Chapotraphouse

The west has no emotional connection to China's past or history. The only history the west knows is kung fu, a monkey series, some people know three kingdoms vaguely from dynasty warriors and then there's the century of humiliation.

The largest part that they actually know is the century of humiliation. This is in large part due to british influence.

They know nothing else, so anything they see just feels hollow because there's no context for any of it. It doesn't feel real.

Contrast this with what they do know - european history - and they have a completely different feeling about all art and culture because they can contextualise it in their knowledge of that history. It feels right, it feels real, and it doesn't feel fantasy, because it is something they understand.

Contrast this again with Japan and you can see how Japanese culture, religion and art resonates with people in the west because they can contextualise it better as a result of far more engagement with and understanding of Japan.

This "feeling" issue is just vibes created by familiarity, with the history and the culture.

Something essential is missing

Is it product placement?

most American liberals don't realize that they are white supremacists so there is gonna be a lot of denialism like this as their century of humiliation accelerates

Nazi cope often has stuff about how there is no "soul" or not true intelligence because it is mechanical like robot while they compare people with a reptile or an insect while mumbling something about it lacking real creativity or some vibes flavored denial but it basically boils down to they are not white and thus will fail and never be real. "Missing something" is also stuff I have heard them say. When someone says something like that, you poke them a little and it immediately devolves into them turning into

"not a racist, btw"

"The vibes are wrong."

I hope to God this dude isn't American and talking about there being a shallowness to Chinese culture, to say nothing of talking about fucking literature like more than 5% of Americans read literature that was written for adults. Obviously this also applies to the "life" category too, but that's much harder to persuade someone of, while these other points are unforgivable.

So that just leaves non-literary art and, like . . . our best auteurs make movies that are a waste of time and it's just a question of whether they make money from special effects or shot composition that doesn't actually advance a message, and we get like one really good TV series per 10,000, including some of the most heinously senseless garbage you can imagine (shout out to Tulsa King), and remember what I said about how no one reads? If even 1% of Americans can name a single contemporary American painter other than fucking Banksy, I would truly be fucking shocked unless it was like a comic book artist who paints on the side (no disrespect to them), or if .1% could name a sculptor. Don't worry about digital art either, because we're doing our best to drown it in AI slop (like literature, incidentally).

But it's okay, because we have the long tradition of American musical theater, where the biggest play of the last decade, which the cultured First Lady Michelle Obama (BA from Princeton, JD from Harvard) called "the best piece of art in any form that I've ever seen in my life," is . . . Hamilton

Fuck this fucking country. Literally all we have is music, and that shit's been dominated by sexual abusers since rock and roll was a real thing, if not longer.

The Occidental barbarian struggles to understand the transcendent beauty of Chinese culture, mistaking the sublime for mundaneness.

Yeah dude, sure, a 5000+ year old civilization & culture is surely missing a dimension that's obvious to any westerner and will crumble because of that.

Like, contemporary Chinese culture surely has issues (see: rat race to the bottom), but it's nothing compared to the issues of contemporary American culture (see: vaguely gestures at the state of the western world)

Racial esentialism's final form

There's a...brightness, you could say, that's missing from them. They lack that kind of... spark of white-hot creativity, Their worldview is...colored by different presumptions

Is it the lack of desire to spread DEMOCRACY to others?

Of course when you build your whole personality around how cool and good you are and how the lame and bad people around the world are, and you blame them for making your life worse, then yes you will not be able to relate to someone who focuses on themselves. Even though all human beings have a lot more in common than they have differences, only when you remove yourself from the human experience through the process of self-alienation do you stop being able to relate.

It's just Nazi

Yeah, crumbling for 5000 years now.

It's sounds like they are implying a specific element that the intended reader of the comment should know, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out what they mean by that. Chinese culture, from my very limited understanding of it as a very westernized ABC, certainly isn't lacking in any fundamental aspect that I could even conceive an ignorant and racist person believing. Surely, even the most chavanistic Europeans of centuries past could see the incredible culture of one of the world's oldest civilizations. Is this person somehow even more ignorant than them? Incredible

american century of humiliation when

Oh wow you mean to tell me "do something" guy has another incredibly myopic and detached take. Wild.

They're never gonna come up with 3 hours of good guys punching robots, y'all. They're cooked.

The US might even soon have The Copium Wars.

Americans live five dimensional lives. Those Chinese "people" living with only four dimensions could never understand our brilliance.

I'm not really worried about him.

I think there is a dimension missing from his brain.

You notice it when you read his post.

And without this dimension he will eventually crumble.

Can someone explain how he managed to post straight through the empathchan debacle? Depraved man