China falls behind when you stack it up against korea or Japan in the mentioned "soft power, communication and image building" but always China naturally had influential soft-power simply for being China,due to it's ancient culture and history ,challenge is to keep presenting the appeal to the world from one generation to the next.China is still developing nation Korea & Japan are developed,may be Chinese soft power will peak when it also gets developed ,which is a some time still considering the humongous 1.4b population and ageing on top of that.
Focus on a domestic audience isn't a negative,as long as the quality is improved,people will consume chinese content because it's chinese ,they already have American content at home. Quality products always have its appeal whether in China or any nation in the earth. But they have to also let the world know that quality stuff is being produced therein,otherwise, people wouldn't notice.Considering global audience is good imo ,in the context that it will make the involved staff strive for higher quality fit for global standard and dual-income from local and abroad.Censorship is indeed a burden but may be china considers ,it's worth the social effect in maintaining order.
China is indeed improving ,drama-animation-comics-games.
For example :meteor garden is easily in top 10 most popular drama on any site .
In animes you have Click Link ranking 23 in MAL, the cult favourite.
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In illustration works Tales of Demons & Gods is always in the top sections of any free/paid website.
Genshin impact being one of most popular game globally,is standardizing chinese aspect in where japan was the sole representative.
China has more promise in anime & games ,since they have more experiece in this regard due to collaboration with japanese and western experts.Japan has long outsourced anime production to China,that has created a fair crop of talents.
China should find its own color and improve quality of their contents.
Do you know korean drama? anime? or even martial arts movie? the selling point is the culture .
Unless you live under a rock and out of loop,one should realize, unlike 20 years ago when the backstreet boys were the posterboys ,now it's BTS. Them being non-English, their core attraction is physiognomy,their visual, and of course the inherent personality.They are not a stand-alone.While Hollywood enjoys significant global clout due to history,expertise and English being global medium,the korean ,Chinese,Japanese celebs has the biggest fandom . People might watch Hollywood celebs like breathing but most of them actually stans Korean,Japanese or even Chinese celebs. East asian face is scientifically more amiable,it invokes the protective desires,while Hollywood actors /actress looks handsome and beautifu,Korean celebs looks ethereal and close to perfection, no unnecessary angles on face ,like a character cut out of an anime or manga .None ever superimposed such pure physiognomic appeal on that scale in competition.
You might not have any idea ,but as we type it's no.1 in MAL currently airing animes
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So,it's not like that's nothing, the live action drama is equally popular if not more , it's a yaoi,so I have no interest personally,but"the untamed" is very popular among females,any female that has a thing for BL (which is like hundreds of millions,are probably is into this .