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None of the content on TikTok is Chinese, so it seems a bit inaccurate to describe it as Chinese entertainment. I've always thought China punched way below its weight culturally. I can't think of any TV shows or movies to come out of that country. I can think of very few books. There are almost no Chinese intellectuals who are commonly read in the West. Compare that to India, which has Bollywood and much else, despite having the same population and far less wealth.
You've listed two successful video games (League of Legends is not Chinese, I don't think), which doesn't seem like much. Maybe they're starting to get good at writing software.
Japan and Korea do seem have an outsized influence given their size. I don't know the reason. China can't compare to them yet.
League is majority owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, but is still thoroughly American in culture and it's developers are in California. It's really an example of the opposite phenomenon, an American game that's extremely popular in China and Korea, even more so than it's popular in the West.
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Er… what else, exactly? I can’t think of any Indian stage plays, video games, or even music (aside from Bollywood soundtracks) that are remotely well-known in the West. As for books, there are a couple of authors that come to mind (more if you count the diaspora, but then to be fair we’d have to add Amy Tan, Ted Chiang, etc. to the China tally).
It seems hard to make the case that China is so far behind India in terms of Western penetration of cultural output, aside from Bollywood.
It seems like India had a lot more cultural cache in the past, when lots of people were going there to learn about budhism, meditation, yoga and all sorts of new-age stuff. Like, it was a huge deal when the Beatles went there in the late 60s, lots of people copied them! But now we can just get that stuff from California, no need to go to India for it.
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I don't disagree with your wider point, but there are some good Chinese novels out there if you dig. I particularly enjoyed Waiting by Ha Jin, The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, and Ingratitude by Ying Chen.
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