This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Your other post was bad, this one is better. The problem appears to be that you were trying to say the problem isn't chinese culture, it was that other people just aren't paying attention. You might not agree with that interpretation but that is definitely the message you seemed to be putting out there.
I'm of the view that nobody can get to know China when the CCP so seriously restricts organic engagement from the bottom up with top down censorship and control. The CCP does not know how to generate meaningful alliances or relationships, which implies that they are not going to be able to guide Chinese society more broadly towards cultural exchange. They just don't have the skillset.
It seems like some contrast between "our product is great! Why aren't these idiot consumers buying our microwaves?" Vs "maybe they aren't what people want."
When I responded to you I had no idea you had all this baggage as some Big Deal VIP poster. And I took the post at face value, not that you were trying to claw back previous dismissals of China (or something?).
I stand by my previous comments. But I also think you should keep posting about China if you want. I'll read your takes and be interested in your opinion. I don't really get the meltdown-coded follow up comments, and think you were happy to mock me and then got pissy when I did it back to you. Otherwise I don't think you did anything wrong and you shouldn't be looking to terminate all your engagement with the forum over a minor tiff.
You consistently conflate «culture» in the broad sense and something like «soft power/media exports/arts/presentation/aesthetics/charisma». For all the rhetorical zeal, I am trying to use the words precisely. There is a culture of business and management, a culture of warfare and diplomacy, a culture of innovation and policymaking and so on. There arguably is a certain holistic quality to the «Chinese culture» as a general style or attitude behind various Chinese ideologies, practices and behaviors. But we can sidestep the debate about essentialism and focus on specific domains. Such as the large domain of industrial productivity, or the subdomain of AI research, where we've seen an establishment of a clear template post-DeepSeek. I of course have another post in this series, on MoonshotAI that's become a paradigmatic example of a Chinese company that adopted DeepSeek's philosophy, approximated their culture. This, in turn, is embedded in the traditional Chinese culture and is not so much about competitive mimicry – DeepSeek has no credible business plan to steal and copy, Moonshot has some but had even more of it before the pivot – as about shame and virtue; the commandment to recognize your inferiority in the face of a superior man, learn and then try to measure up.
The dimensions of culture that I find interesting are consequential even if literally nobody outside of China except me pays attention. I'd go so far as to say that this idea you stubbornly return to, that Chinese culture needs to earn anyone's attention by means of virality and appeal, is characteristic of a consumerist culture where facts are only as worthy as they're entertaining, even if they can kill you or render you irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
"a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups"
It's not conflation. It's just what culture is. When I say French culture is baguettes, being snooty, smoking, and design agencies nobody is arguing. When I say Chinese culture is being shit at diplomacy, making high speed trains and doing propaganda stuff (and, especially, failing to communicate much of anything else about their culture) it's directly comparable.
I'm frankly not interested in that. And never was. You had an issue with me saying Chinese culture is uncharismatic. I was speaking broadly for a reason. You can go through and pick all these examples e.g. EVs, and tell me that proves I'm wrong. But I already took the trick. On the aggregate, on the whole, you know I'm right. We get Japanese culture. We get Singaporean culture. We get Russian culture. We get indian culture. Even when we don't get force fed their media every day, I can genuinely imagine the day to day of an Indian businessman. I don't love their cultural outputs, but I do feel like India has transferred their culture to the wider international audience in a way that makes me feel, to an extent, a sense of Indian culture. Same goes for the Turks, Persians, Danes or Germans. Most people will not have this sense for China or Chinese people.
A normie on the street isn't going to be talking at length about DeepSeek. I have no idea why you keep bringing this up as the critical point in all of this. It's such a bizarre line to take as a holistic defence of China.
The best summary a person on the street will give, even a well informed one, is that China makes iPhones and has a pretty evil, or something, government.
That's my fucking point! You might be interested in it, but as I said from the start, nobody else is. This is interesting because China is an economic super power, and has 1.7bn people who nobody knows anything about. I just cannot understand what you're not getting here. How many different ways can I say it. I'm not saying China has no culture, obviously. I'm saying the fact that nobody knows about it demonstrates a serious lack of appeal.
No buddy. You don't get to do that. This is a terrible conversation tactic that only stupid readers will be fooled by. I am not stubbornly returning to some irrelevant point. That is my point, and you are the one who continually tries to divert the conversation away from it. You responded to me. You don't get to say I'm ponderously returning to some side point when you directly engaged with it, lost the argument immediately, and have since been trying to obfuscate everything with a mental boom laced series of posts that mostly come back to "well that doesn't prove anything!"
So olive branch recinded, I don't like this no progress back and forth, or the completely unearned air of dismissal. You should have called it when you got caught out on me not being American, because it's been downhill since then.
See? You even quote it and think it supports your position. We can read the same lines and come to the opposite conclusions. I think a culture is interesting for what outcomes it produces. You think a culture is interesting for how much interest it generates. As I've told you already:
I'll charitably amend this to "we have an irreconcilable difference in understanding of words".
Well then all I can say is that your point is not interesting to me and has zero consequence. Enjoy imagining the daily life of an Indian businessman or something.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps try talking to Chinese people? The great firewall is one way restricting Chinese from accessing google or facebook, they've got wechat and bilibili and xiaohongshu. Nothing stopping you from shitposting on XHS to see whats up there, mainlander degeneracy is pretty top tier brainrot that doesn't need translation to understand.
Its not that Japanese are any less inscrutable than Chinese, whatever caricature of the Japanese or Korean people that has been internalizes as a representative modality is almost purely inference. Talking to westerners makes it sound like Japanese offices are filled with dead overworked corporate lifers and panty vending machines while Korea is the end boss of narcissistic consumerism.
