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.
Others have already given you the reasons, OrnluWolfjarl in particular.
So let me just state that American artistic culture is rotting and is not this healthy threatening giant it once was.
The quality of cinema has been declining for some time. Capitalism eats its own. Now we have never-ending sequels and reboots because those are the least risky financial investments, this opens up a space by the way for things like Chinese creativity and innovation. The Marvel cape-shit garbage parade, teen angst dystopia fantasy pictures which I’m half-convinced are a CIA psyop to condition and prepare the young for their lives being worse than those of their parents in a markedly dramatic way (all while reinforcing the idea of non-violent resistance or at least executing the swerve and ending on a note of disenchantment that the violent resistance ended up as bad or problematic as the ones they overthrew).
Prestige TV still exists as something spurred on by HBO but with the end of free money lately and streaming services cutting back dramatically and raising prices to attempt to get to profitability there’s a real question on how much longer the investment in that area holds out and already there have been signs of its decline.
I’ll also mention the US got a toe-hold in the rest of the world. It started its ascent, including in the culture area at the end of WW2 when Europe was bombed rubble, the Soviet Union had lost a massive amount of its population and dealt with massive destruction and then had to pay for an arms race with the US. Asia had not yet risen, China’s communists were still fighting. People talk about this in terms of industry and the US industrializing and higher wages for the US proletariat and so on but it also applies to culture. The US was the one left standing with a fully functioning movie-making apparatus of giant size, scope, and experience. It was the one left standing with a burgeoning music culture, car sales, car radios pushed investment and for more of this even as television ownership and thus production of content and the means to produce it exploded.
In that situation, many creative types outside the US could not express themselves or get a platform. Many moved to the US. Refined means of filtering and selecting popular things together with the mad science of 20th century marketing psychology which the Nazis had used to help their rise to power (and which they had learned from the US where it continued to be refined) pumped it out and extolled it to every corner of American influence and beyond.
There was a feeling that it was imperative (a national security imperative) to show creativity, to give people high art, refined, intelligent stuff in competition with the Soviet Union, to portray American capitalism as capable of producing things that were not thinly veiled marketing (but heavily veiled propaganda).
In the case of art I feel it should be pointed out there was a certain synergistic feedback between the various parties you mention, namely Japan <–> US <–> Europe that inspired a lot of the creative ideas and thinking, techniques, etc. (Kurosawa for example was inspired, driven by things he saw John Ford do in his movies and in turn many American film-makers of the 70s onward were inspired by Kurosawa) There was even influence by the Soviets on the west, Miyazaki for instance cites the viewing of a Soviet cartoon in a union meeting as reinvigorating his interest and passion for animation.
There could be some issues with lingering Maoist ideas about returning to traditional Chinese culture, shunning the west, etc that have hampered things a bit but there’s little for that but time and government investment. Problem is, while the US is free to meddle in its media and the CIA and Pentagon have long openly exercised up to veto powers on certain scripts as well are more hidden influence and purging of those not amenable to cooperating with for example the McCarthyist witch hunts and Hollywood blacklist.
If China’s government started doing the same I’m sure the west would start screaming about it all being commie propaganda directly in service of the CPC. Now to be fair they kind of do this anyways but I feel there may be some in China’s government who do not want to push this issue at the moment and in fact like the current status quo where Hollywood avoids angering them in order to have access to their theater market which allows them a soft veto over more extreme anti-China content showing up in US popular media and thus tamping down on anti-China propaganda by virtue of that which they may consider more important at the moment than being a home-grown cultural super-power given the US has such big existing reach into markets which would take China years, decades to duplicate.
With any luck China’s increasing closeness with Russia where you had great masters of the art like Tarkovsky and other soviet greats will have some cross-pollination rub off that bears incredible fruit in future.
GOOD post