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I disagree. Japan was already exporting a lot of cultural influence in the 80s, arguably more than it is now. Every kid in America was obsessing over Ninja, Karate, ans samurai. Nintendo was an absolute craze. Nerds were trading unlicensed untranslated anime on vhs tapes, trying to figure out wtf it meant. Businessmen were showing off their money be eating at fancy sushi restaurants or benihana steakhouses, then getting drunk off sake and singing karaoke. There was even a hit song "im turning japanese."
On the more highbrow side, there were a lot of Japanese artists winning prestigious awards. yukio mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, kazuo ishiguro, andmany other less famous ones wrote great literature. Haruki murakami got a smash hit with Norwegian Wood. Film buffs loved Akira Kurasawa, whose samurai duels were a major influence on the light saber fights in star wars. Japanese jazz and classical musicians were also popular in their respective scenes.
If anything, that stuff should have been bigger. There just wasnt any real marketing in the US for anything foreign at that time. Even british stuff could be hard to find. There was no choice except American Hollywood movies and TV, for a regular person.
But now? Its easy to get international stuff from all over the world. People love it. But what does China have? A shitty, exploitive gambling app (Genshin impact)? One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular (three body problem)? Some incredibly jangoistic movies about killing americans (wolf warrior, The Battle at Lake Changjin) which went nowhere outside China? Some hacky web novels about "cultivation" and getting kidnapped by a billionaire?
The sad thing is that they used to do better. In the past, Chinese martial arts movies, food, buddhism, taoism, and sun tsu books were all popular. But almost all that stuff came out of Hong Kong. With the CCP takeover, and general crackdown on non-Beijing culture, their cultural output seems to have really stagnated. I think, if anything, people are hungry to see a Chinese pop culture product, but there's just nothing there.
To give the devil it's due, this is a phrase that could apply to western media, as well.
I picked up the Expanse well before it became popular, and it came across as a bland paint-by-numbers sci-fi series. And now... makes vague gestures toward the media landscape.
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At the risk of seeming uncultured, I've only heard of Mishima and Kurasawa. And even they are pretty obscure. The average man on the street hasn't heard of Kurasawa.
Compare to Pokemon. Everyone has heard of that. It only got going in the late 1990s. Playstation? 1990s. Sonic the Hedgehog? 1990s. Resident Evil? 1990s. Legend of Zelda? Late 1980s. All of these things started back then and have only gotten more popular.
Let's put to one side whether something is shitty or hacky and look at raw popularity. I could just as well say all those prestigious awards just go to pretentious gibberish, it's a fruitless line of argument. I can't just arbitrarily say that SK has had no cultural output because I look down on kpop soyboys and manhwa. Genshin is popular. The Three Body Problem series is popular and has had a distinct impact on our conception of alien life. Why else would Netflix grab it and pretend all the characters are black or women? Chinese food, Buddhism and Taoism haven't exactly been discarded. Chinese web novels are getting more popular, even non-Chinese people are writing on webnovel rather than royalroad because that's where the readers are. Wukong is popular.
Chinese cultural influence is increasing despite considerable political headwinds.
If you go back to the 1980s, we didn't have the modern Internet, and that's drastically going to affect how popular culture gets spread around the world. Japanese culture in the 1980s had spread as much as could be reasonably expected in a pre-Internet world.
Now that we do have the Internet, spreading culture is much easier. If Chinese culture has spread only as much with the Internet as Japanese culture spread without the Internet, Chinese culture is really doing badly.
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I mean... tbh if you've never heard of Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki murakami then yeah... I'll call you uncultured, at least as far as 20th century novels go. They're not exactly obscure writers, they both sold millions of books besides winning multiple literary awards (whereas 3 body problem only won the Hugo award, which I agree is meaningless now). But OK, they're a bit too "modern," how about Natsume Sōseki who wrote "I am a cat" in 1905, or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki who was shortlisted for the Nobel literature prize in 1964, or Kenzaburo Ōe who wrote famous works in the 60s and finally won the Nobel prize in 1994. Or many, many others, who are admittedly not well-known to the common man in the west, but anyone who's a professional artist in their area knows about them. Like, oh, Osama Tezuka for one, "the father of manga."
