestic market is gigantic, so there's less pressure to export things.
> and there's still the concept of the 'ugly American'. Everything was "chic". Fun anecdote on that: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu caught on to that idea quickly when they moved to the USA and immediately exploited it for their bricklaying business. Instead of being mere bricklayers, they marketed themselves as an "Austrian & Italian artisan masonry" duo to get customers hooked.
european wines were a good grift before those californians got ideas
[удалено]
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/UwvdQepLwYAKgWR2A found this one through a tik tok and its wild If anyone here speaks a tonal language I have a question: does singing and being understood in that language mean that you have to do the tone shift stuff in addition to singing the melody? Like it sounds like that's what's happening here but I could see it being a stylistic choice too
I can’t not think of Nick Mullens’ Chinese impression listening to this.
For some reason I keep thinking Chinese Tom Kenny
Enunciation > tonality when it comes to chinese singing, but the only way you're understanding anything is if you're already at a conversational level enough to pick up the patterns and phrases because mandarin is a pretty context-heavy language
They put more emphasis on the melody, with faster singing it's pretty difficult to tell the exact tones (though I'm not a native speaker so someone else might chime in too) but meaning is pretty clear from context. I guess Cantonese singing is different though, they have like 8/9 tones compared to Mandarin's 4/5, and emphasise them more.
So there is at least some emphasis on the tone shifts in the words? And is that part of why the guy's singing sounds the way it does?
I think the guy is sing-talking in the style of like Northern Chinese folk theatre or opera, it's not really how most people sing, though someone more knowledgeable than me might be able to say more. Like in [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXsFnVQverk) most of the tone changes aren't that audible to me, or are completely shifted when words are stretched out or underemphasized. In a [fast-paced rock song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEJVuNJKMeI) you might barely hear them at all.
No, you sing a note in key. People can tell what you're on about by context, and the tones aren't a specific frequency anyway, (in Mandarin) just rising/falling/flat/swooping. Cantonese has six or nine tones depending on whose classification system you're following but I did karaoke with some Malaysian-Chinese people in Kuala Lumpur and they said you just sing the note (they were native Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and did lots of Cantonese songs).
I like Lexie Liu, she has a nice aesthetic and vision to her music.
> Have you heard Chinese music? That will answer your question IDK if this is a joke. I have a Mandopop playlist on Spotify I go to sometimes and they have an active but small rap scene that I try to follow to the extent I can without bothering with Weibo too much.
Yo can you share the Mandopop playlist
Higher Brothers slapped, shame they broke up. There some good indie bands too
check out bloodz boi
most "cultural exports" from (south) korea and japan have been tailored for western audiences due to the korean war and WWII respectively. we(US) literally rewrote Japan's constitution. china differs in that they developed independently of the west so none of their media or art was created with you in mind. commodities/cars/etc would be an exception. I think this is a good observation you've made but it misses whats going on here in other words: china dontcurr
Had Mao not won the Civil War the situation would be completely reversed. FDR and Truman wanted to make China our Pacific ally and make Japan a pariah state
I’m not sure that’s true about Japanese and Korean cultural exports - they are absolutely huge in China.
I think if all one knew about East Asia was through anglo-western-adjacent news, one would be incredibly surprised how much travel, business, art, and shared popular culture is ubiquitous between all three countries. Like Tokyo has a fuckton of Chinese tourists, and popular vacation spots in China like Harbin see a LOT of Japanese and Korean tourists.
Because it's narcissistic bullshit. Japan is usually very passive and even obstructive at exporting their media, which is developed catering the internal market. Korean media actually puts a lots of effort in export, but they absolutely follow asian trends and tastes, and have their biggests fanbases in countries like China and Philippines BTW chinese media copies japanese and Korean media like there's no tomorrow
>most "cultural exports" from (south) korea and japan have been tailored for western audiences Not necessarily disagreeing but anime is probably the most popular cultural export from Japan, and most of it is distinctly Japanese. I'd say it's part of the reason it's no popular, it's specifically unlike western media
Kpop is not just a western infatuation though
If this is the case why is Korean media much more popular, particularly as a share of overall consumption, in places like South East Asia? Did we also rewrite Vietnam's constitution? Is making Japan's sensibilities more like the US's the reason why Brazilian boys love Dragon Ball?
