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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?
It's more so East Asia than China. Japan through behemoths like Nintendo & Sony have dominated gaming since day 1. Korea has always had a strong E-sports and Mmorpg offering as far back as the mid-2000s.
For its size, China hasn't produced any recent creative works of note. 3 body problem is the only one I can think of. That's 1 international & critical success in my lifetime. Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best. They haven't produced novels and art of note. And their movies, most of all, suck major balls. Freemium games, gambling simulators and perfect recreations of Mozart don't count. We all know the Chinese can copy better than any known people on earth.
Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity. USSR faced the same issue, which led to the surprising popularity of Bollywood in nations that were behind the iron curtain.
That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.
Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year. They are in a little slump with gaming, but that's about it. What you're noticing, is a slow return to a balance. Not everything is American anymore. America shares the top with England, Korea, India & Japan for top tier entertainment. East Asia is 1.5 billion people. Many of whom are in 1st world nations that are past the lowest tier of Maslow's pyramid. They have rich original cultures and aren't derivative of western myth or philosophy. Why won't they produce great art with global reach ? Ofc they do. China's historic underperformance here is the more confusing statistic. The rest of East Asia doing well is honestly, pretty expected.
You have produced a roughly even mixture of true statements, statements of personal taste (and/or the taste of people with taste similar to yours, cf. "critical success"), falsehoods and blind dismissals ("Freemium games, gambling simulators" seems to simply rule out what is the best monetization model for their market, "perfect recreations of Mozart" is a quip that is utterly divorced from the reality of Chinese music).
Huh? Most people who lived there believe USSR literature was great (just consider the scifi output), and the movie industry did about as well as you could expect in a place where US-style movie making capital can not be raised. If anything, Russia turned into a creative desert after the fall of communism.
...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers. This is as fair as if you said that Star Wars (the highest-grossing Western live action media franchise) is to be credited to Japan and China, because the Jedi are a pastiche of East Asian warrior-monk orders.
...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war. Admittedly, that particular alternate reality game does continue being the unchallenged greatest show on earth. I've tried watching American movies, playing American games and listening to American music, and stopped because they were simply inferior to the better works of entertainment that I can get from East Asia for free (financed by freemium models and gambling elements that extract money from people with more loose cash and lower executive function).
I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.
I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.
Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.
Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.
Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.
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