I think a decent measure is GDP growth rate divided by GDP per capita. I don't have the numbers on hand but China is above average in both absolute and PPP.
Yeah for sure, almost all of the US' most impressive accomplishments were state funded. Privatize the profits, socialize the costs.
This might be a hot take here, but for all of Elon's overhyped flops like the Hyperloop and car tunnels, the Falcon 9 does have the lowest launch cost per kg out of any rocket and is the only family of orbital rockets with a demonstrated reusable propulsive landing system. That's not to say they'll have the lead forever since there's a fundamental limitation of private enterprise, but currently they're ahead in several important ways.
This admittedly sounds really familiar though. Did you post it on (a certain reddit sub)?
No, but if there's more than one therapist giving that advice that would be super wack
The Wandering Earth 2 is not simplistic and you’ve probably missed a lot
Probably. I'm definitely not too knowledgeable about cultural allusions and stuff, and I basically relied on the subtitles. I must admit there's a gap there. Westerners often praise Liu Cixin for having great ideas and plots but criticize him for having flat characters and uninteresting dialogue. Idk how much the translation has to do with this and how much this even affects the movie since it's only loosely based on the short story though.
I also have no clue who the two people you mentioned
李荣浩 and 薛之谦, their top songs have 100-200 million views on YouTube, the most out of any Chinese artist. They're incredibly popular in Taiwan, Singapore, and the US amongst ethnic Chinese. I'd be surprised if you haven't heard of them.
Phoenix Legend or Li Yuchun
Mind sharing some recommendations?
I think you discount the lack of exposure
Yeah I'm not denying that this is major factor. I think The Wandering Earth 2 should've been as popular as any Hollywood blockbuster. But I do have my reasons why I think it's "merely" a very good film instead of a timeless cinema classic. Perhaps like you said it's because I'm missing stuff due to the language barrier.
a lot of this post sounds like lack of cultural self-confidence on your part
True, that's what I hope to cultivate some day.
I really hope they look to other countries for better inspiration. India for example has incredible music and movies.
Yeah strongly agree here. For all its diversity, Western music is fundamentally limited by it's reliance on the 12-tone equal temperament system. The systems they use in Indian and West Asian music are ways to surpass that and add additional complexity.
A critical weakness of traditional Chinese music is overreliance on the pentatonic scale, which is even more limited than the full set of 12TET notes. I think it's cool and all that there's a renewed interest in Chinese folk music, but I think it's incredibly misguided how some people think it represents a "renaissance of Chinese music" or that it should be the defining characteristic of Chinese music. To build their own modern musical identity, they must look to the future, not the past. And cultures other than Han Chinese and Western would be a great place to look for some inspiration. Of course it's not my place to tell Chinese people what they should or shouldn't do, but from a semi-outsider's perspective, that's one place where I'd start looking.
I think it's from a legally Chinese studio founded by a Chinese-American and white American. I'll take that as a W since attracting foreign talent is a legitimate development strategy.
Another bit idea: a short where Xi Jinping and his translator meet Winnie the Pooh and they have a pleasant conversation about ecology and environmental sustainability (something like this would go absolutely viral on english media)
Lmfaoo this is gold. It would simultaneously defang the Winnie the Pooh meme and explain China's stance on sustainability. It's too bad the censors and propagandists in China are so out of touch and incompetent.
You're right, I wasn't considering mobile games. Got any good ones that aren't just cash grabs or ports of existing IP?
I'm aware that there are solid games with some connection to China, such as FTL: Faster Than Light and My Time at Portia. There's of course also Genshin Impact and the upcoming Black Myth: Wukong, but I find it hard to be excited about them anymore since my SO shat on them really hard, the former for "being a rip-off of BoTW" and the latter for "being a rip-off of Elden Ring and Dark Souls and using unoriginal, centuries-old IP." TBH I think they have a point.
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.
Yeah I agree here. Why do you think Black Americans have been so creative, especially in music?
Funny enough, China did once try a very hamfisted, top-down approach to try to cultivate an international pop star. They hand-picked an elite music school graduate, and had her and a production team study superstars like Michael Jackson, Beyonce, and The Beatles. It was a total flop.
I do often fantasize about what it would take to bolster the domestic music scene, though. I think having kids learn an instrument in school like Americans had to learn the recorder would be a good start, as would funding stuff like school bands. Maybe reduce crushing school workloads so kids can touch grass and do hobbies including music. Perhaps subsidizing concerts, music festivals, and recording sessions. Offering scholarships for music school. Maybe even tax incentives for revenue from overseas audiences.
Then I realize that things like poverty alleviation, medical services, and national security are far more pressing issues and I feel a little silly for thinking about the more maximalist ideas. But it's fun to think about, and I don't think you can go wrong with at least funding the arts in school.
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Yes, I do, but it's hard to keep a positive mindset when people constantly use this to prove the superiority of the Western system. I view cultural development as something that's just as important as scientific advancement, and the inability for global south countries, even moderately prosperous ones with good infrastructure and scientific output like China, to even begin to match the cultural might of the global north leaves me with no good answer to that assertion.