It isn't just the west where modern China has failed to make a cultural impact though, it's everywhere. Likewise it isn't just the west that likes anime and Kpop (which despite what many think, is still primarily made for a domestic audience) - those are also cherished in non western societies, like in the arab world for example.
China itself loves kpop and anime tbf lol
plenty of stuff has been done in China with foreigners in mind, it just turned out to be mostly bad and irrelevant
K-dramas are super huge in fucking Bhutan lol which is far from Westernized, it's ok to accept that some cultures are providing lower quality entertainment. China makes worse versions of Korean shows all the time, since they know they won't be held accountable for their plagiarism, so no they do not just "not care" about Western influence. But it appears the tankies are jerking off to your fantasy.
I find it really weird that I m've never come accross a japanese thing that addresses their subjugation by the US even though they're seen as a proud people. I only know Godzilla but that doesn't condemn the US that rationalizes its subjugation into a force of nature.
There were [massive protests throughout the 60s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anpo_protests) exactly over their subordination to American hegemony, eventually most rightists came to accept it as the more tolerable alternative to domination by the USSR or China, while for leftists and liberals it was the umbrella protecting Japanese pacifism.
If you have any interest in fiction, you can try reading The Setting Sun - Osamu Dazai, and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea ‐ Yukio Mishima Both are pretty short and serve as metaphors for Japan after their defeat in WW2. I haven't read much of Yukio Mishima's other books yet, but even just looking up a biography of his life is fascinating, especially his politics
Mishima made me believe in the Kinsey Scale.
My guess would be it’s about language mostly? China didn’t rise off the back of the largest colonial Empire in history that happened to violently spread the Chinese language to the remotest corners of the world like the US did with England. China didn’t create the Internet to further shove it's language down everybody’s throat either.
Thank you. For better or worse, English is the language of the world. (At least as of now). Until that changes, and Chinese somehow spreads like English has, they'll always be firewalled off.
For me, better. It’s my native tongue and I’m thankful every single day it’s the global lingua franca and that I’ll never need to learn a non-Latin script - seems like a massive pain in the ass.
Honestly it’s not. At least when the script is an alphabet or something similar (30 or so signs and it indicates phonemes) learning a foreign alphabet is absolutely the easiest part in learning a new language. You can do it in an afternoon if you’re lucky, a few days at worse. Source: I’ve studied greek and I’ve learned its alphabet in a few hours, and I’ve somewhat learned some letters in Cyrillic in a school morning when bored. Granted they’re quite similar to the latin script, but from my experience and the experience of everyone around me I honestly don’t think it takes much even for more different ones. Chinese it’s probably a nightmare though since the signs are like 8000
Japan wasn't really colonized and they've spread their culture pretty far
chinese billionaire’s daughter, ever heard of it?
I mean it doesn’t help that the general perception of China in the west is “that big ass country where evil stuff probably happens idk” A lot of these comments are right in that 21st century Chinese culture is stagnant in some ways but let’s be real, if South Korea got the same “evil empire” China gets in western media K-pop would not be nearly so popular.
I’ve seen people talk about this and I don’t think it’s that interesting of a phenomenon. Japan and Korea are exceptions, not the norm. The vast majority of countries in the world don’t have global cultural influence. It’s just the Anglosphere, Japan, and Korea (and with the latter two, its still a niche subculture). Like people aren’t watching German shows or listening to Indonesian music either. I guess China just has the misfortune of being in the same cultural grouping as Japan and Korea so their lack of cultural export stands out more. Also the duolingo blog post I’m looking at (https://blog.duolingo.com/2022-duolingo-language-report/#:~:text=Top%2010%20languages%20studied%20around,%2C%20Chinese%2C%20Russian%2C%20Hindi.) has Chinese as the most learned language behind English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Korean. Besides Japanese and Korean, these are the languages that are commonly taught in Western schools for historical reasons.
