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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?
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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