And uh even in video games... there's Donkey Kong (nintendo arcade game) in 1981. Or their game and watch system in 1980, Oo the light gun they made for the Magnevox Oddessy (the first home video game console) in 1971, or their love tester in 1969, or their disney-licensed playing cards before that.
And that's just gaming systems from one company. What about all the other stuff I mentioned? Sushi, Karate, ninjas, karaoke, sumo, geisha, pachinko, yakuza, haiku, onsen, kimono, manga... jira? All Japanese cultural exports. Even some of the stuff that should have been Chinese, like Chinese character calligraphy or Journey to the West or Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Go, were still mostly told to us via Japan.
In terms of raw money, it seems like you're mostly just looking at three things, right? Genshin is an anime-styled gambling app, it has no cultural significance whatsover. 3-body problem is a bog-standard sci-fi novel that only got popular because "it's an inroad to the Chinese market" and Netflix will greenlight anything, except they massively changed it to have black and female characters. Wukong, I don't know, I haven't played it, but it's brand new. For the most part, none of those have any cultural signifigance though. When I was a kid, watching "Ninja Turtles" and "Power Rangers" really made me interested in Japanese culture and I wanted to visit there. I can't imagine how playing Genshin impact or watching the 3 body problem makes anyone think "yeah I really want to go to China!!!" If anything, Dragonball or Ranma 1/2 show a better view of China.
edit: to be more clear, I claim that Japan had an amazing literary and artistic tradition long before they became a rich first-world country. China used to, back in the 19th century, but it all got destroyed by WW2 and the cultural revolution. They've since become a top-tier economy, rivaling the US, but they're still a long way behind in cultural output, way behind even much smaller countries. This is admittedly hard to measure, and shouldn't be measured by money, but I still think it's obviously true. I'd go so far as to say that mainland China today is still behind Taiwan or old Hong Kong in cultural exports.
I'm sorry, who has heard of these people? Or authors shortlisted for the Nobel Literature prize, not even getting a Nobel?
Japan has... two Nobels for literature. China has... two Nobels for literature. Maybe you just haven't heard of them because you're not cultured enough? I'm certainly not, I don't know about Chinese Nobel winning authors because I'm not interested in that stuff. That's my point. Few people know what's going on in China because of the language barrier, they don't even know what there is to be interested in and enjoy.
The three Body Problem series is exciting and interesting, it actually dares to have different themes and theses to the 'environmentalism good, lets all cooperate and get along with aliens' that everyone else seems to be stuck with. It has genuinely alien aliens with totally different ethics and worldview, not Star Trek's humans with fancy make-up and tropey exaggerations of aspects of Earth culture. It looks at trends like 'men are becoming softer and less manly' and dares to say that isn't such a good thing. There's a distinct enthusiasm about science and technology.
Genshin is significant in that lots of people care about it, they draw a lot of art about it, they bitch on twitter that the characters aren't brown enough... There are 300,000 people in the Genshin memes subreddit. People even make beautifully animated songs complaining about the gacha element: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
Well, you started off with a really strong claim that "most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance." Now it seems like you're backing off of that and just saying it's the language barrier? Seems like a flimsy excuse, when we have millions of Chinese language speakers in the west, and live in an age where both professional translators and auto-translation are in abundance. I really think that if there was a lot of great art coming out of China these days, we'd hear about it.
If your main example is Genshin impact... I dunno man. Sure, there's a lot of kids these days addicted to it. But if you tell a regular person that you love Chinese culture because you're addicted to spending money on pictures of sexy anime girls in Genshin, they're going to look down on you. I realize culture is subjective, so I can't prove that it's bad but.. cmon. you know it's bad. We can do better.
I reiterate that we are literally ignorant of what's going on in China. I am ignorant. You are ignorant. This is the kind of comment I was reacting to.
