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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.
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.
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.
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