We can see the cracks starting to show in US military and economic hegemony. To be sure, they’re still the most powerful country in the world, but they can obviously no longer take on the rest of the world combined like they could in the 90s.
But more insidiously, the US still seems to be the hegemonic hyperpower in terms of cultural output. Even countries that are geopolitically at odds with the US happily and ravenously consume its art, entertainment, and literature, and to a lesser extent, those from loyal vassals of the US such as Japan, south Korea, and Western Europe.
It’s not just due to reach. I feel that cultural output from the US (and vassals) is genuinely more creative, technically advanced, complex, innovative, and prolific than cultural output from the rest of the world. As someone of Chinese descent who doesn’t strongly identify with American culture, this weighs on me heavily.
I’ll compare American and East Asian cultural output since that’s what I’m most familiar with.
Hollywood cinema is obviously the gold standard the world over. American films such as The Matrix, Blade Runner, and Fight Club are full of symbolism, innovative cinematography, and complex narratives. Korean films such as Snowpiercer, Parasite, and Oldboy are not far off. In comparison, the top Chinese movies such as The Wandering Earth 2 and The Battle at Lake Changjin are rather simplistic and don’t necessarily have a lasting cultural impact, even in China.
Chinese TV is pretty good, with hits like Nirvana in Fire and Reset. But there has been no Chinese series with the wide reach, critical acclaim, innovative and sophisticated narratives, and lasting cultural impact of American series like Breaking Bad, Star Trek, The Sopranos, and Friends, or Korean series like Squid Game. The average Chinese person has heard of Friends, but only a vanishingly-small number of Americans have heard of Nirvana in Fire.
Chinese pop music is largely samey-sounding ballads. Listen to one of the songs by Li Ronghao or Joker Xue, and it could’ve been released today, a decade ago, or two decades ago. In contrast, Western and Korean pop music are constantly evolving and trying new things. Even more creative Chinese artists like Lexie Liu, Hyph11e, South Acid Mimi, and Absolute Purity are largely following established trends and not really setting new trends. Chinese music has no answer to jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, and house. The most identifiably Chinese music simply uses traditional instruments, but there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or creative about mashing folk instruments with existing pop music. K-pop, J-pop, and even LatAm, West Asian, and Indian pop have immediately identifiable sounds, whereas most C-pop sounds like it could’ve been made anywhere at any time. C-pop has little appeal even in places like Hong Kong. If you look at the HK charts, they’re dominated by foreign artists like NewJeans Jungkook, Yoasobi, and Taylor Swift, with a small handful of HK and Taiwanese artists, but not a single mainland artist. That seems really shameful to me.
Japanese manga and American comics are considered the gold standard, with Korean manhwa a solid third. Meanwhile, Chinese manhua suffers from amateurish art, clunky pacing, unlikeable and selfish main characters, and boilerplate, tropey plots. If you thought isekai was overdone, wait until you see the endless cultivation stories in manhua. It’s kind of embarrassing, really.
It’s a similar story with literature, video games, and animations.
So, why is there such a large discrepancy in the quality of cultural exports coming from the US, Japan, south Korea, and Western Europe vs the rest of the world? Is it simply that these countries are richer so more people have the opportunity to pursue art, and studios have larger budgets? Is art like technolgical advancement in that you have to build up the know-how from the ground up? Or is there some cultural or governmental aspect in countries of the International Community™ that genuinely fosters creativity?
People often talk about this in terms of soft power, but imo what’s even more important is cultural self-confidence. If domestic art or art from friendly cultures is good enough to satisfy one’s own needs instead of having to import everything from countries that want to subjugate your own people, I think that would greatly boost collective well-being, sense of identity, and mental health.
On a personal note, this has been a nearly obsessive worry of mine for the last year or so. I’ve tried talking to a therapist about it but they just suggested that I try to stop identifying as Chinese and start identifying as American. Not very helpful advice. I don’t really have anyone to talk to this about, so I hope I can start a discussion here.
Of course the “top grossing movie of 2020” made by China is going to look bad compared to a classic of US cinema. But can you name any films from that same year that the US made that have had the same cultural impact as something like The Matrix or Fight Club?
