Watching Chinese (pop) culture slowly grow in popularity across the West is a remarkable experience because it's extremely similar to the weird orientalist relationship that Westerners cultivated with their racist mental fantasy of Japan (and S.Korea to a lesser extent), but with 900% more Hitler particles?
Like, the go-to explanation for Westerners any time they encountered an element of art made in Japan that they didn't understand and couldn't be arsed to do the reading for is to argue that it spawned from an ambiguous timeless bioessentialist Japanese culture that was simultaneously paedophilic and childlike, terminally shy yet unapologetically horny, at once boyishly misogynistic and Orientally feminized, at once bushido and cyberpunk- a motley collection of misunderstood jokes, colonialist fantasies of the other, sci-fi nerd anxieties about Asian robot replacement and homonationalist/feminationalist condemnations of an imagined backwater.
The Western racist mind-factory of course reproduces many of these elements wholesale when it comes to China, but goes one step further, since it isn't even dedicated enough to lazily generalize or misrepresent a totalized 'Chinese culture', because that would require admitting the Chinese have an actual public life. No, if you want to pass yourself off to an audience of consumerist imbeciles as a 'China expert', you simply need to argue that an evil communist government agent is secretly puppeteering every cultural product of China in a way specifically targeted at the enjoyment of you, the noble Western content-feeder.
Don't want to do the reading to understand a reference to Taoism or Confucianism? "The evil CCP is making writers promote traditional Chinese philosophy because they don't want them to read and reference our Freedom Philosophers!" Don't feel particularly attached to a Chinese setting in a Chinese game? "The damn CCP is trying to steal our money by promoting tourism and forcing these poor developers to feature areas from their own country rather than Europe, which everyone really wants to set every narrative in!" Think a piece of media is featuring too much sex? "The evil CCP is whitewashing its many human rights violations that the CIA told me about the other day by using sex to attract fans!" Think a piece of media is not sexy enough? "The evil CCP is trying to stop people from engaging in sex because they've brainwashed the public into robots!"
Agree with a Chinese story's politics? "The devious CCP will be mad about this one, I hope the developers are safe!" Disagree with a Chinese story's politics? "The nefarious CCP must have burst into their offices and made them write this, because the native political views of a Chinese person are of course identical to my own" Think a Chinese story has good gay rep? "Wow, how'd they sneak this past the CCP censors? Are the masses rebelling against the regime?" Think a Chinese story doesn't have enough gay rep? "The CCP threw the one homosexual on the writing team out of the window, a guy I know from the SinoCrimes Twitter account confirmed this".
To the Western mind, every positive thing that they ever feel about Chinese media has to be framed as a valiant act of resistance against the communist party, because the foundation of modern Western liberal political thought is something along the lines of "I need to convince myself that the government wants to oppress me for listening to hit music and reading bestselling books because I use the loud online pretension of progressiveness as a substitute for a personality". Anything they deem negative about a Chinese story is of course the result of an oppressive omnipresent all-seeing government that is somehow simultaneously colossal enough to micromanage the lives of nearly a billion-and-a-half people while also being petty enough to want to fuck you over on movie night.
It's remarkable how, in an age where cultures across the world can be closer than ever and there are so many patient people happy to teach you about their society, Westerners have somehow managed to become more racist in their consumerism. Once in a while, the Western racist of yesteryear could at least try and visualize a Japanese person who was enjoying themselves, but to imagine the Chinese happy and their (statistically incredibly effective at raising living standards!) communist government as an actually positive political force would be like losing the Cold War ten times over.
And so the same old story continues wherein the Westerners simultaneously desire, exoticize and fetishize the immense diversity and vibrancy of Asian cultural production while also feeling the need at every point to divorce it from the complexity of an Asian reality or history. Why must they make anything at all for themselves, wonders the supposedly liberal Westerner. Why can't they simply collapse into a giant soup of tenderized meat and juices that I can empty into my gullet without needing at all to think about anything outside the four walls of my home? It almost makes you appreciate the neocon China warhawks who openly lust about the bombing the country because at least those bastards don't bother to hide their hatred for every non-Western society behind a veneer of pearl-clutching progressivism.
