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If it were a question of genre, sure I get that. But we're talking about effectively all commercial art at this point. It has nothing to do with "western superior" racism or anything like that. Japan does not have this problem at all, even though they invented the anime aesthetic.
Where is the Chinese Mario, Elden Ring, or Metal Gear? What studio is producing a truly original distinct visual language?
I live in Japan and I strongly disagree. The products you mention are the ones strong enough to get exported overseas, but within Japan itself you get a thousand manga/anime/dorama/idols/games per year that all look pretty much identical, everything feels extremely derivative.
The same is true of Chinese culture. China has an unbelievably diverse range of music, film, theater, etc... but what gets exported to a Western audience is not going to be things like Beijing's underground punk and experimental noise scenes, Chinese shoegaze, Sichuan and Yunnan folk music, Mongolian throat-singing fused with metal, dozens of completely different regional opera traditions, underground queer cinema, or Sichuanese rap.
Westerners will mostly get the small slice of Chinese culture that is easiest to export, translate, market, and fit into familiar expectations about what "Chinese culture" is supposed to look like.
Take the Condor Trilogy, for example. It's not even underground or punk, it's a major cultural touchstone. Written more than 50 years ago, over 300 million copies sold, dozens of TV and cinema adaptations. And as far as I know, only the first part has officially been translated into English, and nothing into Spanish. Even the TV adaptations, some of which had several hundred million viewers in China, haven't been published in the West: I have watched some with fan subtitles, but they haven't been brought officially as far as I know.
If even such major works don't reach us, judging Chinese culture by what does reach us is nonsense.
For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.
Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.
Social games that drive conformity.
If you know more than someone else does, that's great—but in that case please share some of what you know, so we can all learn, and please do it without resorting to putdowns or swipes.
I know that takes more time and energy, but in this way you make an enduring positive contribution instead of an ephemeral destructive one. Curious conversation is fragile; it can't withstand many kicks and blows.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The issue is the kind of community we're trying to have here. In deciding what counts as a good contribution, that has to be the high order bit.
At a minimum, one thing that requires is not punishing people for being wrong. We're all wrong, after all.
The claim being made is so obviously, categorically incorrect that it falls apart within a single second of examination. For example: Hoyoverse, a Chinese company, produced Genshin Impact and Nodusfall, two games with completely different art styles. And yet, in typing this, I have already spent an order of magnitude more effort[1] than somebody professing their racist worldview is dignified to receive. I think the actual productive response is shutting that down. I mean, really. A billion people who can only produce one artstyle like a factory? The claim is so patently, obviously, intentionally racist and incapable of holding up to reality it's absurd.
I could spend an hour scrolling back through my Twitter likes and collecting links to a huge array of Chinese artists with divergent artstyles, but in doing so I would be doing nothing more than wasting my own time, because someone with such a flagrant disregard of reality to come to that conclusion in the first place isn't going to change their view based on being shown reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Whatever. I unfortunately have a compulsion to check this site, but I'll do my best to refrain from posting in the future, since your vision of the site is one where posting racist comments is welcome and calling them out is unwelcome.
And with that single sentence, you have provided a great counter-example. Had you included it in your first comment, you would have saved yourself yet another order of magnitude’s worth of words to type out and contributed to the culture here far more, no?
For what it’s worth, the original comment did not read as blatantly racist to me, though I see how one could read it that way.