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I live in the Sinosphere and have the Mandarin skills of a trained monkey and/or determined 5 year old. I admire Chinese culture a lot and I try to visit the Mainland a couple times a year for random meanderings.
I'm pretty skeptical of actual Chinese cultural exports leaking into the West, even as somebody who watched more Chinese-language films last year in Cinema than English ones. Bit of a disconnect with what's acceptable, plus the Chinese culture seems a lot more insularly-focused than like Korea actively trying to engender more widespread appreciation and adoption.
There's also the obvious geopolitical aspect behind this, with the international viewpoint of Mainland China being quite obviously contaminated by the fact that it's a major world power that straight-up does not want to be a part of the American international order and often shows off hostility towards it (and vice versa). Your average layman's knowledge of China gets mediated through all of these incentive structures and as a result it's still pretty much a summary of the worst that could be found, often taken out of context. China is often perceived as a Stalinist state with little to no cultural value, and stuff that comes out of there gets viewed with a sort of default suspicion.
This isn't limited to artistic exports, either. People seem capable of perceiving China only through the lens of its government. It's still very common for people to suggest that any kind of indigenously Chinese culture has been all but destroyed on the mainland because of the Cultural Revolution, that religion and culture is all but impossible under the totalising purview of the CCP, and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia. Yet I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of traditional religion and culture at least on par with what I saw in Southeast Asia; if it's anywhere close to dead in Mainland China then clearly my lying eyes deceive me. (There's also a clear absurdity with the idea that "Chinese culture" is this unified phenomenon that can be preserved via one tiny regionalised portion of emigrants primarily representing urban, coastal parts of Fujian and Guangdong which then hybridised significantly with foreign elements, but that's another thing entirely.)
So I would agree that China's public perception isn't close to being anywhere near positive yet; this is changing, but the international perception of China has a long ways to go before people stop seeing it as a scary authoritarian enemy-state.
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China will possibly suffer from something like a resource curse with their cultural exports. They have such a colossal domestic market that they simply don't need to think about international markets. Nezha 2 can make 2 billion just from China, so why would they care if it doesn't even earn 5% of that overseas?
That might also explain why gaming is so far the one area that is having some breakouts. Something like Black Myth couldn't rely on Chinese games alone due to the relative size of the middle class, a culture that is still hostile to video games, and a party that is hostile.
The sheer scale of Chinese domestic consumption of cultural stuff is pretty striking. I was in Chongqing a couple weeks ago meandering aimlessly and even with the recent hype, even the most touristy areas where at most like 2% obvious foreigners.
Of course there's also a lot of tourism by overseas Chinese and I did run into some Singaporeans and American Chinese, but out-and-out foreign tourism is a small rounding error for China it seems
They are only just starting to promote tourism again with the recent visa free travel deals. Luxury hotels that cater to tourists rather than business travellers (like the Amans) are still pretty empty in the mainland in my very recent experience. The English proficiency of hotel staff even at top international chains also varies much more than elsewhere in East Asia, yes including Japan (this may be true even if the average Chinese person speaks more English than the average Japanese, I couldn’t comment); there is always someone relatively fluent, but many staff aren’t. I don’t expect this but it obviously makes it harder for international tourists, whereas you can navigate as an American with no real experience in Asia in Tokyo with almost no problems. In Beijing and Shanghai having local coworkers around felt if not necessary then very useful.
China is also in that place where tourists looking for cheap beach vacations will naturally go to Thailand / Vietnam / etc over China. As a big, increasingly expensive and seasonal (in the sense that a lot of key cultural sites are in places that get [very] cold in the winter and [very] hot in the summer) destination, places like Beijing seem more like Moscow or St Petersburg before the war in terms of rich world tourism, in that they are going to attract primarily (upper) middle class, relatively well travelled people who want a glimpse into another culture rather than to go for a bucket list item, for food, because it’s cheap or for status (all the above have driven the recent Japanese tourism boom for example), which is a small proportion of the total.
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Basically yes. I mean there is a level of cope for sure among the Chinese for how poor our cultural export is, which needs some correction, at least to be able to attract our cultural siblings in East Asia, but it’s always nice and comforting to know that 1/5 of humanity enjoyed it anyways regardless of how well it does outside of our niche. Maybe American perception of China actually matter, idk, but what exactly is the point for e.g. Serbians to love or hate us?
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What counts as the Sinosphere? My impression would be Singapore and Taiwan, leaving aside mainland China. I'd struggle to describe Korea or Japan or most of SEA with that moniker, anymore than France and Germany are part of the Anglosphere. You don't need to dox yourself, I'm genuinely curious as to what counts.
I live in Malaysia in a Chinese-speaking household in a Chinese-speaking gated community in a suburb that's mostly Chinese who've been here for 100+ years. Whilst the Chinese ethnics only make up like 30% of the country and don't have direct democratic power I think it's pretty clearly in the Sinosphere. If anything in terms of 'preservation of traditional Chinese culture' SEA-Chinese are probably more religious and ritual-observing.
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Sinosphere in common parlance includes Korea, Japan, and Vietnam i.e. anywhere that Literary Chinese was at one time the language of high culture.
Restricting it to areas that speak Chinese today would indeed only leave Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia and Burma.
I think you could expand it a bit. Still some quite Chinese areas of Thailand/Indonesia even if they copped more out-and-out oppression. Plus enclaves around the world of varying degrees.
As I understand it Thailand forcibly assimilated the Chinese so now everyone pretends not to notice that all the rich are Chinese (although some assimilation did occur, a lot of intermarriage etc, certainly much moreso than with affluent overseas Chinese anywhere else in SEA).
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