Why does Amerika seem like the dominant culture still? Cause they’re stealing from New Afrikans and our creativity, all while having a monopoly over worldwide media. There’s a lot of money that goes into the propaganda machine and that’s a part of it.

They steal from us and use us to push their capitalist propaganda on the rest of the world.

Others have already given you the reasons, OrnluWolfjarl in particular.

So let me just state that American artistic culture is rotting and is not this healthy threatening giant it once was.

The quality of cinema has been declining for some time. Capitalism eats its own. Now we have never-ending sequels and reboots because those are the least risky financial investments, this opens up a space by the way for things like Chinese creativity and innovation. The Marvel cape-shit garbage parade, teen angst dystopia fantasy pictures which I’m half-convinced are a CIA psyop to condition and prepare the young for their lives being worse than those of their parents in a markedly dramatic way (all while reinforcing the idea of non-violent resistance or at least executing the swerve and ending on a note of disenchantment that the violent resistance ended up as bad or problematic as the ones they overthrew).

Prestige TV still exists as something spurred on by HBO but with the end of free money lately and streaming services cutting back dramatically and raising prices to attempt to get to profitability there’s a real question on how much longer the investment in that area holds out and already there have been signs of its decline.

I’ll also mention the US got a toe-hold in the rest of the world. It started its ascent, including in the culture area at the end of WW2 when Europe was bombed rubble, the Soviet Union had lost a massive amount of its population and dealt with massive destruction and then had to pay for an arms race with the US. Asia had not yet risen, China’s communists were still fighting. People talk about this in terms of industry and the US industrializing and higher wages for the US proletariat and so on but it also applies to culture. The US was the one left standing with a fully functioning movie-making apparatus of giant size, scope, and experience. It was the one left standing with a burgeoning music culture, car sales, car radios pushed investment and for more of this even as television ownership and thus production of content and the means to produce it exploded.

In that situation, many creative types outside the US could not express themselves or get a platform. Many moved to the US. Refined means of filtering and selecting popular things together with the mad science of 20th century marketing psychology which the Nazis had used to help their rise to power (and which they had learned from the US where it continued to be refined) pumped it out and extolled it to every corner of American influence and beyond.

There was a feeling that it was imperative (a national security imperative) to show creativity, to give people high art, refined, intelligent stuff in competition with the Soviet Union, to portray American capitalism as capable of producing things that were not thinly veiled marketing (but heavily veiled propaganda).

Is art like technolgical advancement in that you have to build up the know-how from the ground up?

In the case of art I feel it should be pointed out there was a certain synergistic feedback between the various parties you mention, namely Japan <–> US <–> Europe that inspired a lot of the creative ideas and thinking, techniques, etc. (Kurosawa for example was inspired, driven by things he saw John Ford do in his movies and in turn many American film-makers of the 70s onward were inspired by Kurosawa) There was even influence by the Soviets on the west, Miyazaki for instance cites the viewing of a Soviet cartoon in a union meeting as reinvigorating his interest and passion for animation.

There could be some issues with lingering Maoist ideas about returning to traditional Chinese culture, shunning the west, etc that have hampered things a bit but there’s little for that but time and government investment. Problem is, while the US is free to meddle in its media and the CIA and Pentagon have long openly exercised up to veto powers on certain scripts as well are more hidden influence and purging of those not amenable to cooperating with for example the McCarthyist witch hunts and Hollywood blacklist.

If China’s government started doing the same I’m sure the west would start screaming about it all being commie propaganda directly in service of the CPC. Now to be fair they kind of do this anyways but I feel there may be some in China’s government who do not want to push this issue at the moment and in fact like the current status quo where Hollywood avoids angering them in order to have access to their theater market which allows them a soft veto over more extreme anti-China content showing up in US popular media and thus tamping down on anti-China propaganda by virtue of that which they may consider more important at the moment than being a home-grown cultural super-power given the US has such big existing reach into markets which would take China years, decades to duplicate.

With any luck China’s increasing closeness with Russia where you had great masters of the art like Tarkovsky and other soviet greats will have some cross-pollination rub off that bears incredible fruit in future.

China has no interest in exporting its culture, or catering to a foreign audience. This has always been the case for centuries.

We have our own internet platforms that are mostly insulated from the rest of the world. A popular video on bilibili can easily get several times the view count than that of a popular video on Youtube, and yet the vast majority of the world will never have heard of it.

