It's true that the censor stuff is a huge bane to China's own pop culture. However, there is still a difference between export pop culture and domestic pop culture. The domestic stuff still manages to squeeze out the occasional gem (《你好，李焕英》 is an example that comes to mind), but the pop culture exports (such as Great Wall, which casts foreign movie stars in the hopes that somehow this will get westerners interested) tend to be all uniformly shit. And the ridiculously viral movies, such as 《战狼》 or 《流浪地球》 are...honestly not that interesting despite the popularity.
As for modern culture, I agree with what you've already said and would add that the really fast generational turn over is also a contributor. In the U.S., a generation spans 10-15 years. Kids born in the 80s and 90s share a similar set of cultural zeitgeists (9/11, Simpsons, Power Rangers, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, etc.). Whereas in China, it feels like there's a generation gap every 5 years, so even kids born in the same decade have very different childhoods growing up. Maybe as China's economy matures the generation range will grow bigger and pop culture will have a little longer to figure out what it wants to be.
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Date: 2022-11-01 15:30 (UTC)It's true that the censor stuff is a huge bane to China's own pop culture. However, there is still a difference between export pop culture and domestic pop culture. The domestic stuff still manages to squeeze out the occasional gem (《你好，李焕英》 is an example that comes to mind), but the pop culture exports (such as Great Wall, which casts foreign movie stars in the hopes that somehow this will get westerners interested) tend to be all uniformly shit. And the ridiculously viral movies, such as 《战狼》 or 《流浪地球》 are...honestly not that interesting despite the popularity.
As for modern culture, I agree with what you've already said and would add that the really fast generational turn over is also a contributor. In the U.S., a generation spans 10-15 years. Kids born in the 80s and 90s share a similar set of cultural zeitgeists (9/11, Simpsons, Power Rangers, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, etc.). Whereas in China, it feels like there's a generation gap every 5 years, so even kids born in the same decade have very different childhoods growing up. Maybe as China's economy matures the generation range will grow bigger and pop culture will have a little longer to figure out what it wants to be.