\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHaving said that, what are some possible reasons that Chinese cultural exports are not more widespread and popular? Here are some I think might contribute, but I actually have very little confidence in any of these explanations
\n
- Cultural products are less comprehensible worldwide because they are less similar to globally dominant Western ones
\n- Stability of cultural canon
\n- Lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution
\n- Highly rural population (esp. in recent past)
\n- Luck
\n- ???
\nthe language barrier (doesn\u2019t affect English/Spanish to the same degree) and the vast size of the domestic market and the total failure to grasp Western culture in a way that could lead to good marketing and the fact that any artist worthy of the name invariably oversteps the line and gets banned until they give up and go overseas.
\nI had reckoned it as a funding issue - a council of old people\u2019s less likely to commission an anime analog than committees trying to sell what\u2019s already established in other countries, and like console video games were illegal in the PRC until recently. Korea\u2019s dramas have the advantage of being part of the US\u2019s trade world and not communist, and for kind of the same reason C pop is behind K and J pop.
\nBut that doesn\u2019t really explain why Taiwanese media hasn\u2019t caught on in the same way. Could just be trying not to piss off the mainland but, idk.
\n\n
The few sinoxenic cultures tend to have relics of it mostly in the oldest parts of their traditions. Maybe it doesn\u2019t sell for the same reasons Vatican themed stuff doesn\u2019t really sell in the US apart from a dan brown novel and the occasional pulse.
\n\n
\u2026Or maybe the issue is the world just doesn\u2019t find Chinese culture interesting, like most countries\u2019 cultures. When\u2019s the last time you watched an Indonesian tv drama or listened to a popular singer from Ethiopia? It\u2019s not that there\u2019s nothing important to say, it\u2019s not that there can\u2019t be something extremely moving in these countries, we just don\u2019t really watch anything from there.
\ninteresting to compare with France, which used to (very recently!) be seen as a cultural hotspot for the Western world as a whole and now seems something of a backwater, with any French cultural products needing to be laundered as American for general appreciation.
\nHowever Hong Kong cinema is popular. I can walk into a mainstream DVD shop and pick up both anime and Hong Kong movies. Looking at Asian countries that do have strong cultural exports, India, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan I do notice that all of them have a few things in common.
\n1) A high degree of liberty.
\n2) being invaded by an English speaking nation.
\nHong Kong cinema falls off a cliff after\u00a0\u201897, when the Mainland market becomes more important than the pan-Asian market.
\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s the case that Chinese cultural exports are particularly unpopular, but rather that Japanese cultural exports *are* particularly popular, and they\u2019re right next to and culturally-similar to China. After all as obiternihli points out, there\u2019s a lot of reasonably-wealthy countries around the world whose cultural products haven\u2019t become popular on a world scale. It\u2019s basically *just* the Anglosphere and Japan that have done that, and the Anglosphere is pretty well explained by the UK and the US having been global superpowers. So the real question is, why did Japan invent anime and not some other country?
I keep wondering why Thailand can\u2019t out-Japan Japan.
Japan went through a sort of enclosure movement and concentration of surplus capital into industrial combines before it was exposed to full-force Europe
"}