[infinity0]

The author makes an incorrect assessment without considering the appropriate context for China.

The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich.

In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP.

Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.

[cromwellian]

Culture doesn't need any kind of "official" export. If it is good, it gets discovered, now more than ever in social media. I didn't grow up watching Atom Boy, Voltron, and Robotech because the Japanese government invested in exporting it. Those were pulled into the US by some distributor in the Midwest who discovered them by accident, and decided to have them translated and show on US television.

A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade.

Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things.

You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished.

Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.

[stickfigure]

India seems to manage it.