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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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