I think a lot of this has to do with the failure of the Cultural Revolution, which set in a conservative trend where the national policy has become averse to attempting anything that significantly deviates from the status quo. Instead, the cultural richness of present day China is drawn from the vastness and depth of its historical past, a civilization that spans over several thousand years.

For a country with nearly 1.4 billion people, it is far easier to make people identify with their cultural past and use that as a national unity project. The last thing the leadership wants is something that retreads the madness of the Cultural Revolution, even if it comes at the cost of stifling cultural innovation.

The decline of Western imperialism is going to lead to the rise of regional blocs in the form of multipolarity. The cultural hegemony of the US will slowly give way to an reinvigoration of local cultures as these countries, bound together by regional ties, began to reassert their sovereignty. You’re not going to see Shanghai as the world’s sole cultural center that displaces the role of New York, but instead the emergence of multiple regional cultural centers across the world.

1. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the US was seeing a massive influx of immigrants from all over the world. This allowed it to develop simultaneously a multitude of cultural genres and forms, which were influenced by the backgrounds of all the immigrants and their melding together. Especially WW2 saw a bunch of artists and artist-related professionals (like technicians needed to make a film) leave Europe and head to the US.

2. Vast sums of money and resources were invested to various culture industries (in the purest capitalist sense), especially film and music, over a course of many years with the aim of profit and cultivating propaganda.

3. The Hollywood golden age of the 40s, 50s and then the 80s shaped the likings of people all over the world to be more akin to what Hollywood wanted to produce.

4. The introduction of psychological manipulation tactics to advertising and the creation of films, music and later video games (e.g. Lowest common denominator, focus groups, etc) made American cultural export even more potent.

Simply put, the US had a headstart over everybody else, which it capitalized with big investements and then properly utilizing the advanced technical know-how that was developing regarding complex productions of culture.

Their culture will leave its mark for decades to come. Perhaps for ages. But others will eventually catch up and surpass them. It is a matter of time.

One of the factors to consider with modern Western art is how a lot of the best pieces come from places of negativity. I’ve never heard of a significant piece of contemporary art that wasn’t fueled by either desperation or anti-establishment politics.

I insist on “contemporary” because there’s no comparison between ancient art pieces around the world. The West’s cultural dominance only started at the age of imperialism because it is the time where it bred so much anger, loneliness and desperation that it created individuals broken enough to create ultimate bourgeois art.

Yes I said “bourgeois” art because truth be told, the masterpieces of the West become so because of cultural elitism and the capitalist induced gatekeeping. That’s the catch : yes currently we have incredibly deep art made in the West because it broke enough people to create a few good doomed artists and subversive artists, but that’s not desirable compared to a society where everyone can happily enjoy making art.

Art could be this nice thing to enjoy with your community, but instead we value this obsession with ultimate pieces from mistreated individuals and elevate ourselves by contemplating it in awe. That’s a good way to cope but actually a sane society wouldn’t do that. Humans are social productive creatures who often copy what others do and enjoy being together, we don’t have to live in a world where we feed on the distress of a few to find a bit of meaning is a dreadful life.

Edit : important precisions, forgot to mention that the West produces broken doomed artists that still have indirect access to enough material wealth to be able to record and spread their music, thanks to imperialism. Broken people in the periphery have to stay in the shadows because there are no infrastructure to carry their art.

Really great read, this whole thread.

I think most other things I thought to say have been voiced thoroughly. I just have one more (which has been touched on too but anyways):

Is there perhaps a subconscious anxiety here: that socialism, aka a materially better society, a society where people suffer less, makes life a little more boring? That pain = good art?

I know I have this fear, sometimes.

And I think this is a truly late-stage Western way to think. Bad = Bad, but Good = Secret Bad, if not Good = Even Worse. We are so used to good things here being bad things in disguise, we have an inherent distrust of good things. I think it lends to Sinophobia of the Chinese project, and ideas like “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens,” or similar ideas that are essentially cope talk where suffering = cool, or suffering = indispensible. As fascism tells us, after all, “to live is to suffer.”

I know I have feared my life ever improving because the idea that I would never make good art again is intolerable.

But, deep in my heart, and deep in my mind, I know this isn’t true. Making HAPPY art that is also GOOD may take some unlearning and re-learning, but it is possible. If it isn’t, then reality itself is grim, and I refuse to believe that until socialism has had its fair shake with the human psyche.

