China rises in the world as a cultural power

Beijing. Black Myth: Wukong marked a milestone in China’s cultural industry. The video game inspired by The Monkey King, a character from one of the four books of classic literature in this country, sold 10 million copies in the first three days after its launch, on August 19 of this year, and has become a new benchmark for entertainment products that come from the Asian power and are well accepted among the young population of the West.

Until now, Asian cultural export industries had been dominated by Japan and Korea. Only in the center of Mexico City, in the middle of some of the most representative buildings and monuments of the capital, stands a sanctuary to everything that has to do with the animethe manga and Japanese video games; and in recent years, that four-story mass has given rise to K-pop, which extends its exhibition territory to the Zona Rosa of the country’s capital.

Cultural products consumed mainly by young people: Japanese J-pop, which South Korea would later lead to a million-dollar export industry known as K-pop, dramaslos animeslas sleeves and video games were the seed of industries that have a multiplier effect in other sectors such as fashion, makeup, food, language and even tourism.

For decades, cultural industries have fueled the attraction to Japan among Western youth, and the same has happened with idols from Korea. This aside from the fact that only exports of manga y anime They represented 4.7 trillion yen (around 30 billion dollars) for the Japanese economy in 2022 and BTS – a band of seven young South Koreans – generates 5 billion dollars a year for their country.

In force for 32 years

China had gone for another line. Rich in culture, the economic power has had the concept of cultural industry explicitly since at least 1992, explains in an interview Liljana Arsovska, researcher at the Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México. The sinologist details that, as part of the economic reform and the construction of socialism with a market economy, it began to be developed at least three decades ago.

The amount of money they invested is enviable.emphasizes Arsovska in an interview with The Day. From the central level to the provincial and municipal levels, all fields that can be thought of in culture, architecture, music, theater, animation, video games and creative design were developed. Towards the outside, the promotion occurred mainly with festivities, such as the Chinese New Year, but they were not segmented towards specific markets, such as Japan since the last century and in more recent years Korea.

In China, culture was a function of politics. Everything served the purpose of building a socialist State. More or less with the reform and opening things began to changehighlights Arsovska. During the fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party, in 1992, and the presentation of a new model of building a socialist market economy, “the ideas of culture, its use and function, in China underwent profound and complex changes; the concept of ‘cultural industries’ began to take shape,” he details in an article published in Towards a strategic agenda between Mexico and China.

“The development of the cultural industry became official policy of the Chinese State from 1992, when the motto ‘culture at the service of the economy’ replaced the traditional position characteristic throughout the Maoist period, ‘culture at the service of economy’. politics’… Since then and to date, the cultural industry has experienced unprecedented development. Its main function has been to change the image of China as the factory of the world to the image of a harmonious and balanced material and spiritual civilization,” explains the researcher.

Although in China there are cultural expressions of all kinds, it is not as such the image that is exported in the cultural industries. Cultural policy today is indeed oriented towards being profitable, but within the limits of a socialist State.highlights the researcher. Political theory continues to permeate cultural expressions.

Black Myth: WukongAccording to the researcher, it is part of this new policy to direct the cultural industry towards specific audiences that was not so explicit before. The success of the video game is also explained by the underlying story. It is not an ideological message, it is based on one of the four novels of traditional Chinese literature, Journey to the West –which has also given way to operas, television series, films and theme parks within China–, was even the basis of one of the biggest successes of the Japanese cultural industry: Dragon Ball.

The Statista platform states that the video game sold 10 million copies in three days, making it one of the fastest-selling games in history. Behind him is Game Science, a studio associated with Tencent Gaming, one of the largest video game companies in China and the world, but it is not the only Chinese cultural product that has had a good reception on the other side of the world.

The three body problemwhich is part of the science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s past, It was a bestseller in China and beyond. In Mexico, bookstores had a waiting list to purchase the novel by Liú Cíxīn – winner of the Galaxy award nine times, the Hugo award in 2015 and the Locus award in 2017 –. In addition to having an adaptation on Netflix, the story will be made into a film by Zhang Yimou, director of red sorghum y The House of Flying Daggersfrom the hand of one of the main producers in this country.