Yeah, I had that one, too. Fortunately, my college experience was anxiety-free due to self-medication.
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That kind of thing is freaking out the hydro engineers who run the show in Beijing.
American soft power? Absolutely. Japanese soft power? The folks in China are freaking out about cosplayers portraying characters who wear kimonos and various assorted stuff. If you want to shake your head in concern about how childish their freakouts can get, look up on google the words Kiryu Coco and Taiwan together. South Korean soft power (aka hallyu) had them freaking out for many years.
Chinese soft power has been in a state of shit outside of the slot machine style gacha games Hoyoverse puts out (even though most folks would mistake these games as being japanese games at first because of their aesthetic), a few sci fi books and the algorithm that powers TikTok. For an economy of that size, it would be surprising their soft power is that relatively small if it weren’t for how beijing loves to clamp down on on any sort creativity outside of the tech sector (i’ll admit that chinese flashlight companies have been putting out all sorts of interesting designs and products).
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I don’t get them anymore, but for years after graduating college I had the opposite dream: I would oversleep, then wake up and make a mad dash to get to my first class only to discover it was the weekend and everything was closed. The dreams were so vivid that sometimes I wondered if I really had rushed to class on a weekend, but evidence suggested I had not.
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Particularly given that last paragraph in the post.
Given the relationship between China and the US, the Chinese Government’s concerns about culture. There’s a lot of subversive power in cosplaying that particular thing in this particular place.
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You know, I would love to see a choreographed version of Chinese schoolgirls posing in front of the lockers at the Ikea in… West Covina… California… Yeah, the one down I-10 form the Edison corridor.
Mock-American school settings are common in K-Pop music videos, and real American school buses appear too. Cute uniform-style costumes are very common for girl groups.
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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.
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Their approach to soft power is not exactly what the hip kids are into.
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William Gibson’s Idoru has idol pop and online fan culture.
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I wasn’t struck so much by the precise skirt length; but by the overall emphasis on uniforms in a rows-of-lockers style high school setting.
Does the US have schools with uniforms, some public, many private? Sure. Are the iconic rows-of-lockers media depictions usually of those schools? Not so much, plenty of private schools have lockers as well; but it’s more of a big public high school look.
Looking at it as an American; it seems like someone is playing an American’s stereotype of how British Public school dresses in front of a (substantially accurate) perception of how an American Public school is probably constructed.
Taking a few inches off the skirt doesn’t help the realism; but I assume that’s an influencer tax.
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It’s especially interesting when, in practice, they’ve got some stupidly powerful options for projecting cultural soft power if suitable material were available and not reflexively repressed by powerful old dudes.
Basically any big-budget Hollywood production will throw in some china-service scenes if they aren’t too absurdly discordant with the rest of the movie, just because that’s such an important export market; and Tencent alone has either total or controlling interests in an astonishingly broad slice of video games; the only companies in the same league are the ones with their own console; and maybe EA and Activision/Blizzard.
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Yes he was better than most (which is why he’s my favourite author and the item I will be buried with is my signed copy of Neuromancer) but my point stands in general about the genre embracing a shallow Japanese-adjacent future out of economic anxiety as much as anything.
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Yah, China’s dominance is absurd in mobile gaming- people have no idea. I only know because I was in the industry. Again, though, they weirdly shoot themselves in the foot by not participating in the non-Chinese app stores, and blocking most outside games from their own stores. If they did, they’d be 80% of all mobile gaming overnight.
They recently mandated that every single app to be released in China has to go through manual review by the government. That’s an insane thing that basically stopped all import of foreign apps (no doubt that was the point) because a human agent can’t possibly thoroughly review the hundreds of apps a day that are released. Our company gave up trying to release in China when that happened. It was very hard before, but became impossible.
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They might have seen uniforms with short skirts in Korean TV dramas. Or in Japanese anime and manga.
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Remember, if it isn’t a real high school located in the United States, it’s just Sparkling Secondary Education.
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I can’t tell if that’s just the fashion at the moment, or an extreme vague allusion to school uniforms.
It’s so broad and vague a uniform reference (if that’s what it’s intended to be at all), it could be referencing American private school uniforms, British school uniforms, Korean or Japanese school uniforms… or even (some) Chinese school uniforms (apparently the plaid skirts, ties and sweater-vests have made their way to China). Or all of the above.
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The Chinese government review of game content is pretty crazy, and it’s been true for a while now. 10+ years ago I worked for a couple (non-mobile) US-based game companies that were releasing games in China - one was Chinese owned and one Korean owned. Our Chinese parent company, which was owned by someone with government ties, apparently, told us, “Don’t worry about content, it’s not an issue.” Releasing a game via a Korean parent company, we had to be very careful to avoid certain content (we had a bunch of China-only replacement assets) and we still got rejected on the first pass for weirdly arbitrary reasons - we got a bunch of notes from the censors that basically amounted to, “I didn’t like this bit.” There’s clearly (at least) three levels of standards - one for foreign companies (the most restrictive), one for the average Chinese company, and one for the Chinese companies with connections.
What happened in 2021 is that, after a lot of criticism of - and restrictions on - games by the government, China stopped approving any games, even domestic ones, and only started again this year. A lot of Chinese developers closed as a result.
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Those can seem just as weird from inside the US. I grew up in a completely school bus free environment in the US (the district would rent a bus occasionally for field trips, but no daily service). A few years ago the topic of school buses came up around my wife’s family and I pestered them for all of the details that seemed so strange and exotic to me. Short film about the community
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Yeah, it’s weird to me as a non-USian. Why would you need a special kind of vehicle just to transport school kids, if normal buses already exist? Obviously we have school buses as well; I took the bus to school every day. But here they’re just normal buses operated by bus companies under contract to the government. And I think that’s the case pretty much everywhere else in the world.
Lockers in school are unfamiliar to me as well, but at least I can see the rationale. We just carried the day’s books and supplies in our backpacks every day, which could get quite heavy as a result. If you could leave the books you didn’t need for homework at school, it would probably be quite good for a lot of children’s postures.
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