Note on SCMP's China's growing cultural clout article

This is a quick critique of Why Japan thinks China’s growing cultural clout is something it needs to counter.

The headline and intro focus about the Japan / China angle but Japan is only mentioned 4 times. 4 paragraphs deal with the ‘reaction’ from Japan and 34 others contain uninspired glaze over Chinese’ pop culture achievements, of which my personal opinion is:

Wukong ⊕ as a reference point, if you compare it with something like Yotei (American-made although with a lot of Japanese input), it’s pretty weak culturally and Yotei is excellent on that point. was pretty disappointing relative to the hype: the game-play is not original, the graphics are pretty good (intro cut-scene!) but not revolutionary and the historical tale is pretty weak except in setting-up the story.

I didn’t see Ne Zha 2 so I can’t judge the quality of it (note: Red Panda basically made me reticent to watch another Chinese-influenced animation movie). What I found though is that from the tremendous commercial success of that movie ($2.2bn), it’s 97.8% Chinese sales. Hard to call it global soft power when the audience is almost entirely domestic.

As for Labubu, I don’t really see the efficacy of a manufactured collectable trend as a cultural achievement (as far as I know, the dolls are not particularly inspired by Chinese history or culture). And, Chinese or not, manufactured trends suck.

The Three-body Problem was an excellent read indeed. Actually, I think the Chinese show is better than the Netflix one → lol @author. Not counting the fact that some of its story had some issues⊕ “According to the author, these chapters were originally intended as the opening, but were moved by his publishers to avoid attracting the attention of government censors.”, wikipedia locally because of its description of the Cultural Revolution.

Not mentioned is Genshin Impact, a good Chinese-made game, superior to Wukong in my opinion. One of its most important region and source of NPCs is beautifully made after China (landscape, architecture, myths, food) but culturally it also uses medieval Europe, Edo Japan, American, Arabian themes for other regions, which is maybe why the author didn’t mention it.

And not mentioned either is food. Chinese cuisine is arguably the most widespread Chinese cultural influence in the world.

Ironically, one should mention the success of the Japanese light novel / manga / anime The Apothecary Diaries or the (domestic-only as far as I know) success of the Japanese manga Kingdom and its live-action movie adaptations which are both set in China (or an unnamed region that takes a lot after China)!