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What would a China-led world order look like, in cultural terms?
Its a hypothetical, so let's set aside the probability of such a future for the moment.
Part of what made the US so uniquely influential over the world was that its primary language is widely spoken across the world. And American books and movies feature events and histories from across the world. These two factors have allowed the US to transmit its culture and values far and wide. Americanism is now the de facto culture of the Western web, and it has shaped the cultures of countries as diverse as India, Australia, Israel, the UK, Philippines, etc. Hollywood, comics, animations even back in the rubber hose and classical Disney era, were very popular globally.
But right now, Chinese culture is largely closed off from the outside world. Chinese books and movies are mainly about China. Furthermore, few people outside of China speak Chinese. However, this might not necessarily be a barrier for China to project its cultural capital. Hong Kong films have been very popular outside China too. Kung Fu icons like Bruce Lee left a lasting impact on Hollywood. While this seems to have retreated as a trend in recent years, the mainland Chinese developer Game Science Interactive seems to be intent on marketing Black Myth Wukong to the global audience. And of course, there's Japanese anime and video games, Kpop and Kdrama that have penetrated into the western market despite lingual barriers. Films coming out of mainland China are targeted at the Chinese audience, so they'll likely maintain some form of insularity? The Battle at Lake Changjin and its sequel were extremely successful, easily held up by their massive domestic market. I think HK films will also increasingly rely on the Chinese market as the Kung Fu magic isn't quite working anymore.
Furthermore, if China does compete in cultural hegemony, would the US finally be forced to roll back on its own excesses re wokeism? Or would China continue to be inward looking and be content with its economic weight, and the US would remain the cultural hegemon?
More xianxia webnovels, more sci-fi and more Genshin Impact-esque games. Thematically, more science, male heroism and order.
Xianxia/Cultivation has been taking off for some years now in male-dominated places like royalroad, spacebattles and progressionfantasy on reddit. We've got Westerners with their own takes on the themes (sects, vast power differences, showing face) like Will Wight's Cradle series. I particularly liked Reverend Insanity. Long, somewhat edgy but rational, excellent worldbuilding, plot and thematic content. It got cancelled by some state apparatus for being too individualistic and anti-social, or possibly due to author jealousy. This state focus on order is a running theme.
I think there's a Chinese predilection towards old-school science fiction that we no longer hold. One of the secondary themes of the Three Body Problem series is that environmentalism is a misanthropic plot to weaken humanity and leave it vulnerable to alien invaders. Technology is great, it's the source of power, sovereignty and all good things. You wouldn't see a heavyweight Western novel with that perspective - environmentalism is too holy to be questioned. There's also the lone male hero who takes ultimate responsibility (something in common with xianxia perhaps). If the Chinese are in charge, science and engineering might become sexy again. The Wandering Earth was one of their biggest films, again a testament to engineering and planning.
On that point, I'll also raise Dyson Sphere Program. Steam game, Chinese developer. You are an uploaded human in a robot body who gets sent out to build industrial infrastructure across the galaxy, bootstrapping dozens of Dyson Spheres where uploaded humanity dwells. It's a very cheerful, pretty, fun game that I thoroughly recommend. The interpretation I get from it is like Thiel's 'definite optimist' concept: 'We are making utopia according to plan'. If you compare to Factorio, there's no environmentalist angle. The eventual, as yet unimplemented, enemies are motivated to suppress you before you get too threatening rather than aliens who hate you for ripping up their planet.
And finally we have Genshin Impact, the most popular Chinese cultural export. Cute girls killing monsters in an upbeat, pretty world. The American equivalent is probably GTA or possibly Skyrim (primarily singleplayer open world but with some multiplayer capabilities), which is the exact opposite. Order vs Chaos, Beauty vs Grunge. Western RPGs focus more on player freedom, Genshin is more about immersing you in this happy, pretty place.
I think the US would have to make some concessions on wokism. I assume people heard about the Chinese fellow who promised to use AI to whitewash the upcoming little mermaid movie. I'm astonished this didn't get discussed more given the intersection between AI and race politics. Maybe I'm just a goldfish and forgot about it.
https://meaww.com/halle-or-ariel-disney-fans-spark-outrage-as-ai-scientist-whitewash-halle-bailey-with-a-white-woman
I guess the Chinese are more technophilic than we are currently simply because they've been alive to witness their country become an economic and technological contender with the West.
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Maybe this is a just-so-story that could be just as easily reversed, but I do feel like the fact that that language is written with a catalog of thousands of characters instead of an alphabet could be a significant source of friction. English's mangled orthography is bad enough - our language may need an orthographodontist to put its letters in braces - but the situation can be worse.
There is a compromise, but you're not going to like it.
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A world order may have cultural components, but at root it is about economic and geostrategic relationships. The American-led global order was created in order to (a) allow for American and capital to access all the resources of the western-aligned world, (b) to permit complex supply-chains to link America and its allies together into economic mutual interdependence, and (c) permit America to forward-station forces to keep the Soviets contained.
A China-led global order would not have the same motivations, so absent some forecasting of what the Chinese's politico-economic goals would be, cashing out what their system would look like is a fool's errand. I don't speak Chinese, so I can only tell you third- or fourth-hand what the current government's public-facing objectives are, and can't tell you at all what their public sentiment is, or what the Chinese version of "the Cathedral" is thinking. Absent that information, I don't think any discussion of this question is going to be all that fruitful, but ymmv.
But they do have the same motivations.
China needs a lot of resources to remain the world's biggest industrial power. They want food, energy and raw materials.
They're very big on linking the rest of the world to them - see One Belt One Road. Part of it is creating the physical infrastructure for above resource issues, part of it is their giant construction sector looking to export excess capacity. But they're very into supply chains!
