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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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 green represents freedom and the orange represents liberty

I used to think that all ideas, even potentially harmful ones, should be free to spread so they could be defeated in the “marketplace of ideas.”

Brobdingnagian if veritable

I enjoy a bit of everything, but my favorite is… drumroll please… Pop. Call me basic, but I love my Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. I also enjoy non-English pop like Bad Bunny, Twice, and Lexie Liu.

I also love metal, mostly thrash and power. Some bands I like are Kreator, Vektor, Seven Kingdoms, and Sonata Arctica.

Gotta be dubstep. I loved it back in the day, but now I just roll my eyes at it.

Lmao I was gonna say, like, racist against OP’s ears?

Was it? I thought it was pushed by established record labels as “hillbilly records” which was a perversion of folk music.

Wouldn’t France be considered an empire?

There’s no need for a tour group for China, Vietnam, and Laos. Clueless college grads go backpacking in Vietnam and Laos all the time without issue. China can be a little tricky without knowledge of Mandarin but if you spend a month or so learning travel phrases you’ll be fine. You will need a tour group for the DPRK (can’t go if you’re a US citizen) and Cuba if you’re a US citizen (US citizens can only go for “support of the Cuban People”).

Flights to mainland China from the US and many other cringe countries are super expensive RN, but you can save on costs by flying into Hong Kong, Taiwan, or south Korea first and booking a separate flight to mainland China.

Loan’t