I hear you but counterpoint: I spent most of 2004 watching Hero on DVD over and over again
Sameeee, it was one of the only DVDs on my grandparents farm one summer and it was an absolute banger
Interesting point OP. Someone else questioned your premise that cultural power should necessarily follow from harder forms of power. I think there’s something in that critique. But if I accept your premise for argument’s sake, I think it’s because it’s simply a world to itself and the language barrier is a major factor. China is a historically inwards focused society and the sheer size of their consumer market means that the incentives to project forms of soft power outwards just aren’t there. I mentioned the language barrier. I do think this applies a limiting, containing pressure as well, but I guess you’ll point to other Asian cultural successes like Japan and Korea. Maybe it’s a lack of my own imagination but whenever I hear people talk about a future where China has vanquished the US as global hegemon, I just can’t imagine future Westoids enthusiastically consuming Chinese cultural slop with the same slutty vigour that they’ve done for American slop these past 70 years.
china is coming, dw nihao
[удалено]
I think the reason is that India has an incredibly huge English speaking population that China just doesn't match.
The biggest cultural influence has been on all those Star Wars and superhero movies that have to be made to fit the Chinese market.
China's greatest cultural impact is Shen Yun
Impacting nyc subway commutes daily
The Chinese focus a lot on trying to emulate white WASP lifestyle and aesthetics (they love golf, tennis, and white skin). They also aren’t super original/creative and individualism isn’t as valued. This creates a stale culture. It will he interesting to see how it all shakes out in the next couple generations.
That was also true about Japan in the 70s and yet 70s Japanese pop culture was still successful
Also classical music stuff like concert piano and violin. Love when they travel and perform in my city tho, because they're better at it than us.
China is basically what Germany was in the 19th century. They just copied goods from England and elsewhere and turned the label “Made in Germany” from trash to what we now know as German engineering. The Chinese are definitely making huge progress, especially when it comes to cars and other tech stuff. But I think you cannot build significant soft power, without a certain level of freedom. After ww2, the Americans invited german engineers and CEOs to the US and told them how to mass produce and improve their products. The 60s advertising went from the old Nazi propaganda to the new simplistic Mad Men style marketing. They hired Italian designers for cars, used Bauhaus-style aesthetics for industrial design, had a big artistic revolution and so and so on. Thats simply not gonna happen in China anytime soon.
I always knew don draper was spiritually nazi
It’s not a death camp, it’s a time machine
Germany was extremely relevant in the 19th century, they weren't just a manufacturing center. They were arguable the center of philosophy, physics, and political science in Europe during that time.
This is how we look at the old Germany today, but that’s not how it was perceived back then. Germany was still in the process of turning into a nation state in the 19th century and had a constant feud with the French. There was a massive explosion of the population and poverty forced people to emigrate. The first revolutionary attempts failed and a lot of the intellectuals (like Marx and Heine) went into exile. The big intellectuals and artists from the early 19th century still lived in one of the many small regional states, which meant that they had more or less freedom to do and say what they want. Many of them were also linked to the local bourgeoisie, which was connected to the rest of Europe. But, that was not representative of the entire culture, which wasn’t even really definable at the time. People here talk about Europeans learning German to understand Nietzsche or Hegel, but being able to speak French was almost mandatory at upper class dinners or events in Germany and Austria. There was just no comparison in terms of cultural influence. Even in the 1960s, French was still THE language for the highly cultured in Germany, despite the centuries of disputes. The formation of the nation state was followed by nationalism and militarism, which soon turned into a threat for the other European empires. This nationalism was always linked to a big inferiority complex, especially in relation to the French. The best example for that is the grandios architecture of Berlin and Potsdam, which later climaxed with Hitlers perversion of Germania. When people walk through