Seriously, its like none of you guys here whining about China or Chinese people actually met anyone based in the mainland. No one is obligated to talk to someone for the sake of it, but assigning population level mystique is a category error. Talk to chinese people online, they're much more retardedly normal than you think. Less nefarious intent on dominating westoids, more shitposting on shopping livestreams.
Can you make a basic effort to understand what I'm saying?
To put it more succinctly, China has very little cultural impact on the world. And in the few mediums that they try to, it comes off poorly.
If your answer is to log into billbill or xiaohongshu to experience chinese culture, you're making my point for me. Nobody is doing this. Normies have no idea what you're even talking about.
"Just go talk to them". I don't "just go talk to" Americans. American culture is so pervasive that I organically experience their culture daily, passively.
I can't scroll on this forum without being blasted with "Europeans are pussies lol". I have no issue saying "chinese culture is uncharismatic" when it's a model that describes why Chinese politics, diplomacy and cultural engagement largely fails. I can say it when nobody outside of the Chinese political elite actually really know whats going on in china.
Every one of these responses that says "actually China is good at engaging with the world, you're just too ignorant to know it" has made some incredibly poor assumptions about me. I'm not saying this because I'm not looking. I'm saying this because I'm looking and noticing.
You specifically state that the CCP restricts bottom up engagement. China may be invisible at engaging the world, in which case their shit just sucks too hard for people outside to care about (a valid take indicative of preference shaping) or the Chinese propaganda effort is just not working - which is a less valid take since it assigns intent where none reasonably exists. Chinese media isn't interested in getting money from foreigners, when theres 1.4 billion people domestically.
granted, the Chinese state DID make an attempt at engaging the world directly for awhile, and those efforts sucked shit. Confucius institutes, hypernationalist movies with weird foreign tokenism (The Great Wall, Wolf Warrior 2, probably some other crap not worth remembering) and the brief time Zhang Ziyi was let out her cage were all probably attempts to directly showcase CHINA AWESOME, to manifest failure.
Right now many China boosters are mainly antiwokes holding up the proximate enemies greatest threat as proof of the failure of their foe, not necessarily admiration for Chinese products or media. Chinese vidya and donghua has escaped the parties notice for now and is baller as fuck, but thats the domain of weebs, so obviously beyond cultured intellectuals such as ourselves.
I swear to all of you guys though on the bottom of my overweight ass, if you want to experience true China domination, go eat their supermarket sandwiches. Chinese supermarket chains on the mainland must have kidnapped the best Japanese food scientists and forced them to make unfairly good food, and it is shockingly price to quality effective. Something about supermarkets just seems indicative of Real Quality Of Life to my animal brain, and cracking the supermarket quick food aisle is what made me convinced Japan was a real country just like how the costco chicken is proof of US dominance.
Yeah businesses are notorious about their lack of interest in breaking into new markets with high disposable incomes.
All jokes aside, it's not like they don't try. They do. Sometimes successfully. But more frequently not. Which is a summary I could use for virtually all Chinese interactions outside of China.
I'll check them out.
Most media prioritize local first instead of hypothetical deep pocketed foreign markets. Its just the math of cultural familiarity and limited upside from investing in the tastes of foreigners: hollywood tried selling pro China stuff to break into the market and for that we got Pacific Rim Uprising, which lost domestic gross for negligible xibucks, just like Iron Man 3 or Transformers 3 failing to capture mainlanders with the power of supplicating. Similarly China or Japan also prioritize local markets first. Only Korean Hallyu really committed money to the attempt and it just helps that Koreans are already shamelessly shallow so everyone they promote is already good looking, unlike Japs who have the weird crooked teeth for their idols and weird 80s hairstyle for the guys.
Frequent failures at breaking to overseas markets is hardly unique to China, it just is thermostatically relevant because China is relevant. Organic niche successes lack state push, so they escape notice.
Though since you're mostly westerners here, I'll leave one weird tidbit for you: there is one specific niche that was being pushed state level, and to roaring success until about a month ago (maybe). The Thai Culture Ministry has been very lax with who they disburse funds to, and some money ended up flowing to Boy Love dramas, with little state invervention against this unexpected success. It is HUGE in womens circles that were starved for prettyboys eyefucking each other after China cracked down on danmsi few years ago, and I'm sure western women watch it in large but hidden numbers. The only reason asian prettyboy rotting of womens minds may be halted is because Heated Rivalry exists.
More options
Context Copy link
Don’t forget that it took a LONG time for Japan to register foreign interest in anime as anything more than cut-price toons for kids. The Japanese didn’t start actively factoring foreign sales into their strategy until, what, 2016? They had to be pursued quite strongly by companies like Crunchyroll before they were persuaded that piracy could be parlayed into real money.
The average westerner of the 60s-90s probably had an idea of what they thought a Japanese man was like. Hard worker, very strict workplaces, dedicated to the company, etc. Strage customs, nice furniture, small apartments. Tokyo, bright lights, (possibly??) crazy night life?
I'd say, whether that was an accurate description or not, the Japanese culture had endorsed that meme. And that helps create a cultural story that outsiders can read.
If you asked a normie what an average chinese guy is like, I just don't think you get any of that. In 10 years? 20? Yeah it's probably a different story.
My dad in the 80s could probably go out with an Italian, a Japanese, a Singaporean and have some expectations about each of them. I don't think Mr Thompson from accounting could go out with a Chinese guy, today, and have much of a head start at all.
It's weird because obviously Chinese economics have arguably caught up to the west. But they haven't exported the chinese identity. If anything, which is my main point, they've damaged chinese identity with bungled attempts to insert themselves into it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link