Wukong & the cool part of China, demand-side stimulus, Vietnam - Week in Review #24

I ended my vacation to Georgia (the country) this week, I am pleasantly surprised that in the poll last week more than 125 of you voted yes to read my travelogue. Originally, I thought I didn’t have much to say about it. I was wrong! My experience in Georgia, while fun, also gave me many alternative thoughts to appreciate how a small country could potentially prosper in an increasingly multi-polar world order. I will probably write about it next week.

For this week though, I will do a regular weekly review of events that I think will matter beyond news cycles in China. For who I am and what new things I can bring to the table, please read here.

#1 Black Myth: Wukong & the cool part of China

Black Myth: Wukong is certainly the talk of the town this week. It has become one of those rare pieces of work that have very high expectations waiting for them, and turn out to meet and even beat those high expectations.

Made by a previously unknown Chinese indie studio named Game Science, Wukong has neatly broken single-player Steam records on day one with 2 million concurrent users. On YouTube now, you will see waves and waves of influencers playing this game, exclaiming how its quality has blown them away.

Wukong is arguably China’s first so-called triple-A game, which is those games with massive budgets and high-quality visuals and gameplay (think of Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto), and nobody was expecting China’s very first triple-A game can be so good, setting an extremely high bar for newcomers. One comment I saw somewhere, which I think is fair, basically describes this as an equivalent of creating our first EUV lithographic machine in the video game industry. It’s also a huge rebuttal to Noah Smith-type assertion that China has no great contemporary cultural output.

Much has been said about this game, to which I just want to add 3 things.

First, I think it's highly likely that the success of Wukong will single-handedly bring about a complete recognition of the value of the video game sector by authorities and whole of the society in China. Now, video games in China prove themselves to be something of international importance, earning not only hard cash but also soft power. This is not to mention the strong connection between video game and AI industry (e.g. Nvidia's GPUs). I hope we are forever gone from the era when video games could be easily characterized by official media as "spiritual opium". The chance for this industry to be destroyed by a single decree is practically zero now.

Second, there is also a huge lesson here for China’s authorities. The Chinese leadership has been dreaming of cultural soft power for a long, long time. It has been highlighted in many policy initiatives and high-level documents. But China has so far not cracked the code. Why? The reason is simple: soft power, just like what I argued before about entrepreneurship and sustained technological innovation, can’t really rely on top-down dictation. It’s better left for the private sector to accomplish in a way that’s market-oriented. All the authorities can do is set up some basic guidelines and some basic aspirations, and most importantly, leave out enough safe space for the private actors to grow.

Game Science is a purely private organization. It’s not even some big companies. Its founders are dreamers and artists, who choose quality over quick profits, unlike the rest of the industry. Their success won’t be possible if the state meddles too much and tells them they can’t do this or they should do that.

So how can China really grow our soft power? Just don’t grow it. Let it grow on itself. Again, for this, I actually agree with

Noah Smith

’s the assertion that a “command-and-control system can hurt cultural innovation”. China needs to find the right balance between maintaining its idea of social stability while also not stifling creativity.

Last but not the least is the lesson for promoters of Chinese cultural products.

For years, I have been telling people, that the biggest limit for Chinese culture to reach more overseas audiences is that, it’s not cool enough.

When people think of China, they link it with things like “conformity”, “stability”, “harmony”, “Confucianism”, etc. Those are great ideas, honed to perfection and a general consensus in China after millennia of rises and falls. But these are not cool. These are not relatable, even less so to young generations around the world.

But our culture and history have no lack of cool things and very cool individuals. Just take Wukong, the Monkey King as an example. At its very core, it’s the story of a rebel, who acquired some magical powers, cherished liberties, had some fun, created troubles, got bestowed with some official job but was looked down upon as an under-class, rose up in rebellion against the hypocritical court, got severely punished, rose up again and almost destroyed the heaven, got jailed for 500 years, and finally went on a journey for the common good, and beaten up demons along the way, and finally became a buddha himself.

His name, Wukong悟空 literally translates to “enlightenment into emptiness”, a water-like state of mind reserved for the most battled heroes who have been through it all.

This is a very cool story. But this new game marks the first time that the Monkey King has truly made it into international fame (not counting Japanese Goku which was based on Monkey King). How have they achieved this? Because this time they manage to wrap this cool story into a cool package. Just compare with the Monkey King in the 1980s classic TV series and the same Monkey King of today, and you will see how far we have gone.

Wukong in the 1980s vs Wukong in Black Myth

There are also so many cool characters in our history that are literally unknown in the outside world. There is Zhuge Liang诸葛亮 in the Romance of Three Kingdoms, the great sage-general with almost mythical powers who defeated giant armies and spent his life dedicated to the project of the kingdom he was loyal to, without taking the throne for himself even though he had all the power to do that. He died fighting for his cause.

Zhuge’s moral opposite, Sima Yi司马懿, also a great sage-general, did take power for his clan in a bloody coup, despite making promises not to. His clan ultimately started the Jin Dynasty but was a short-lived one precisely because of the moral rot at its founding.

There was Yu Qian于谦. When his emperor was captured by Mongols in a spectacular military failure, and when the Ming Dynasty was on the verge of a sudden early death, Yu took matters into his own hands, literally “appointed” a new emperor, and led the remaining armies to defend and ultimately saved Beijing, just like how Game of Thrones’ Tyrion Lannister singlehandedly saved the city of King’s Landing. And just like Tyrion, Yu Qian was not thanked, but tragically executed for treason…

I could go on and on like this forever, I might start another newsletter one day just to tell those stories.

But my point is simple: there are many cool things inside Chinese history and culture, waiting for people to mine them, rediscover them, revitalize them, and refresh them with meanings that are relevant to our times. And Wukong will just be a beginning.

[For the paid section of this post, I will comment on renewed discussion about stimulus policies and China-Vietnam relations. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Again, if you are already a paying subscriber of Baiguan, please contact me for complimentary access here.]

#2 More voices advocating for direct demand-side stimulus