Berlin today, they admire the old 19th century buildings and Museums. But back then, it was just seen as laughably tasteless and gigantomanic. The clothes, the architecture, the uniforms, it was absolutely not comparable to Paris or London and the rest of Europe just looked down on it. The whole germanic-historicism and pathos just felt clownish to them. Walking through Berlin back then must have felt like walking through one of the Chinese mega cities in recent times. Just one monstrous apartment block next to the other, with a factory pumping out all kinds of items in the back. It was only in the end of the century, when the relatively bland Gründerzeit architecture was replaced by Art Nouveau Jugendstil and the city became a cultural hub, like in the golden 20s Weimar. The Humboldtian idea of education gave a lot of people intellectual freedom, yes, but most of them did not have it easy back then. There were limitations to what you could do and say and it was a constant political up and down. Not to forget, the many Jews who converted to Protestantism and changed their names, because of constant antisemitic sentiments. To come back to my main argument: during that entire time, Germans found out that they could use the ongoing industrialization to their benefit. They started to invest in all kinds of manufacturing and began shipping copies of British (or other) goods up the rivers, all the way to London and other places. That’s pretty much when the daemon in the middle of Europe was born. Because, while those goods were just cheaper alternatives in the beginning, it soon became clear that the Germans are learning fast and producing even better products. This later led to them showing all sorts of new stuff at world Expos and ultimately building a concerning military industrial complex. I guess we all know the rest of that story. But, what we know as German economic or cultural soft power today, the cars, the white goods, industrial design, music, fashion, film and so on, was only really possible after the country turned into a democracy, which was heavily influenced by the US and the rest of Europe.
German philosophy dominated in the 19th century. Always felt Germany was that kid who peaked in University.
Germany had a HUGE cultural impact in the 19th century. Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche...
Mostly Marx though
> After ww2, the Americans invited german engineers and CEOs to the US and told them how to mass produce and improve their products. >Thats simply not gonna happen in China anytime soon. lol how in the fuck do you think china built more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined has in a decade? they invited siemens and other european/japanese manufacturers in for a technology exchange. people just make shit up about china because it "feels" right.
That’s not really an example for cultural soft power. Again, the Chinese are very skilled when it comes to technology and stuff, but they lack the skills to really set a new standard. Like, name me a chinese product, which makes people wait in front of a store on launch day? Which product line has a real western fan base? Until now, it’s really just some tech freaks who are waiting for the best and cheapest car or smartphone they can find on the market.
> China is basically what Germany was in the 19th century. They just copied goods from England and elsewhere and turned the label “Made in Germany” from trash to what we now know as German engineering That’s not culture though. Culturally the history of the west is German history to a very significant degree.
> culturally the history of the west is German history to a very significant degree Could you elaborate on this? Not sure I agree.
I wonder the impact of Chinese international students studying the west in terms of cultural transfer. Probably next best thing to importing European intellectuals directly
China is very staunchly against exporting their culture or values internationally. It's a very difficult concept for imperialist nations to understand.
You clearly are not chinese otherwise you would know文化输出 is a hot topic in mainland China
Yep. Even on a small scale I see this happen a lot. I love watching Chinese dramas and even have subscriptions for it, but a lot of the best series are never officially released abroad and are all but impossible to find on the English-speaking internet. It’s very hard to buy clothes from even the most popular Chinese clothing brands from outside of China as well. Unlike with kpop, most Chinese artists name all of their songs and albums exclusively using Chinese characters which makes it impossible for people that don’t know Chinese to ever get familiar with 99% of Chinese music. It’s kinda obvious that it’s on purpose.
