A populous affluent nation can fail to translate wealth into global cultural exports

Evidence

For such a populous and increasingly affluent country, China’s contributions to global pop culture remain surprisingly sparse. Hong Kong accounted for most of the exceptions. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hong Kong cinema reached an international peak with John Woo’s action movies and Jackie Chan’s emergence as a Hollywood star. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai became a global indie film icon with masterpieces like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. On the international stage, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a China-backed production helmed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee—became an international phenomenon. There was a brief trend among European hipsters around Chinese socialist-chic Feiyue sneakers, and Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem won over Obama, Zuckerberg, and George R. R. Martin. Attempts to adapt or capitalize on these successes, however, faltered. Netflix’s 2024 adaptation of The Three-Body Problem controversially recast the main characters as “ethnically balanced twentysomethings,” reducing its distinctiveness to generic Hollywood fare. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 748

Categorization

• SEED: The Netflix Three-Body Problem casting controversy as a case study for how global distribution flattens cultural distinctiveness — directly serves the reader’s counter-thesis: the flattening is a feature of the platform era, not of the culture being exported.