#精品长文创作季#
Author: Wen Yu, Editor: Xiao Shimei
In the 70s of the 20th century, Toynbee, who is regarded as the greatest historian of modern times, had a dialogue with the Japanese thinker Daisaku Ikeda entitled "Looking to the 21st Century". In the course of this classic conversation, Daisaku Ikeda asks Toynbee the following questions:
"Which country and nation in the world do you think will eventually lead the world?"
The latter blurted out: "China." ”
At that time, the United States was in full swing, Japan was rising, and China was not at all powerful, and Toynbee's answer was largely unimpressed. Looking back half a century later, Toynbee is worthy of being a great historian, with great insight and penetrating vision and cognition.
Today, when we explore the basis of Toynbee's judgment back then, what he really valued was actually Chinese culture. Culture is the soul of a nation, which cannot be seen or touched, but the most fundamental thing is the ultimate cause that determines the rise and fall of a nation's fortunes. In the past, China's rapid rise was inseparable from the strong support of the cultural core, and now China's going to the world is also inseparable from the expansion and spread of culture in all directions.
[Know China, understand China]
In 1935, the famous writer Lin Yutang's "My Country and My People" was published in the United States, which crossed the language barrier and systematically told the world for the first time about the spirit and temperament of Chinese culture, and became a window for the West to understand China.
Nearly 100 years later, how to tell China's story and spread China's voice to the world is still a must-answer question in front of the Chinese people.
On the one hand, China has and will continue to go out in all directions, and the current industrial industry is going to sea in waves. The first step of economic development is cultural exchange, which is related to economic efficiency, but also to the future of cooperation.
On the other hand, countries around the world will be somewhat confused about China's sudden rise. We must do a good job of answering the question "Who am I, where am I from, and where am I going?" to explain China's coming and future paths, and to construct a set of discourse and narrative systems that belong to us internationally.
Based on this, the height and depth of cultural communication have shown unprecedented vitality with the development of economic globalization, and the national level has taken "enhancing the soft power of national culture and the influence of Chinese culture" as a major strategic goal.
As early as 2017, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on the Implementation of the Project for the Inheritance and Development of Excellent Traditional Chinese Culture", which clearly stated:
By 2025, the inheritance and development system of China's excellent traditional culture will be basically formed, and important results will be achieved in research and interpretation, education popularization, protection and inheritance, innovation and development, communication and exchange, etc., cultural products with Chinese characteristics, Chinese style and Chinese style will be more abundant, the foundation of national cultural soft power will be more solid, and the international influence of Chinese culture will be significantly enhanced.
However, the spread of culture has never been the business of a small number of people, and the top-down promotion of the government is important, but it also needs the bottom-up response of civil forces, and in this regard, the industry has made a good start.
In recent years, Li Ning has appeared at New York Fashion Week with the theme of "Enlightenment", combining Chinese elements with sports trends to amaze the world; Huawei has teamed up with the Henan Museum to draw the painting of the mythical beast "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" with Huawei MatePad Pro, using modern technology to extract thousand-year-old colors and tell Chinese stories......
These enterprises with international influence can "bring goods", which will naturally help to enhance the influence of traditional Chinese culture overseas.
【Cultivating Culture, Spreading Culture】
Compared with the manufacturing industry, the film and television, literature, games and other industries are directly on the front line of culture, and naturally they have become the only carrier of Chinese cultural communication. In particular, games have the special advantage of penetrating national boundaries and cultural differences, and they are the most worthy force for culture to go overseas.
At the beginning of the 21st century, a number of phenomenal games were born in South Korea, such as "Dark Light", "Legend", "Millennium", "Bubble Hall", "Audition", etc., which played a crucial role in the export of Korean culture later.
The same thing is still happening, but with China. At present, Chinese game companies continue to make efforts overseas. Tencent Games' PUBG Mobile, the overseas version of PUBG: Battlegrounds, has swept the world with an unstoppable attitude as soon as it was launched. Up to now, it is still firmly in the top 10 echelon of the world's most popular mobile games. Since its launch, miHoYo's Genshin Impact has not only topped the global mobile game revenue list and topped the global mobile game best-selling list, but also won a number of domestic and foreign awards, which has been highly recognized by the industry and beyond. Sanqi Mutual Entertainment's "Puzzles & Survival" has been launched in overseas markets around the world, realizing "blossoming" in many markets such as the United States and Japan, and has long ranked among the top 5 in the list of overseas revenue of Chinese mobile games.
What's more worth mentioning is that these game manufacturers have long been taking on the responsibility of spreading traditional Chinese culture in their own way. They incorporated elements of Chinese culture into the game design, showing the breadth and profundity of traditional Chinese culture to overseas players.
This year, PUBG Mobile's Chinese New Year special event has gone to great lengths to incorporate elements of Chinese culture, making the game more than just a battle, but a blend of culture and emotion through activities such as the Year of the Dragon's Dragon Lance, Dragon Eighteen Palms Game Action, and Cantonese Voice Packs.
