This is a really excellent point. Subversive regimes like China shoot themselves in the foot by crushing their own soft power (inadvertently). The only current media pop culture influence I can think of is stuff like Firefly where in some sorta-dark future China’s culture mostly rules the world. It’s always done in an almost begrudging way, like “they’re so big that surely their culture will take over, but we can’t really imagine what that will look like besides Mandarin swears”. This speaks to how weak China’s soft power is today, because people can’t really picture a scaled up version of it.
It’s much like how Japanese culture was treated in original cyberpunk writings, because that stuff was written in the 80s and early 90s during peak American anxiety that the Japanese economy was going to surpass theirs (see also: Gung Ho). But again, it was a shallow vision- food and language perhaps, but nobody saw things like manga and anime becoming mainstream with white people.
