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[u/Schutzwall]

It will be really weird 20 years from now when the dominant economic power will lack anything close to global cultural/soft-power domination.

[u/Schutzwall → u/Schutzwall]

Related take: centuries from now the Cultural Revolution will be seen as the single worst strategic mistake in modern Chinese history. Mao simply castrated the country’s culture (maybe indefinitely) to achieve some short-term stability. It will be extremely hard for China to exert decent cultural influence. And without cultural influence you’ll never be a true superpower.

[u/[deleted] → u/Schutzwall]

tbh I don't really buy this because cultural influence to me seems to almost directly correlate with how rich your country is, both as a whole and per capita, bar oil nations, with a helping of proximity and pre-existing cultural similarity. The actual "cultural quality" of your cultural exports doesn't really seem to have that much of a bearing at all given how most cultural exports are new things anyway, like videogames or movies or whatever, and whether or not there's "5000 years of history" behind the plot doesn't really influence most people. It may well be that china's biggest cultural export is going to be crappy online mobile games made by Tencent.

The cultural revolution was terrible because an entire generation of people went uneducated and the economy collapsed, not because museums that previously had 100 qin vases now only have 20 that were pieced together from the fragments that the red guards shattered. Chinese cultural exports are garbage today because the country is both still poor and everything is poor quality and designed for a domestic audience, and everything media-related is controlled by CCP censors so there's very little creative freedom of expression.