Another example is the "Lantern Festival" of Genshin Impact, which coincides with the Chinese New Year, and players around the world can experience the strong Chinese style of "Colorful Harrier Spring Breeze" in the game world. The game also integrates classic movements such as jumping, squatting, rolling, lunge, and buckle steps of traditional Chinese lion dance, so that players around the world can deeply appreciate the unique charm of the "national tide and national style" Chinese lion dance, and enjoy a feast of culture and games.
For another example, the Spring Festival event of "Puzzles &Survival" also cleverly added elements such as the image of a little warrior monk and traditional Chinese kung fu, subtly exporting China's chivalrous spirit, allowing more overseas players to feel the world's caring spirit of "chivalrous greatness, for the country and the people" in the bones of the Chinese. In addition, in order to restore Chinese kung fu such as "Seven Star Fist" as realistically as possible, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment specially invited the warrior monks of Shaolin Temple to demonstrate, and through AI motion capture technology movements, the Chinese kung fu performed by real people was completely copied into the game characters, so that players can appreciate the unique charm of Chinese culture in the game.
In fact, games are just a microcosm, film and television dramas, online literature, animated feature films and other cultural industries have been exporting traditional culture through various ways in recent years, and from a practical point of view, this wave has gradually evolved from a wind to a rolling wave. It is not surprising that standing in the large historical coordinate system, the revival and far-reaching spread of Chinese traditional culture is essentially the product of the development of the times, and there is a profound historical inevitability behind it.
Chinese culture needs to go global, and the world also needs Chinese culture.
[Integrate into the mainstream, become the mainstream]
A modern history is a history in which the East learns from the West.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the human productive forces have been unprecedentedly advanced and liberated, and the Western culture that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution has naturally become the absolute mainstream of the world, and it is the object of learning and imitation by all countries. With the continuous development of China, Chinese culture is increasingly recognized by the world for its inheritance value.
To take the simplest example, in the past, people always liked to attribute China's rise to the demographic dividend, but in fact, this is not the whole truth of the matter at all. Among all the late-developing industrial countries, China is not the only country with cheap labor, but which country can reach the height of today's China's industrialization? The core competitiveness of the Chinese is, in the final analysis, the hard-working, courageous and tenacious rooted in cultural genes.
According to the statistics of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), from 2002 to 2021, China's export trade volume of seven categories of cultural and creative products increased rapidly from US$32.00 billion to US$234.04 billion, and the proportion of global cultural and creative products exports increased from 15.3% to 38.3% during the same period.
At present, the export momentum of film and television dramas, literature, games and other fields is developing rapidly, and it is rapidly "gaining fans" overseas. In the field of film and television dramas, dramas such as "Mountains and Seas", "The World" and "Canglan Jue" continue to be popular overseas, among which "Canglan Jue" has achieved the top five results in popularity in many countries and regions; in the field of literature, in 2022, it has witnessed 16 Chinese online literary works such as "Son-in-law", "Great Country Heavy Industry" and "Great Doctor Ling Ran" being included in the Chinese collection of the British Library; in the field of games, the actual sales revenue of China's self-developed games in overseas markets will reach US$16.366 billion in 2023. Especially in important mobile markets such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, the number of Chinese game products continues to grow, and more products have entered the top list.
It is often said that a grain of ash of the times is a mountain when it falls on the head of an individual, but in fact, the reverse is the same, and the efforts and accumulation of individuals can also converge into the majestic power of the times.
Take the game company Sanqi Mutual Entertainment as an example. As the first company in the industry to launch the overseas strategy, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment adhered to the corporate philosophy of "inheriting the essence of Chinese culture" in 2012, and implanted Chinese culture into the game world view, story plot, scene and service to go to sea at multiple levels, and has been forging ahead in the past ten years.
According to the latest financial report released by Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, in the past five years, the company's overseas operating income has increased from 1.049 billion yuan in 2019 to 5.807 billion yuan in 2023. In the latest "2023 Overseas Revenue List of Chinese Mobile Game Publishers" released by Sensor Tower, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment has successfully entered the top three of the annual list. From start-ups to listed companies, from obscurity to overseas giants with overseas revenues of more than 5.8 billion yuan, the growth of Sanqi Mutual Entertainment is a microcosm of Chinese cultural enterprises going overseas. Behind it is the continuous improvement and deepening of the international influence of Chinese culture.
In the torrent of the times, cultural exchanges have always been an important driving force for the progress of civilization. It not only promotes the inheritance and development of culture, but also promotes the exchange, mutual learning and integration between different civilizations. Although the road to the rise of Chinese civilization is tortuous, we have reason to believe that Chinese culture is bound to rise in the global culture.
We are glad to see more Chinese cultural enterprises make great progress on the international stage and contribute to the enhancement of the country's cultural soft power, and we firmly believe that this will happen.
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The content of this article related to listed companies is the author's personal analysis and judgment based on the information publicly disclosed by listed companies in accordance with their legal obligations (including but not limited to temporary announcements, periodic reports and official interactive platforms, etc.), and the information or opinions in this article do not constitute any investment or other business advice, and Market Value Watch does not assume any responsibility for any actions arising from the adoption of this article.
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