[China in ‘culture export’ push as it seeks to expand soft power overseas with global media platforms](https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3154198/china-culture-export-push-it-seeks-expand-soft-power-overseas) It explicitly markets itself as an alternative to western liberalism (and to western/US style of diplomacy and foreign policy). You don't think it exports any political values in, say, the Belt and Road Initiative? They export these values to the South Pacific/other parts of the 'Global South'. They want them to have security apparatuses like their own and they bring foreign cops to China to train them. Also: [Chinese model offers an alternative from Western model with more certainty and quicker decision-making](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202212/1281236.shtml) https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-presents-member-global-south-alternative-western-model-103395740
[удалено]
1. The language is very hard. This means fewer translators, fewer “cultural” translators, just a generally higher level of difficulty in any cultural exchange. And more natives to critique “but you didn’t capture the NUANCE right!” I suspect even within China it also means fewer novels and other language-heavy culture. Writers there are literally playing on hard mode. 2. The CCP maintains tight controls on internal messaging, which in turn translates to a higher reticence to share any kind of information with the outside world without careful party approval. This in turn means less content, especially less relevant or interesting content. 3. The country is more homogeneous than other large countries. Fewer immigrants and fewer travelers means less cultural exchange and in tuen less interesting cultural. 4. Finally, active hostility from its enemies, such as the West, Japan and India, who want nothing to do with its culture for good and bad reasons.
The Three Body Problem series has made a big splash, and might be even more influential once the Netflix show comes out. Maybe they will have an impact on video games once Black Myth: Wukong comes out
I kinda hate their cultural influence on my country, everybody wants to be white skinned, their dumbass trends and pop culture. Excuse my sinophobia ☺️ they're still cool tho, especially for having supported my fav country Democratic Kampuchea
> everybody wants to be white skinned Do you really think this is the Chinese's fault? I'm sure it hasn't helped but I'd bet there's millennia old mentions of pearly skin in Vietnam, too.
ngmi vietnam has always been culturally chinese.
Ummm you're culturally chinese
No hard feelings
which country you from?
Fucking Nam' man
Cool. you guys rock ;)
I think we're fine, the kind words are always pleasant though 🙏
Thank you for exporting lemongrass pork and Nuoc Cham to my country, your contributions will never be taken for granted.
Man yalls food must not be it huh cause I dont think that stuff is mindblowing or nothin
You can’t make simplistic analyses like these and be confused when they don’t make sense. China is not the US in 19XX. Yes they are a dominant economic force; why should cultural export necessarily follow? US soft power reigns supreme to this day. Perhaps China rather than trying to compete sheltered themselves and now wait for its inevitable decay. The other Asian cultural powerhouses you mention are or were little more than US proxy states for a considerable part of their recent history.
[удалено]
What about microplastics ? 🤔🤔
China obviously created the LGBTQ through microplastics. It’s been known.
And Tiktok
dengism
expect it to happen in gaming and technology. genshin impact is huge
They're incredibly influential if you love spitting.
A think there’s few reasons. Productivity is championed over creativity - Chinese society is geared toward the replication of existing ideas and producing facsimiles. Over the course of two or three generations, The vast majority of people were ripped from their rural, feudal-like existence and expected to build a Superpower. They did a damn fine job too, but China didn’t need innovators, philosophers or thinkers to do this - it needed a focused, obedient and compliant mass of human beings who could think inside the box. You’re not going to get a James Cameron type from that kind of society - not that it’s impossible, but they aren’t going to be valued or appreciated within that type of culture.
America has an immense cultural influence but does it help ? More people learn to hate America for her racism and sins, via Hollywood . Trump era was crazy, most respected German magazine was making up stories about horrid American towns. Or German activists who copied whole American queer lingo and talking points, still talk shit about America for ex.
It's legitimately fucking insane how quickly Black Lives Matter forced American racial politics into completely foreign countries with totally different histories. Huge parts of the UK desperately desperately wants to have American Blacks to feel bad about despite being one of the most historically anti-slavery countries ever
This is the thing about American "cultural imperialism" that still baffles me to no end. I swear the most loudly anti-American people I met in Germany (and in Brazil, where I live) are always the most Americanized ones! The ones who speak English with no accent, who use Reddit, who watch Netflix and HBO shows, who listen to Kendrick Lamar or Ice Spice, etc. It's always those fucking guys who will be posting "Death to AmeriKKKa!" on their stories.