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Yes I do enjoy certain Chinese media, and I do support artists I like on Bandcamp and watch movies I like in theaters. But I don't want to reward mediocrity. I think one of the many reasons Chinese cultural development has lagged behind their economic development is because they have such a large captive market that there's no need to be particularly innovative or polished. You don't have to capture the hearts and minds of the entire Chinese population to be successful - just a percentage is still a huge number in absolute terms.
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Yeah I'm currently studying singing and songwriting, and this is a huge motivator. I would like to make songs in Chinese some day but I'm not fluent at all. We'll get there, though.
Yeah I totally see the established industry effect in terms of high production value films, TV series, and highly-polished pop music, but what really gets me is that a lot of influential musical movements such as jazz, hip-hop, punk rock, thrash metal, grunge, and house weren't made by carefully cultivated industry darlings with an elite music education, or even by fresh immigrants with a mind full of unique ideas, but by regular working-class Americans, often marginalized in their own right, just fucking around.
Why were Americans able to make such groundbreaking music, but other people can't? The standard liberal answer is that Western liberal values of individualism and free thinking encourage creativity, while socialism and collectivism punish stepping out of line via societal pressure and outright censorship. They also argue that any great bout of musical creativity came about from rebellion against the status quo, and rebellion in "authoritarian" or "collectivist" societies is mercilessly quashed, while it's tolerated in the free West.
I hope that's not the case. In the case of China, it really is true that musicians have to gain approval by local governments before performing at any ticketed event, including a vetting of lyrics. I think it's a fine policy in principle, but in practice, guidelines are really vague and many local governments come down way too hard to err on the side of caution, and I think it's really unfortunate. China is operating under siege socialism, and it's true that there are sometimes harsh limitations on artistic expression. But even so, black Americans were far, far more oppressed when they developed blues and jazz, and their dissent was certainly not tolerated at all, so I'm not sure if this argument holds water.
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.
They achieved their goals of debt trapping Ukraine and cucking Germany. Who cares about victory?
To play devil's advocate, maybe the same reason the US claims to be democratic?
I think the PRK should be pretty known for anyone who has done a surface-level study of modern Korean history, such as reading Patriots, Traitors, and Empires.
It seems like in the last few years, the cracks were really starting to show in American dominance. The bungling of the COVID response, the BRI and BRICS chipping away at US trade and currency dominance, the failure of Ukraine to repel Russia, inflation and shortages in the imperial core, etc.
But it seems like many of these cracks have been patched up this year. I’m not sure how much is just propaganda, but economic indicators show that inflation in the US has cooled, unemployment is the lowest and the labor force participation rate is the highest they’ve been in decades (even accounting for underemployment/gig work), and real wages have increased amongst the poorest and richest alike (albeit unequally so).
US energy prices are dropping. US oil production is at an all time high, and the US is refilling its strategic reserves at a lower prices than it released them for. OPEC can’t retaliate without taking a huge hit to their economy.
Infrastructure, historically a big issue for the US, has been looking better as the Biden administration passed several huge spending packages to improve train networks and other things.
Ukraine is losing but the US has only spent a small fraction of what they did in Afghanistan, and they’ve debt trapped Ukraine in the process. The Israel-Palestine conflict has certainly turned sentiment against the US but it hasn’t resulted in any material change in relations.
China’s economy is stumbling; although there’s not a recession per se, unemployment is sky high, consumer confidence has taken a hit, and investment has slowed. Interest rates are about 3.5% in China while they’re about 5% in the US, which means China has less room to perform expansionary monetary policy than the US.
The US seems to have gained ground in trade relations. Several countries have pulled out of the BRI. Countries like Mexico, which for a while had China as their biggest trade partner, once again have the US as their biggest trade partner. FDI in China has slowed. “De-risking” and “friendshoring” have started yielding results. I know in the long run this will also weaken imperialism as it develops the productive forces of countries like India, Mexico, and Vietnam, but it might take a long time; even highly-industrialized countries like Japan, Germany, and south Korea are still subservient to the US.
People have completely forgotten about the US’ shit COVID response, but Chinese citizens still bear resentment towards Xi and the central gov for the zero-COVID policy, and the uncertainty over lockdowns was a contributing factor towards the reduction in investor confidence in China.
So overall, things don’t look too bad for the US, while they’re looking a bit uncertain for the other emerging “poles” like China, Russia, and the Middle East. I suppose the silver lining is that a lot of these gains came at the expense of gutting the economies of “allies” like Europe and south Korea, which means that the US won’t have as much to easily prey on next time.
What are your thoughts?
Tap water that's drinkable straight out of the tap is a rarity in the world and not really a thing in any developing country. There are certainly parts of China where you could get away with it, but you could get sick in many other places. The issue is that pipes leak here and there, so even though water comes out drinkable from the plant, there's no guarantees what it will be like at the tap. From the perspective of the Chinese, you drink less than 1% of the tap water you use, so why bother making all of it drinkable? But I'm sure things will change as the country develops.
The Wandering Earth 1 and 2 are awesome if you like sci-fi.
If you're also looking for non-mainland stuff, I really enjoyed the Ip Man movies and Infernal Affairs.