Comment by tntxtnt
13 days ago
What do you mean by "global" pop culture? Maybe you mean "the west"/European/American pop culture. Being Vietnamese, I and my friends grew up with Journey to the West which at the time was bigger than Star Wars, Three kingdoms which is a lot lot bigger than Game of Thrones, and a lot of Jin Yong's movie adaptations. Star Wars the force is like normal thing in Jin Yong's novels. It's not a "complete" lack of. Sure you have heard of Monkey King, Lu Bu or Guan Yu, Cao Cao? They also won an Oscar long before Korean did. Sure they lose to Japanese's Pokemon but everyone lose to Pokemon really not just China.
China's pop culture having moderate success on directly boarding countries is not really proof that I am wrong. Given it's size, i'd say that's an example of how it fails.
Maybe it's late but no, China's pop culture is not having a "moderate" success on neighboring countries because they tried and failed but because those neighbors actively resist it. They had culturally dominated over neighboring countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam for hundred of years. See every Korean "historical" movies and you see Chinese culture everywhere. What you're seeing now is the active effort of those countries to stay as far far away from Chinese culture as possible. Imagine you successfully invade China and getting assimilated as the result. That's the Mongols. Thanks to Persia or whatever middle country between China and Europe, Europe did not get infected by Chinese culture. Now ironically thanks to Trump the west is resisting China's dominance before getting infected like Pokemon or KPOP or K-drama.