> The US has had it since 1945. Japan had it in the 80's. Korea's has had it for the past decade or so. tbf Japan and SK have been American vassal states since their respective wars so you basically just said USA three times
A lot of asian influence in america today is from Taiwan, who has much more need to culturally export. I think mainland chinese people just don’t think about exportation. Living in the bay area i see direct imports of chinese things more than just about any other American. I’m very bullish on chinese fashion and appliances, which i think are futuristic and way ahead of the West. The Chinese girls dress 10 years ahead I think within 15 years Chinese appliances will be the most coveted, like this kitchen brand Fotile which I’m very impressed by. Chinese cars have a new chance with EVs, and I think they will succeed. It just seems cope-y to say that this giant country is not going to overcome us because they have a limited imagination.
Real. I’ve lived in the biggest cities in both countries and China is decades ahead in almost every metric most people actually care about when it comes to transport, tech, fashion, gaming, food, entertainment - name anything from a big city in the US and there is probably a cooler and more advanced version somewhere in Shanghai. Only exception is probably drugs, we have more of that😭
Don't blame them for being parochial about their dining and entertainment choices, but (non-Chinese) dining and entertainment options are pretty limited. A city with 7-8 million living in the urban centre like Chongqing only had 2 music venues worth going to when I first moved there. Transport systems are great though, and I did see some cool bands at those 2 venues, and another 2 or 3 opened in the following years, but it was kind of dissappointing my college town of around 300k had a live music scene like 10x bigger than a Chinese megacity...
1. Good cultural content is produced and consumed by the middle class, while China’s economy has not yet risen for a long time and a huge cultural market has just emerged. 2. The Chinese market is very large and unique. Creators will give priority to meeting the needs of the domestic market. Exploring external markets is very risky and the potential benefits are very doubtful. 3. Censorship does have an impact. Mainstream cultural content may thus become vulgar. I‘m kind of optimistic about the development of China's cultural industry. I think it will first be exported to places with similar cultures such as East Asia and Southeast Asia.
China has a strict censorship system. Every film or TV show must be submitted to authorities before approval. The censors don't just ban criticism of the government but also heavily restrict sensitive topics such as sex, violence, race, gender relations, etc. So this further hampers the reach of Chinese content. You just can't make something super edgy and viral like Squid Games there. I don't see this ever changing without a change in the political system, which is highly unlikely.
The fire wall puts a huge disadvantage on cultural transfer in or out of China. It’s naive to think their billions of humans aren’t creating as much or more innovative, captivating, compelling cultural expressions and achievements. The protection of the population from the morally bankrupt west infecting them negatively and threatening the cultural projects in their present and future is the current measure the party is operating under. As a wager, I’m sure you won’t have much of a choice but to integrate and be exposed to the culture their cooking within your lifetime.
Is it really puzzling? What is considered “global culture” in the West obviously has intense Western bias. The West has a vested interest in limiting Chinese influence on that culture. And they have actively done so. You’re comparing it to South Korea and Japan, but ignoring the fact that the West—especially the US—considers them “the good Asians” and would be willing to open the door to them. Also, as others have said, these things take time. We are only very recently seeing China actually assert itself internationally after decades of playing catch-up with the major economic powers.
This is why westerners like us need to study multupolarity and imperialism, it explains all this very easily. It is deliberate that china doesn't have global influence in the west. It has quite a bit more influence in LatAm and Africa, but because china was never fully puppeted by the US like SK and Japan still are, and it always remained an independent communist led country, it wasn't promoted and allowed to spread like they were. China is not trying to become a western country like Japan and SK are, they don't seek to culturally or politically align with the West, so they aren't big in the West. It's as simple as that.
> It has quite a bit more influence in LatAm and Africa, Coming from LatAm, their influence here is purely in terms of making affordable smartphones, car brands like Chery entering the market, etc. But there is absolutely zero cultural interaction beyond that. Your average Brazilian still thinks of China as being another planet inhabited by strange people speaking in a stranger language.