I remember being very disturbed at myself once, when writing answers to a fun little 50 music question Tumblr prompt. One question was “what is a song that makes you happy?” For every other question, I debated between 2, 4, 10 different songs. For this question, I could not think of a single one. But, is this because the only good music is painful music, or because I have a painful life in a painful society and so, naturally, pain is something I relate to the most? And that there is an absence of music that is both happy AND sincere, talented, and emphasized?

Some thoughts.

good post, in my opinion what we’re dealing here with is time and language. Others already pointed out that art and entertainment is an industry like any other and those take time to develop, however to me the main obstacle is mostly language. I like chinese, I genuinely like how it sounds, unfortunately it’s a monolithic task to learn it, and very few people in the west have the determination/interest to do so (me i’m just lazy and i have a peanut brain). This is a shame because despite what you seem to think I’d argue that chinese culture is wonderful and rich, yet a lot of it is locked behind tiny symbols my stupid brain can’t figure out.

All those things will naturally converge over time. More people will learn chinese, china will develop an efficient entertainment industry now that its achieved itself as a modern and prosperous state, and more and more people will start to consume chinese media. I also unironically think that chinese shitposting is far superior to the west, and genuinely believe in the meme that the great firewall is there to protect us westerners from powerful chinese posters lmao

You’ve hit upon a very interesting point that i myself have thought about for some time. I see other comrades here being dismissive of the cultural hegemony that the West enjoys but in my opinion this is not quite so trivial an issue. The reason why is because Western culture reinforces and propagates liberal ideology and it does so very aggressively and successfully. We stand little chance of countering the predominance of liberal ideology in the world until the dominance of Western cultural exports is broken. This is a major obstacle to socialism, revolution, decolonization and other liberation efforts as spontaneous movements will tend to degenerate into liberal avenues and attempt to emulate western liberal society and thereby its political and economic structures.

The undoing of this iron grip of the West on the global cultural consciousness will only happen very slowly as it loses its economic and military dominance. Even as it experiences material decline, politically and ideologically the West will remain strong for quite some time thanks to its global cultural indoctrination apparatus. Only once it becomes evident to the people of the global south that the West’s promises of material wellbeing being linked to the kind of society the West promotes through its artistic output are false will enough people in the periphery realize that it is not worth subordinating themselves to and trying to emulate the West. Unfortunately we are not there yet. As we can see from the sad outcome of the Argentinian election there are still a lot of people who buy into the West’s garbage.

Many people in countries that have been abused and exploited for decades by the imperial core still strongly cling to the delusion that their problems can be solved if only they bend the knee enough to the West and do capitalism hard enough. This is where in my view having a very strong ideological counter-force to liberalism embedded in your culture can be of great help, and so far there are few options powerful enough and unfortunately most include significant reactionary tendencies. Religion and nationalism are two forces strong enough to form such an ideological barrier, though of course as communists we would strongly prefer that people be motivated by socialist internationalism instead. Fortunately China’s success is bringing back some of the lost global popularity of socialist ideas which took a big hit with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Of course the “top grossing movie of 2020” made by China is going to look bad compared to a classic of US cinema. But can you name any films from that same year that the US made that have had the same cultural impact as something like The Matrix or Fight Club?

You’re comparing China’s present average to the west’s “best ever” so of course it’s going to look bad by comparison. I’m also not sure what you mean by western pop music being “experimental”? It all sounds like the same made by committee plastic manufactured crap to me. Are you comparing more of an indie breakout hit sort of song that gets popular because it sounds different to the mainstream in the west to the regular mainstream in China?

It really sounds like you’re looking for reasons to dismiss Chinese media and reasons to uplift western media unnecessarily here. I just started watching a drama series, Minning town, 山海情, and it’s not “perfect” or anything, but it’s completely unlike anything I would ever expect to see in western media. Maybe instead of trying to measure things by “cultural impact” or whatever, you could try reframing it, and think about what unique things a culture can create?

The #1 thing that determines how popular something gets in the west is how much money the rich think they can make off of it. The west’s “culture” at this point is largely artificial, created by the rich to sell distractions to increasingly destitute masses of people. China’s media landscape is radically different because they don’t need to distract their populace with mindless entertainment.

Also, as others have said, a lot of people around the world speak English, and the anglosphere in particular consumes media at an appalling rate. So it’s hardly surprising that western media is the most prevalent in the world just from that alone.

