China’s millennials, Gen Z leading nation away from American culture | Hacker News Reader

China’s millennials, Gen Z leading nation away from American culture

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I'd be willing to bet most of the worlds youth are less enthused about American culture after the last 4 years. Would be interesting to compare sentiments between other countries. The box office thing just seems to be that domestic filmmakers are producing better stuff.

Agree - while the rise of woke and cancel culture in America have affected people's perception of American culture in the last few years (e.g https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-18/u-k-an...), I think the lack of quality entertainment from Hollywood over the last few years (reboots, superhero movies etc) are a much bigger reason for the rise of local movie industries.

You mean the rise the grievance culture and its insecure leader.

This isn’t a thing.

Cancel culture and woke culture is though and it’s embraced wholeheartedly by the radical left.

Even left leaning Europe thinks it was too extreme that Twitter cancelled Donnie

Y'all. The word "polarization" captures both, and explains why you each think only one is the only problem. There's a cycle of causality here.

Left-leaning European here, I think he gathered enough demerit points that wouldn't usually fly with any review team, except he was a high-profile political leader which made it relevant regardless. Now that he's not POTUS anymore, by all means let him play by the same moderation rules as the rest of us serfs.

Your leaders say differently

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/angela-...

No, that's not what umeshunni meant. What's more, unless you fail basic reading comprehension, you know it's not what they meant. But props for the totally transparent attempt at deflection, or whataboutism, or whatever that was...

I absolutely despise that rhetorical trick of pretending that someone was talking about the opposite of what they obviously are. It's both dishonest and transparent, and does nothing to advance real conversation.

I wasn't using a rhetorical trick, I understood what umeshunni meant, and you understood what I meant. As you said, I was transparent. I wasn't assuming umeshunni meant the opposite and clearly stated my opposing opinion. Perhaps I was too brief and left too much up for interpretation amidst others' superb reading comprehension skills.

I'll go ahead and state things more clearly for you. First, look at the comment umeshunni was responding to: "I'd be willing to bet most of the worlds youth are less enthused about American culture after the last 4 years." Now, I wonder why that commenter said specifically 4 years.

Now I can't say with certainty that the prior commenter was implying Trump is to blame. However, suppose you are willing to spend five minutes reviewing opinion polling about the USA from other countries' perspectives. In that case, you would know that President Trump's polling worldwide is very low and that opinions about the USA have dropped during his term. One source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm....

Feel free to respond to this more sufficiently described opinion in a manner that meets the criteria of real conversation. Or, you can respond with more confused grievance outrage.

they are related. Hollywood movies get worse the more they push the woke religion. it's a lot like Christian rock.

The kind of people in France who have negative feelings towards America because of 'woke culture' are not Gen Z or Millenials, but largely conservative or upper class older cohorts, like say the French arts community. The kind of people who think of the US as prudish and would go out and defend Polanski, that kind of stuff.

There's no significant difference between young Europeans and young Americans or even young Chinese when it comes to social issues, and trying to shoehorn cancel culture in there is just a bad attempt to hijack the discussion. No youth outside of the US things the US is too left-wing, lol.

The reason why the Chinese youth nowadays is more anti-American than their parents has nothing to do with cancel culture in the US, they don't care. The reason is that they're tired of being caught up in another countries dream. Many older Chinese still can't shake admiration for the US and liberal values out of principle. When they grew up, the US was the only game in town. Newer generations are more ambitious. They want their own culture, they don't feel like they owe anything to the US, and they perceive liberal democracies largely as a dysfunctional mess. They didn't witness cool Britannia and the fall of the Soviet Union.

I think a big difference simply comes down to relative living standards. If you grew up poor, held back by disastrous policies the American 20th century standard of living sounded amazing: supermarkets full of food, factory workers can buy new cars and TVs (not just elites), the space race and other feats seem amazing if you’re in a country which is struggling to maintain a basic standard of living for everyone.

In the present era, things look a bit different. Most people are living better[1] and there are plenty of people doing quite well domestically to look up to, not to mention that the other side of the comparison has come down a lot as you have e.g. better high speed rail at home and while Americans are still buying tons of cars they’re buying 4WDs to sit in traffic on roads which are years overdue for maintenance so that’s not looking like such a great deal, not to mention that real wages have come down enough to cause problems which are prominently reported. Recognition of the problems poor/non-white Americans face is similarly going to be well reported. The expensive, pointless debacle in the Middle East gave a lot of ammunition to anyone saying our government wasn’t as good as claimed and 4 years of Trump poured gasoline on that particular fire, especially with the pandemic spotlighting basic failures of the government to protect its citizens.

China’s government hasn’t exactly forgone the opportunity to tell everyone how much better their system works. If you’re growing up in that world, a lot of the old luster is gone and the inertial weight of basic things like English fluency are going to accelerate that process, too. If it seems like things are getting better it’s pretty easy to put your hopes there.

1. not the Uighyurs but how easy is it to learn about that?

American films have not experienced an absolute decline in China. It's just their relative share have declined as Chinese films have improved from bad to passable.

King Kong vs Godzilla is projected to do $166 million[1].

[1]https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2564993/godzilla-vs-kongs-c...

I don't think this is surprising. You can't expect to constantly lambast an entire nation of people and still expect them to treat you favourably. That's not how humans work.

IMHO, I don't think the Chinese gen z, or Chinese of any gens, are leading the nation away from American culture. In a more YC-ish term, the American culture is merely diluted.

2 facts: American blockbusters are still very successful in china, at least the good ones; there are a lot more decent options other than American ones, which was not the case a decade ago. The same can be said with HongKong culture, which used to be the only game in town.

America's millennials, Gen Z are leading America away from American culture.

I don't think its surprising to see it in other parts of the world.

To the contrary, they're defining the American culture of their era.

If by "away" you mean "back toward it after the Boomers had made a mockery of it", then yes, I agree wholeheartedly.

The Communist Party in China has led an economic boom over the last 40 years absolutely unprecedented in human history. That earned them a ton of credibility with their citizens. You can commit atrocities and few people will care if you also lift 500M people out of crushing poverty. At the same time, Chinese soft cultural offerings like movies and music have gotten decent if not good. Why would they look up to America at this point?

>The Communist Party in China has led an economic boom over the last 40 years absolutely unprecedented in human history.

Thanks to capitalism and Western democracies. Taiwan and HK accelerated at a speed exceeding the CCP, by decades.

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