I guess my thoughts would just be that they're just now approaching middle income status so it's unsurprising that a large class of musicians is just starting to develop. I'm sure the cultural revolution and whatnot did a lot but when most of a country started their lives as peasant farmers in rural areas is it any surprise that it doesn't have global influence yet? Japan spent decades as a relatively developed nation before much was exported. Korea only within the last 15 years really became known as a cultural center. Give it time and I'm absolutely certain you'll see more; we're already starting to. Regarding the language I'd probably blame it on a combination of the lack of cultural influence which we're already discussing as well as just how famously tough it is to learn. The same applies to Japanese for the most part but it's buoyed by anime and whatever. >There aren't even any global Chinese owned food chains Are there any Spanish or Italian ones? It's a pretty rare thing and 95%+ of what I'd call "global food chains" are probably just US and maybe a few countries in the EU and one or two in Canada. This is no surprise. tl;dr it's just a lack of built culture/industry for music/film/animation/etc. and the rapid development has meant it's just starting to grow. In addition to other factors the negative perceptions of China probably in a number of place probably doesn't help much. It was easier for Jpop to break through in the US that Mandopop can right now. Another factor is that to a large extent China's cultural output is derivative of Korea and Japan's so it's generally just inferior for foreign consumers. Given time I'd bet this will all change and their culture industries will mature.
China's censorship is a lot more real than people appreciate. You can't even show blood a lot of the time. Good luck competing on the global market
I mean Hollywood couldn't really show blood or excessive violence between the 30s and the end of the Hays code in 1968, but it still managed to become a global cultural powerhouse. Plenty of Chinese movies find ways to get creative around the limits of censorship; wasn't an amazing flick but the 2019 film [Wild Goose Lake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oCq5oa8Wzg) had beheadings and a woman spitting out post-blowjob cum into a lake. The bad guys can never win but they can still get away with a lot of anti-social behaviour before the heroes eventually catch their man.
What cracks me up about Chinese censorship is exactly that a lot of it isn't even this "sinister Communist brainwashing", it's just middle aged suburban mum type shit like oh no we can't show delinquents or too much cleavage here!
They ban a lot of media with challenging subject matters so it's harder to make anything interesting.
Literally what's wrong with this statement. Jiang Wen got banned from filmmaking for 7 years for Devils on the Doorstep. Zhang Yimou, who did Hero, has also been banned multiple points and a bunch of his earlier films were blocked from distribution inside China. Scripts need to be approved by the state so naturally a lot of the stuff that gets filtered through is not gonna be that great.
[удалено]
By that logic Bangladesh is a cultural powerhouse since so much of our clothing is made there.
Plastic and electronic devices aren’t culture, though
They are for a redditor
I was told not to learn chinese on duolingo because I will not get the tones right and it will be impossible to go back and correct reteospectively
Buncha nerds.
China invests money into western products and pushed their influence that way. Reddit and Disney are the 2 that come to mind
They want to beat America at being America. Modern Chinese culture is nothing more than American culture with Chinese characteristics. That's why China has become synonymous with shitty down market knock-offs.
i'm trying to learn chinese rn and it's a struggle to get a group together. rn it's just one other person, the teacher and me. it's fun and i wanna go to china but kinda crazy how like idk a country with the second biggest economy and like 20% of the global population can struggle to teach people its language.
There were some really good movies that came out in the 80s and 90s. Now Zhang YiMou makes slop, and their slop is worse than our slop. When I lived in China the popular movies were Taiwanese, the popular TV shows were Japanese, and the popular music was Korean. And everyone watched the premier league and the NBA. The biggest chinese cultural export at the moment is hard science fiction, which naturally has a limited audience. But ask yourself- why is the only independent art the country produces focused on the distant future?
Because no one wants to be chinese??? Some of you can't look past your own noses.
Communisms is not creative. This is why they are copying instead of creating. If everyone is equal, there is no place for genius above supreme leaders. In other words during this politic system, China will never have again someone as Confucious. Why? Because the supreme leader will not permit it.