You’re comparing China’s present average to the west’s “best ever” so of course it’s going to look bad by comparison. I’m also not sure what you mean by western pop music being “experimental”? It all sounds like the same made by committee plastic manufactured crap to me. Are you comparing more of an indie breakout hit sort of song that gets popular because it sounds different to the mainstream in the west to the regular mainstream in China?
It really sounds like you’re looking for reasons to dismiss Chinese media and reasons to uplift western media unnecessarily here. I just started watching a drama series, Minning town, 山海情, and it’s not “perfect” or anything, but it’s completely unlike anything I would ever expect to see in western media. Maybe instead of trying to measure things by “cultural impact” or whatever, you could try reframing it, and think about what unique things a culture can create?
The #1 thing that determines how popular something gets in the west is how much money the rich think they can make off of it. The west’s “culture” at this point is largely artificial, created by the rich to sell distractions to increasingly destitute masses of people. China’s media landscape is radically different because they don’t need to distract their populace with mindless entertainment.
Also, as others have said, a lot of people around the world speak English, and the anglosphere in particular consumes media at an appalling rate. So it’s hardly surprising that western media is the most prevalent in the world just from that alone.
I wasn’t intentionally naming recent Chinese movies, I just happen to think the best (mainland) Chinese movies of all time were made in the last few years. That at least gives me some hope that they simply needed some time to develop the expertise. And yeah, I’m well aware that for every The Matrix there’s a couple dozen Justice Leagues.
Indeed, most top 100 music is derivative crap everywhere, including the US. But every year there are a few hits that stand the test of time like Poker Face and thank u, next. And I don’t mean to say that US pop music is truly cutting edge stuff. Rather, what happens is that there’s always cool new stuff brewing underground, and in a few years either the formerly underground artists make it big or their sounds set off a trend that’s eventually picked up by established artists. That’s how you end up with a bunch of trends or waves in music like deep house and trap heavily influencing US pop music in the 2010s. By contrast, it seems like underground music in China stays underground, and in the first place the sounds were invariably originally imported. Like there are by all means good sounding Chinese non-mainstream artists like Omnipotent Youth Society, 等一下就回家, Ice Paper, PO8, GriffO, and Absolute Purity, but their music is based on existing, imported genres like hip-hop and prog rock and their music has virtually no influence on the most popular Chinese pop artists like Li Ronghao, who just constantly spit out generic tunes.
I do appreciate that Chinese media can take a different perspective than Western media. Propaganda pieces like Minning Town can be a good watch and are really wholesome. Even organic works like The Wandering Earth obviously are made with different worldviews. I do think this is one unique strength that can be leveraged that doesn’t just try to copy Western stuff or rehash tired palace drama cliches, and I’m glad to see it appear more often in recent works.
I think there are many great ideas coming from Chinese TV and cinema, they just need to work on execution. Take the Tencent adaptation of Three Body Problem, for instance. Huge potential, and the IP is imo one of China’s precious jewels. But they really did it dirty with the low budget. It was mostly just people standing around and talking. A single episode of the (whitewashed, de-sinicized) Netflix adaptation has a bigger budget than the entire Tencent series. I would go as far as to say that it would’ve been worth it for the government to subsidize it to raise the production value.
Other people have mentioned the music stuff in far more detail than I could, so I’ll leave that discussion to them I think.
The biggest difference I would say between western media and Chinese media is that Chinese media is open about their agenda, Minning Town is unapologetically pro-goverment, which of course makes westerners hate it because it is “propaganda.” But at the same time, western marvel movies and things will be even more unapologetically pro-US government and Americans and Americanised people around the globe will just accept that as a given and won’t even consider the most blatant US propaganda as propaganda. I personally find this more unnerving than anything else, I don’t like a lot of western media for how blatantly it shoves a US state approved message down people’s throats and because that is just the “default” for western media, no one ever questions it.
Yeah, I agree with you on the Three Body Problem, the actors were fun, but yeah, the budget really held it back. Though I’m not sure that throwing money at the problem would automatically fix it. Others in this thread have mentioned how the US had a headstart both in industry and cultural output at the end of WW2, and a similar idea applies here. If the US could get China to spend billions of dollars in producing media (that may or may not flop) then they can push them into a kind of “media quagmire” similar to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, except with film production instead of weapons production. Trying to take the heart of capitalism on an equal financial footing is doomed to failure, as they have effectively limitless resources at their disposal and a huge head start when it comes to creating media.