How does anyone know that Chinese manhua sucks? Have they actually read it? Listened to 'Chinese music' such that they can characterize it? Have they played many Chinese games? How can it be obviously impossible for China to do such things if Wukong is at 96% positive on Steam with 300,000 reviews and FF VII Remake Intergrade is at 89% positive and 24,000 reviews? Don't the stats show that Wukong is as good as Final Fantasy? FF XIV is in that same territory, 87% positive.
Wouldn't I be an outlandish clown if I said that American music sucks? WTF is American music? Rap? Country? Taylor Swift? A philharmonic orchestra somewhere? Metal? Rock? I bet most people haven't heard more than a few Chinese songs. I haven't.
However, I have played some Chinese games. Some are good, some are bad, some are excellent. Dyson Sphere Program is at least as good as Factorio. And the Steam reviews back me up, 97% to 96% in DSP's favour. Gunfire Reborn is also a pretty good game but nobody's ever heard of it. Most Chinese games aren't even on Steam, I don't even know where you'd look to find them. Some Chinese website presumably.
I've read some Chinese novels. It's the same wide range of quality you find in the rest of the world. Some are really good! Most people just haven't read them because they're on weird Chinese websites and have to be translated into English. Plus they have different values and worldview to Western fiction.
People seem to have got it into their heads that China can only copy, or the CCP crushed Chinese culture into paste. It's just not true. They are perfectly capable of producing good entertainment products. People are literally prejudiced in that they have already worked out their opinion and will look for evidence to back it up. They'll say, with no evidence, that China is using bots to prop up the review score of a AAA game. And at the same time, they'll point out that China's been suppressing the video game industry anyway because it's decadent and a distraction for the youth... Come on, the simplest answer is that it's a good game and people are enjoying it.
Which Chinese novels did you like? Were they "real" novels, written by a professional author to be sold in bookstores, or just amateur webfiction? Because all I've ever seen coming out of mainland China is the latter. And I'm not a total snob, I do sometimes enjoy webfiction, but the all the Chinese stuff I've seen has just been garbage. Endless leveling up "cultivation" fantasies for boys, or "romance" about being raped by a billionaire for girls. I judge it as "it sucks" because I read it and that's my opinion, and I'm assuming that's what the other person also did. Perhaps there's some hidden gem that simply never caught fire or got translated or anything. But perhaps not. There's no "conservation of culture" law that guarantees that a large country must be able to produce great culture in proportion to its economy or whatever. If anything it seems to work the opposite, where the best art comes from the descendants of families that were once rich but lost everything in great tragedies.
I really think that part of the reason "3 body problem" went viral was that people were hungry to see something out of China, and this was the first time we'd ever seen a real fiction book from them. But it was... very mediocre, in my opinion, and it wasn't followed by anything else.
Reverend Insanity, webfiction, very long and unfinished due to some unclear spat with publishing. Selfmadehuman liked it.
Levelling up and cultivation, plotting but also a lot of human-condition/character stuff in the allegorical in-universe Legends of Ren Zu. Original, interesting world. It constantly goes in directions you wouldn't expect. Characters have real theory of mind. I think it's great fun watching this amoral sociopath run rings around people who are tied down in social constructs of their own creation such that they can't use their strength. And what edge there is exists for a purpose.
I fully expect you'll look at Chapter 1, see that 'he took my body's purity line' and think 'oh this is degen trash'. That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. I have no idea why the author put that line in since our MC is the least sexual man on that planet (or why there was a random 'hehe gays are funny' side story 2000 chapters in). There's a certain weirdness to it, so be it.
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If it hadn't been for "puppy" votes brought in by Vox Day as part of an attempt to gank the Hugos, Three Body Problem would have lost to Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor. So it wasn't just a meaningless award, it was a meaningless award with an asterisk
No way. 3BP's dominance of sci fi was total. It would have taken the prize against almost anything.
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The greater sinosphere does have a lot of internal crossover between Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia-Chinese, the mainland and other elements which have their own unique voices. Which I think changes the dynamic somewhat versus Japan where their original market was more solid.
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