And they want to station forces abroad. They're looking for bases on the Atlantic coast of Africa, so they can stick their noses in the US's home waters. They've got a base in Djibouti. This isn't an American scale global empire but the intent is pretty clear.
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I've been watching Outlaw Star recently, and much like with the later, more well-known Sunrise series Cowboy Bebop, it leans heavily on Chinese-style imagery, probably Hong Kong more specifically. Luxurious restaurants, Taoist themes, Tiger Balm Garden-style opulence, it's all there. China generally factors heavily into the lore of the series, with the warp-drive Phlebotinum landing in a Chinese desert, Chinese space pirates being the ones to use Grappler Ships for combat, and the main antagonist force using Tao-based superpowers.
It seems that people at least really liked the aesthetics of Hong Kong. Mainland China seems to be a harder sell unless it's pre-revolutionary (as in pre-ROC) China where the aesthetics are concerned.
It's hard to say if China can be a cultural juggernaut outside of being a potential model of government, as Georgioz noted. In speaking of Hong Kong, the CCP has arguably strangled that golden goose culturally and politically--"liberate Hong Kong" is a meme that has historically proven to inspire the same amount of cultural allergic reaction among Chinese people as a VTuber mentioning Taiwan. (We talk about "woke excesses" here on The Motte, but it seems like China also has a problem with Terminally Online people setting the tone for discourse, and it's just as bad as in America.) It remains to be seen if the mainland can really make an impact outside of, say, mobile gacha games.
Period dramas are a big chunk of what's on television. There's even a full-scale replica of the Forbidden City to shoot them in.
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I think that the key "soft power" export of China is their surveillance technology such as Social Credit System, their censorship apparatus and more broadly exporting their system of corruption and management of power. So they can be leader in population control, enforcing "social harmony" and promoting collectivism and top down authoritarianism.
Now it is hard to see how it would really look on global scene, China is now driven by domestic concerns mostly and their relationship to other countries is based on very limited considerations such as securing resources from Africa or forcing other countries to support their policies such as dominance over South China sea and so forth. This is not something that can really work in multipolar world. Even today China does not exactly have the best relationships with countries like India or even their supposed ally of Russia.
However I do not necessarily even see "USA" as being cultural hegemon. What I see now is handful of powerful corporations including big Hollywood studios, streaming services or huge Tech corporations like Alphabet or Meta having outside influence on what is pushed. We even seen in the past that these corporations are not beyond adopting whatever censorship rules are necessary to secure their business. If China was the ultimate hegemon I can see them influencing these companies in the same way they influence their own domestic giants such as Tencent.
So how would it look like if I have to force myself to imagine it? I'd say it would be your standard "5-year plan" propaganda. If it is global "Covid Zero" plan, then we will have movies and influencers promoting that. If it will be something technological we would have I don't know "hydrogen economy" or some similar theme pushed as well. Dissent and certainly most woke things would be suppressed as going against social harmony, unless it can be used in some sort of power grab inside the global aristocracy.
I think that actually, the "soft power export base" of China has a certain quite successful component that is hard to see for foreigners with little cultural interaction and sympathy for it, which is a certain brand of consumerist vapidity that more sympathetically could be described as harmony-promoting. Americans and those who are culturally like them are wired to reflect upon their own society and others through the lens of conflict, and this wiring is reflected in the cultural artifacts they produce: a work that does not depict some individual or group of people being locked in a basically unresolvable conflict against their society and the circumstances they find themselves in just registers as boring. Ask Westerners to talk about their society in generic terms, and they'll invariably start to catalogue its sins, be it racism, capitalism, populism, too much of some degeneracy and too little of some freedom. This is not the case for most of those culturally Chinese, and in fact to represent their society (or any society that they could identify with) as fundamentally broken in that way would generally strike them as an antisocial and all-around unpleasant act. To further the confusion of the Western observer, this is not just a specific restriction that is draconically imposed on top of otherwise Western intuitions (like you want to write all the same accounts of conflict and struggle against something but you go one step too far and then the censor jails your family), but a whole cluster of intuitions that leave normal, well-adjusted individuals steering well clear of anything even directionally leading you towards the Voldemortian core of bad ideas.
The way such a society winds up looking to the conflict-dependent Westerner, of course, is sterile ("Where are all the Cyberpunks, or on that matter the anything-punks? Who are they even doing this culture thing versus?"), but a lot of people within find it quite nice and don't understand why the Westerners have this compulsion to shit in their own bed.
The harmony type of society can ossify and be myopic toward social issues. If any criticism is seen as disturbing social harmony, it is hard to make any improvements. And of course this is also seen in personal life where the difference between public and private face can produce various psychological issues.
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Is this like that one Japanese story structure (that I can't remember the name of) that you tend to see in 4komas? I remember that being an example of a story structure that doesn't require there to be a driving conflict.
I assume you're referring to kishoutenketsu (approximately, perhaps, background-setup-twist-conclusion), which seems somewhat orthogonal to me, being concerned more with the structure of the story than its contents; comparable perhaps to the Western five-act structure.
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The first steps of a Chinese world order would be Chinese people placed in key positions, perhaps even gaining their own form of affirmative action, Chinese people gaining social capital, and Chinese having their own victim narrative in the textbooks.
China doesn’t need to change culture to any meaningful degree apart from these steps. They would be content influencing other countries, exporting more Chinese, and making overseas Chinese more powerful. The result is: wealth goes to Chinese (organizations, companies and the state) and economic interests are oriented toward what is good for China. If China wants they can produce their own woke media, but I don’t see wokeness as detrimental to Chinese hegemony and instead as a useful tool. They would rather see Chinese inserted into the woke fold.
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