This is a comm for news, information, and discussion on anything China and Chinese related.
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Imperialism will result in a ban.
Sinophobic content will be removed.
The Cool Japan policy is responsible for so much of Japan's reputation it's unreal. Socialist states should be copying it but doing it even better tbh. It is the single most effective cultural and reputational propaganda to have ever existed.
I know our tendency is to ridicule this stuff but given how effective it has been we should be learning from it.
Yep. To reuse my favorite quote from a user on lemm.ee:
I don't even see any politics on my instance! listen dude, i actually support china because i play genshin impact
It needs codifying and making official policy. The period of time I can think of where "cool China" was actually a thing was back when Jackie Chan and Jet Li were popular. China should lean in on the kung fu and massively invest in all of its cultural produce.
No offence though they need to make some shit that isn't just Three Kingdoms rehashed.
Shaolin monks should be doubled down upon as a Chinese equivalent to ninjas in coolness factor.
Videogames, music and animation. Particularly anything targeted at younger audiences. People that build an attachment to something in their youth carry that into their adult years, we've seen this with Pokemon.
Incidentally, if Xbox is going to shit the bed and kill itself in the gaming market then a Chinese SOE should enter the console market and that company should produce first-party content, this would massively boost the industry and quality of content in the industry. A Chinese competitor to Nintendo and Sony, both of which are being pushed and supported by the Cool Japan policy btw.
There is so much that can be done.
No offence though they need to make some shit that isn't just Three Kingdoms rehashed.
That, or Journey to the West.
There's a perception that the Chinese cultural exports we do get are so "regionalized" that they won't be accessible to people who didn't spend years immersed in the culture and history. The local cinema actually ran Ne Zha 2 for a couple weeks but I talked myself out of it figuring I'd lack the references.
Whatever stupid interest you have-- American football, bread, Victotian maids-- Japan has made a shonen battle anime about it that you can enjoy without knowing who the last five emperors were. Is this because we're importing lighter content from Japan, or is it an engineered plan on their part to produce more marketable media?
There's a perception that the Chinese cultural exports we do get are so "regionalized" that they won't be accessible to people who didn't spend years immersed in the culture and history.
That's fine! That's good.
Like, half of anime is exactly that. The audience likes being exposed to the culture and things that don't easily translate. They like learning specific words and concepts that can't be translated easily "nakama" being important in One Piece for example. ProZD makes a total joke of this but it's a good example of what I mean: https://youtu.be/YvNxgHTWIlo
The audience will learn, they will borrow the words that can't be translated, they will build culture and community around it all, they will gatekeep and get annoyed at people who aren't hardcore enough, etc etc. It will ALL be positive for China's overall perception in the longterm. The difference between a normal person and a weeaboo is literally that knowledge and the "haha I know more than you" attitude people get about it. That's fine. It's just how it is. All of that shit would wrap itself up in Sinaboo or whatever too, if a commitment to the cultural produce and export was really made.
Wasn't all that stuff made in Hong Kong before the handover?
Yes but I'm not sure if I'd date it to the handover. It must have been many years later things started to decline in this area? The handover was 1997 and China was definitely still "cool" when Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was released in 2000.
EDIT: At a vague guess I think things were still fine in 2002-2003? Something happened then to sharply affect opinion here in the UK which was generally not negative at all, in 2002 UK opinion was 16% negative and 65% favourable. China was legitimately regarded as cool in people's minds.
Propaganda machine go brrrr, Ive never seen any big news network talk about china in good light or even neutral in the last 20 years. The BBC filter with forests all greyed out comes to mind. I guess thats when the US saw that economic liberalization in China would not go the way they wanted and the economic balcanization would not happen.
Idk the only way I have learned about China in some objective way has been with raw economic stats that contradict every "The Economist China will fall" news article while in a 5-20% yearly GDP growth for 20 years. And then I joined this place which has helped me getting rid of liberal brainworms I still had in my mind, the day I actually read the USSR and Chinese constitutions I just read every line thinking "Based" in my mind.
Back to topic, last month I just saw some Chinese anime about Chinese god power scaling but it was about some Victorian era detectives, and the production quality was good, so I guess they are building something up although they dont seem to catch as much atention, I just saw it on my stremio in the most seeded section.
Shaolin monks should be doubled down upon as a Chinese equivalent to ninjas in coolness factor.
Xiaolin Showdown would go crazy in 2025 I bet if you showed it to some children, Christy Hui vanished when we needed her the most.
I actually support china because i play genshin impact
...I play genshin, wuthering waves, PGR, and ZZZ.... I might support China a little too much lol
When I see this kind of stuff actually working for AES states today... I miss the USSR all the time, but in these moments, I really miss the USSR. God, to be an actual commie Soviet sympathiser, sitting quietly at the family dinner table, while my little brother insists to our dad he's not a communist, the USSR just makes good entertainment media... and I don't immediately seem like a filthy pinko for backing him up, if I'm careful... Oh, that'd be amazing.