The Wandering Earth 2 is not simplistic and you’ve probably missed a lot since you aren’t fluent in the language, because you can’t capture the nuances yourself and you aren’t able to go into Chinese-langauge spaces to see what other people have found. I also have no clue who the two people you mentioned in the pop music bit are, but idk why you are talking about them instead of hugely popular musicians like Phoenix Legend or Li Yuchun, both of whose works very much have evolved throughout their careers.

There are a lot of structural factors when it comes to Chinese cultural products having less impact in the imperial core. I think you discount the lack of exposure. Even if there was some Chinese media that you personally feel is innovative blah blah, do you think the imperial core would let it get popular? So idek why that is a gripe that you have.

You have valid critiques (and people in China complain about capital being lazy and not producing more creative films and tv shows), but a lot of this post sounds like lack of cultural self-confidence on your part, as well as viewing Chinese media through a Western lens/palate tbh.

Chinese TV is pretty good, with hits like Nirvana in Fire and Reset. But there has been no Chinese series with the wide reach, critical acclaim, innovative and sophisticated narratives, and lasting cultural impact of American series like Breaking Bad, Star Trek, The Sopranos, and Friends, or Korean series like Squid Game. The average Chinese person has heard of Friends, but only a vanishingly-small number of Americans have heard of Nirvana in Fire.

Did you know that Friends is a ripoff of the Black TV series Living Single?

If you didn’t then you are part of the problem and you don’t even know it

The problem has little to do with “media quality”. It has to do with language-based social circles.

• Whites watch white media
• Whites are fluent in english
• a global group of multinational disorganized Africans and Asians are learning english

naturally, this means they speak with whites, spend time on white social media sites, and pick up white media tastes and memes
almost nobody learns Mandarin, so this same thing never happens in reverse

In my opinion the main problem is still just material. Material conditions are still better in the West than in China, so there’s still a motive to learn English.

Also since China is a Western foe, they’ll never even allow Chinese pop culture to rise within their social media bubbles anyway. And since 95% of communication takes place on those bubbles, China is kinda just SOL for now (but the problem will improve as material conditions in China improve)

Many have already said a lot, so I won’t write an essay here. I agree to a certain extent that culture is steered by the US in the popular consumer market. But if you take the center/periphery model of culture seriously (I don’t), then you can expect a lot of niche/scene things to come out of periphery nations and in turn influence the center nations, like US/UK. I can comment a few things:

• Artistic merit lies in the eye of the beholder.
• Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. Likewise, if something that isn’t popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.
• Hollywood has a lot of budget, big music labels in the US/UK have a lot of budget. They can hire experienced producer, promoters, gig/cinema managers etc. to promote and distribute their stuff. Art in the East does not often have the same budget to distribute and promote. This means lack of exposure on the consumer end.
• Lack of local exposure on the artist end. If “Western” music is enjoyable, and Eastern musicians make music inspired from it, what’s the power play here? It’s not necessarily a hegemony, it’s a matter of recognising lineage and historical contingency.
• Watch some USSR movies (e.g. Tarkovsky) and listen to some USSR music (e.g. Kino).
• A lot of Japanese anime/manga also has “unlikeable and selfish main characters, and boilerplate, tropey plots.” Big budget and high incentive to pump out a lot of content will lead to slop, but there’s always a % that produces instant hits and cult-classics.
• There’s a lot of cool and hip Eastern-based music out there, you will have to look outside the top charts though (same goes for Western music). Again, your opinion lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder: I find Hollywood movies too cookie-cutter, and Western top chart music too overproduced and formulaic still. There are small scenes and collectives anywhere, pushing the frontier for arts and media. What about ZA/UM, making Disco Elysium?
• Lots of cool scenes in London/New York come from immigrant/world musicians. Just because it comes from the US/UK doesn’t make it “Western”.

others have said a lot, but i just wanted to add

I’ve tried talking to a therapist about it but they just suggested that I try to stop identifying as Chinese and start identifying as American.

is ridiculous to the point of satire. It feels like something someone would satirically say rather than unironic advice from a therapist.

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Great writeup! I think I get what you’re saying. I’m honestly not sure what the answer is though.

However, I think there’s no strong reason why the west will be able to hold on to cultural hegemony. The only thing I can think of is the bourgeois nature of western art - more bourgeois people means that more people can afford to pursue arts with a financial cushion, although this isn’t the case for many instances. Rich people are the primary audience of fine art, as well. Investment seems to help, as you can see with the success of Kpop. I’m not familiar with the artistic contributions of the Soviet Union, but that could be another interesting body of evidence.