Anime & Donghua

Having observed this for a while now, I'm uncertain whether all these imposed "cancel Japan" decisions at a grassroots level will produce any positive effects if the CPC itself is unwilling to make any substantive governmental responses, aside from diplomatically scolding Japan at the MoFA level, citing the UN Charter and cancelling some random seafood imports. It's been a month since the threat of war by the fascistic Japanese PM and there doesn't seem to have been a real governmental inclination to do anything in response.

This presently just seems to be leading to overzealous low-level government officials trying to show off by (allegedly) tearing away the mic from Japanese performers in China mid-performance and all these "bona fides" demonstrating acts like video game devs cancelling Japanese-themed content expansions, cancelling flights to Japan and (purportedly here) discouraging Japanese media at conventions.

Even though it's all been done in a fairly heavy-handed way, there's nothing wrong with these things per se. The West certainly lost any moral high ground given the far more ridiculous Western censorship and banning of Russian content following the Ukraine escalation in 2022. Still, I don’t see the practical value in trimming down the weeb population or supporting these individual-level restrictions if the government itself isn’t going to leverage the shift in public sentiment for any geopolitical use.