They made some wonderful animation in their time,and some amazing movies
Sadly,hard to access if you don't know the language
I think someone here said recently that Japan is culturally Israeli and the parallels between cool Japan and hasbara immediately came to mind (in terms of their success in the west I mean)
Oh yeah I can kinda see that! Japan are far better at that shit though. South Korea is probably the second country successfully implementing it, primarily through kpop and kdrama. Israel might have attempted to but their execution has not been on par with either of those two. Israel doesn't really have a cultural produce with fandoms, unlike shows or videogames which South Korea and Japan are doing great in compared to their size as countries. What percentage of Japan's gdp is exported entertainment in the form of shows and games? I don't know because that's a very specific niche figure that's hard to dig into, but it would be an interesting figure to know because that's your baseline to match if you want to get the same effect in another country. Presumably the tourism industry also greatly relies upon the generated "cool" factor of this export.
being a capitalist dystopian ethnostate is so sugoi
Agreed, the mainstream "China bad" clearly has a harder time just from the very existence of TikTok, this would definitely work
Mass produce the sinoboos
This is funny bc in college I was weeaboo adjacent, went to go register for japanese so I could learn to watch anime without the subs, but I was too late in the registration window so all the classes were full. So my 18 year old puppy brain says fuck it, kanji is kanji, I signed up for Mandarin and now I'm a Maoist
I signed up for Mandarin and now I'm a Maoist
It's true, some say that just being exposed to the raw power of the character 𰻞 will cause you to immediately become a Maoist
I know a nutty Maoist who insists that learning the language of a given revolutionary movement makes you more inclined towards it. Then tells me "you really should learn a foreign language, comrade." (He's not wrong in that specific statement, I probably should, but the subtext is absolutely "if there is a known way to turn someone into a Maoist, I want to try said method on you".)
Ahh, Maoists being sectarian. Always good for a laugh. And hey, he's slightly less annoying than your average Trot, and he does give good hugs, so dealing with him's generally worth it. When he's in a less sectarian than usual mood, anyway. Most of the time if you admit to being an ML around him, he rants at you about the Sino-Soviet Split. Which I'm still mad about too, from the opposite side.
But honestly, what can you expect from a 🐼? It'd be weirder if he wasn't a Maoist.
"that's a crazy character I wonder what the simplified version is"
Goes to Google
Mfw
For the record, the simplified version is 𰻝
Yeah, it's intentionally absurd to the point that if you see a character with this many strokes, there's a good chance it's this one — it's one of the textbook examples of high stroke count 汉字 and I would love to try the noodles someday
I could cook noodles in the same time it takes to write this character
I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen unicode biang properly render
THE SAME EXACT THING HAPPENED TO ME LMFAO (except it was the advisor who suggested Chinese as a replacement until I could get into a Japanese class, but then I ended up really liking Mandarin)
Country that's like 5k years old with a rich history and culture
or
my anime and bideo games
Honestly I really don't judge people at all for learning languages because they're more interested in pop culture than "fine" culture, because God knows that I spend a lot more time listening to Radio Kavkaz Hit for my daily dose of energized dance music than I spend watching documentaries about the like traditional handicrafts of Ivanovo Oblast or whatever. So learning Japanese because you're a fucking anime weeb is fine, learning Japanese or Chinese because of their long histories and rich cultures is also fine — whatever gets you out the door, right? The important thing is that people are learning languages at all.
No, the thing that frustrates me about this Redditor's obvious bait is that like... Ne Zha 2? MiHoYo? Anilist's database of Chinese animation? Is there like any reason at all to say China "doesn't have anime" aside from that the characters don't speak Japanese, i.e. simple brand loyalty to a red circle despite no meaningful qualitative differences? I don't get it.
...Well I guess there is one meaningful qualitative difference between Chinese and Japanese animation, which is that Japan has made 423 animated half-hour TV shows about cute girls doing cute things and China has only made one.
Oh yeah, it's actually very funny that if you say you're a Chinese learner, people will assume you're doing something very sophisticated like reading Maoist literature or classical Chinese poems or something and not just like watching 动画 but if you say you're a Japanese learner, people will assume it's definitely for anime
I think I heard once that anime weebs comprise actually the majority of Japanese learners, and I will never not feel just a twinge of embarassment knowing that that is me as well.
But hey, at least I can take comfort knowing that my boomer mom also decided to start studying Japanese because of the cartoons, so it's evidently not just a socially awkward young person thing.
Also an unfortunately not insignificant share of the people in my life can't distinguish Chinese from Japanese to begin with, so.
Okay but have you considered that anime language has this
NSFL
spoiler Seriously if you look at this the volcel police are coming
No really please stop
spoiler This is your last chance to click away you monster
:::
do I even want to know?
It's just a silly pun about hentaigana having "hentai" in the name. Hentaigana is really just variants of the letters of the Japanese syllabary; the hen part is incidentally the same character as in hentai but the tai part is written with a different character.
That reads like bait, why would he consider Chinese if he so clearly doesn't like it
Everything on Reddit is bait, btw
China doesn't have anime, games
laughs in Chinas rapidly growing animation and gaming industries For fucks sake, watch Link Click.
That poorly-animated marx anime
black myth wukong
I rest my case
There's a Marx anime?
Primo commie bait. I gotta see that.
It's called The Leader, and it's free on youtube IIRC, but you really don't. Unironically the best part of it is that it gave us two emojis. 
Ah. Typical terrible media based on a historical revolutionary, libs love it, for commies it's a few hours we'll never get back, type thing? In that case, I'll pass.
Btw recently many big names are coming out of China, both in games and animes/donghuas. Lord of the Mysteries and To Be Hero X animations have been very well received even among purist weeb spaces. Big new games, which are not mobile gacha, is being announced every month now. An example would be Blood message which received enough traction when the trailer dropped. Along with recent shift in public view of China after the rednote incident, it looks like 2025 may mark the start of chinese soft power in pop culture. The rest depends on CPC policy, and what they envision.
In China there are many Chinese
Wait learning Chinese unlocks more DLC? 
Everything I see that's cool in Japan seems like a creature comfort designed to bandaid the alienation caused by their harsh capitalist work culture. You don't create restaurants where nobody talks or looks at you because you're a healthy society.
"communism is when no anime, games those kinds of things"
Funny part is that everybody knows chinese games and animations are better
at this point, I mean
I completely understand the title! I know it's super basic stuff but seeing a sentence in the wild and actually understanding it is a big milestone that I just passed
China has the best animated show of season (To be Hero X)