Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.
This said, we won't have a real tipping point until China can rival Hollywood for quality and quantity of cultural output, and their language makes that quite difficult. This is one of the reasons the USSR never "won" even at the time when it was arguably more powerful and efficient than the US.
Amazing how fast attitudes change. Just a few decades back, Japanese goods and Made in Japan had the same cheap, low quality reputation as Made in China goods today. I even distinctly remembered the same "Japanese people as a culture don't care about quality" comments which is the same as some people nowadays complaining that Chinese people have "chabuduo"(just enough) attitudes. Or the same accusations of no creativity.
Funny how drastically these "deep-rooted" cultural attitudes in Japanese people have changed. Or maybe its not the culture of Japan that has changed but the perceptions others have of it. I reckon the same is for China.
Maybe part of it is economic risk. Localization and distribution would have some costs, and maybe nobody's willing to take a risk on "let's bring China's #1 movie to the US". Things like anime in the west got bootstrapped in obscure fandoms on an informal, low-budget, and sometimes downright bootleg way, which I'm not sure they want to do if they're trying to consciously develop soft power.
I am somewhat surprised about how limited China's attempts at soft power seem to be. They don't have a prominent global media presence like, say, the BBC/DW/NHK. They don't seem to be tooting their horn well about their engineering advances. They don't even seem to have effective tourism marketing-- I can't think of the last time I saw an advertisement encouraging travel to China (even before the pandemic) while there are loads of travel documentaries on TV all conveniently sponsored by "(random state or European country) Tourism Office"
I do think a missing piece is having a few more world-beating brands. Yeah, we have a few, (Lenovo, for example), but we're definitely at the point where people will say "I'm not going to buy a Chinese car/washing machine!" -- which feels about where Korea was in 1980 or Japan in 1955.
* Centralized governing system
* Production excess, we continued to produce even if we didn't have any buyers and the quality was pretty bad (today you have Wish or Aliexpress through which you can sell literally anything, even people from my family are ordering crazy stuff from China that has no use at all, so China has the upper hand, we just didn't have that technology back then)
* Lack of political diversity
* No indicators of survivability, China is yet to go through a major crisis (Black Swan) to see how it handles it, the pandemic is not a Black Swan
* Impedance mismatch between communism, atheism promoted by Marxism vs. Christianity that promotes individual thinking, Eatern cultures generally are more collectivistic, so again, China has the upper hand
* Socialist countries are ticking time bombs, they implode when you don't expect them to happen, usually the trigger is local. Nobody thought that Soviet Union would collapse out of nowhere, I still remember reading articles coming from socialists in German and American newspapers lauding the policies adoped by Soviets and how they will get ahead of them. On 15th December 1989 nobody in Romania would have thought that the next day a bloody revolution will start out of a small Hungarian minority in the city of Timisoara. Localism! Everything from China comes from the top level, filtered and censored, we may never know what happens locally and it will be a surprise for us when that happens.
* An educated population is hard to control, the only thing that communism does great is offering education for the masses and opportunities, the moment it will hit a certain threshold, people will just want more and everything will end violently. As Wikipedia puts it:
"The events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with peaceful opposition in Poland, and continued into Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence." [1]
> Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.
I can agree with you. Because of our experience, it is easy for us to swap China with "Western Communism" and think that it will have the same faith without taking other factors into consideration. The West has problems and the pandemic revealed them, blaming China for the Corona problems is stupid, we should blame our overlyoptimized, overlyindividualistic nature. When Italy was "burning" at the beginning of the pandemic, all European states were reluctant to aid and all the press in Europe was finger pointing them in a disgraced way, typically European. I remember states that I've believed to be "team-players" like Sweden notifying all other European memebers that they will do it their own way. The same happened with my country, they were so late to react to the advice of WHO and EU, so late that the local municipalities started to take the matter into their own hands they practically blocked the access to the cities.
I have listened to this viewpoint (and at some point I have held it myself) for the past 20 years. And year after year it is clearly proven wrong.
Today Chinese companies such as Huawei, TikTok, DJI, Xiaomi are absolutely world class technology companies. Ten years ago Chinese companies of this stature were unthinkable. Yet somehow we question whether Chinese companies will be capable of producing a highend microchip, now that we via our sanctions have create a halfway sputnik moment for them? Whether they can create an international blockbuster movie?
Could it be that we in the west are speaking out of prejudice? That we think we know what modern Chinese communism and Chinese culture is? And we just assume it is going to degenerate into some Soviet style bureaucratic, corrupt, degenerate mess.