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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.
What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
I think most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance.
China is a very populous country, fairly well developed and with high IQs. There is plenty of talent and wealth there. Of course they will produce compelling cultural products. Genshin Impact, Three Body Problem, Wukong, more obscure stuff like Dyson Sphere Program and Reverend Insanity. Plenty of good stuff has already been made.
Do they censor? They sure do. RIP Reverend Insanity, unfinished. Are they behind the curve? Probably. A lot of slop is being produced because China is only recently developed. Japan became well-developed in the 1970s and 1980s but it takes time for one's cultural output to become globally attractive. If we were back in the 1980s we'd be saying 'oh Japan's cultural output is limited, there are just a few gems here and there, they're fundamentally unable to create'. What was there, LOGH and Astro Boy? Evangelion, Dragonball Super, HxH, Naruto, SAO, One Piece and so on hadn't yet emerged. People didn't think anime was cool, it was just weird Jap cartoons. It only became really popular in the 2010s due to time-lag and possibly Western decline. Now Demon Slayer can go toe to toe with the entire US comics industry.
China is the same. We're looking at the beginning of the growth curve. It takes time for the wealth and talent to circulate appropriately such that they can do great things, develop mature taste and so on. Most people in the West don't know where to look for Chinese cultural output, most of it's still untranslated in Chinese. That's slowly changing and AI should accelerate it.
I disagree. Japan was already exporting a lot of cultural influence in the 80s, arguably more than it is now. Every kid in America was obsessing over Ninja, Karate, ans samurai. Nintendo was an absolute craze. Nerds were trading unlicensed untranslated anime on vhs tapes, trying to figure out wtf it meant. Businessmen were showing off their money be eating at fancy sushi restaurants or benihana steakhouses, then getting drunk off sake and singing karaoke. There was even a hit song "im turning japanese."
On the more highbrow side, there were a lot of Japanese artists winning prestigious awards. yukio mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, kazuo ishiguro, andmany other less famous ones wrote great literature. Haruki murakami got a smash hit with Norwegian Wood. Film buffs loved Akira Kurasawa, whose samurai duels were a major influence on the light saber fights in star wars. Japanese jazz and classical musicians were also popular in their respective scenes.
If anything, that stuff should have been bigger. There just wasnt any real marketing in the US for anything foreign at that time. Even british stuff could be hard to find. There was no choice except American Hollywood movies and TV, for a regular person.
But now? Its easy to get international stuff from all over the world. People love it. But what does China have? A shitty, exploitive gambling app (Genshin impact)? One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular (three body problem)? Some incredibly jangoistic movies about killing americans (wolf warrior, The Battle at Lake Changjin) which went nowhere outside China? Some hacky web novels about "cultivation" and getting kidnapped by a billionaire?
The sad thing is that they used to do better. In the past, Chinese martial arts movies, food, buddhism, taoism, and sun tsu books were all popular. But almost all that stuff came out of Hong Kong. With the CCP takeover, and general crackdown on non-Beijing culture, their cultural output seems to have really stagnated. I think, if anything, people are hungry to see a Chinese pop culture product, but there's just nothing there.
The greater sinosphere does have a lot of internal crossover between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia-Chinese, the mainland and other elements which have their own unique voices. Which I think changes the dynamic somewhat versus Japan where their original market was more solid.
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