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It's more so East Asia than China. Japan through behemoths like Nintendo & Sony have dominated gaming since day 1. Korea has always had a strong E-sports and Mmorpg offering as far back as the mid-2000s.
For its size, China hasn't produced any recent creative works of note. 3 body problem is the only one I can think of. That's 1 international & critical success in my lifetime. Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best. They haven't produced novels and art of note. And their movies, most of all, suck major balls. Freemium games, gambling simulators and perfect recreations of Mozart don't count. We all know the Chinese can copy better than any known people on earth.
Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity. USSR faced the same issue, which led to the surprising popularity of Bollywood in nations that were behind the iron curtain.
That beings us to Wukong, the one exception. It's right there in the name. Sun Wukong draws entirely from 'Journey to the West', a Buddhist epic. It is book with religious significance. It almost feels on the nose, but Wukong is one of India's only enduring cultural influences on China, and it shows.
Part of me is offended by this question. America makes amazing entertainment, year over year. They are in a little slump with gaming, but that's about it. What you're noticing, is a slow return to a balance. Not everything is American anymore. America shares the top with England, Korea, India & Japan for top tier entertainment. East Asia is 1.5 billion people. Many of whom are in 1st world nations that are past the lowest tier of Maslow's pyramid. They have rich original cultures and aren't derivative of western myth or philosophy. Why won't they produce great art with global reach ? Ofc they do. China's historic underperformance here is the more confusing statistic. The rest of East Asia doing well is honestly, pretty expected.
For Hong Kong, I'd go out of my way to point out that it went beyond mere capability for amazing art. For two decades or so (pre and shortly after the handover), it hit far above its weight, arguably being the most culturally productive place in the world per capita, in film. Not just wuxia and martial arts: In the Mood for Love is a movie that is both genuinely loved and widely acclaimed in the global film community as one of the greatest movies of all time.
I'm not sure it's communism per se that did it. Mainland China was starting to produce some films of note (cf Zhang Yimou's oeuvre), but the industry was stillborn. I think it's more about living in liminal zones, in space and time. Conflicts arise, and the future can play out in multiple different ways. Choice and agency matter. Genuine art can exist only in those zones. Otherwise, it's just remixes of what has been that serve to reinforce existing structures and patterns.
Fully agreed on Hongkong.
Ayy, we've all seen the every frame a painting video. I joke, but I want to sit down to appreciate Wong Kar-wai's greatest hits.
It's odd. The best wuxia novels come from South Korea but use Chinese myths. I recently rea 'Peerless Dad' and it is legitimately good. But, all Korean. Same for Chinese history. The Qin unification story has been told a million time, but Kingdom (Japanese Manga) has somehow turned out to be the most effective.
That's a cool take. By definition, what makes them interesting (the thick atmosphere, the lack of belonging, the feeling of transition) is what makes them unstable and temporary.
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You have produced a roughly even mixture of true statements, statements of personal taste (and/or the taste of people with taste similar to yours, cf. "critical success"), falsehoods and blind dismissals ("Freemium games, gambling simulators" seems to simply rule out what is the best monetization model for their market, "perfect recreations of Mozart" is a quip that is utterly divorced from the reality of Chinese music).
Huh? Most people who lived there believe USSR literature was great (just consider the scifi output), and the movie industry did about as well as you could expect in a place where US-style movie making capital can not be raised. If anything, Russia turned into a creative desert after the fall of communism.
...written in China, by Chinese, and presumably utterly foreign to any putative Indian readers. This is as fair as if you said that Star Wars (the highest-grossing Western live action media franchise) is to be credited to Japan and China, because the Jedi are a pastiche of East Asian warrior-monk orders.
...and yet the only American entertainment that I have consumed for the past few years is the culture war. Admittedly, that particular alternate reality game does continue being the unchallenged greatest show on earth. I've tried watching American movies, playing American games and listening to American music, and stopped because they were simply inferior to the better works of entertainment that I can get from East Asia for free (financed by freemium models and gambling elements that extract money from people with more loose cash and lower executive function).
I have made a genuine attempt to love Chinese creative works. For one, they have outdone themselves on cuisine. Traditional, fusion and contemporary Chinese cuisine are all outstanding. 3 of my roommates are Chinese from the mainland (I'm not racist, I have a black friend), and my favorite recent individual (like many rationalists) is an ethnic Chinese man. (Lee Kuan Yew). Yes, I am Indian, but I don't really care about China-India tensions as much as your typical Indian on twitter.
I have tried. But, I've struggled to find much depth to contemporary Chinese music, Chinese movies, Chinese comics or Chinese computer games.
Fair. I stretched my point there. It is still derivative of their own history, but Wukong is their big win, and deserves to be acknowledged as such.
This has to do with a mix of wokeism, covid, the writer's strike and netflix-isms. Matt Damon talks about the death of original mid-budget films. It is more so economics than the death of art.
Now, the best stuff has moved to streaming platforms, getting broken into mini-series with low budgets, that make moderate profits instead of becoming block busters. No wonder horror and intimate character studies are flourishing. Midnight Mass, Pig, Marriage story, etc. are all innovative, gripping masterpieces of the last 4 years. Some of my favorite albums (mainstream and indie) have been produced over these years (Tesseract, Silk Sonic, Black Crown Initiate, Kendrick). Western games are admittedly in a slump but the early 2010s set the bar too damn high (Dota2, CSGO, Skyrim, GPT5,.....) and the studios are still at the tail end of the 'milking it' phrase. Hell, I dislike the wokes as much as anyone on TheMotte, but that guy ' Ta Nehisi Coates' writes a damn good book. I disagreed with everything in it, and I still couldn't put it down.
Yes, the big mainstream of American Media is in the middle of a self-fellating death spiral, but 2024 seems to be a year of 'coming back to senses'. American Entertainment is so incredibly productive, that even when popular media is failing, the lower tiers are still producing hits after hits. You need to look under the covers.
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That sounds like the complete opposite of what's happening. America hasn't created anything amazing in about a decade, they've been churning out sequels, prequels, remakes, and adaptations of foreign material in a scramble to have any content at all, and gaming is probably an exception - mostly due to indies.
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Tell me you haven't been paying attention without telling me you haven't been paying attention. Just look at the slop Disney is putting out time after time and the absolute abysmal mindrot offerings in gaming.
90% of everything is shit, that doesn't mean nothing good is produced.
To add to that, we see everything that is vomited onto our market, but we don't see the Chinese market (or other East Asian markets). There's a big cultural and linguistic gap, the only things from over there that make it over here despite that are almost by definition the good things. We're not showered with crappy Chinese phone games or CCP propaganda or what have you. We do get showered with our own crap.
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Well, not day one. The first big hit was Pong, from Atari, which despite its name was an American company.
Huh, I never knew. Always thought it was Japanese.
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