Opinion: Can Ne Zha 2 break the wall between China and the West?

In 2014 I went on a two-week family trip to China. For a twenty-something who had barely left Europe, you can imagine what an experience it was to encounter first-hand a country, a culture and a way of life so different from what I knew, both from living in southern Europe and from the kind of culture and entertainment I consumed and continue to consume. That trip touched me deeply in my interest in Asia and Eastern culture in general, which I have visited on three more occasions since then, but you quickly realise that for a European without cultural or family roots it is difficult to approach this way of seeing life.

How they eat, how they sleep, how they live, think, feel, relate, work, shop, love, and die. So, with all these concepts that broadly describe a person's life, China almost seemed like a different planet to me more than ten years ago. And those barriers have moved very little in that time, although recently I am beginning to feel cracks in the East-West wall.

And why precisely do I come here to talk about this? Well, because those cracks do not come from a surge of media attention, nor from politics, nor even from economics (at least not at first). The gap can only be bridged by finding common ground on a cultural level, in entertainment. Yes, we have social networks where we do the same funny dances or watch the same content scheme on video platforms. Maybe we try to imitate each other in the way we dress or do our hair, but we still miss certain elements, like the way we approach topics such as spirituality. We consume in a similar way, but our entertainment products are absolutely alien from one side of the fence to the other. And this is where the issue of money comes in.

Ne Zha 2, Chinese animation's coup on the table

This week, we have witnessed a curious global phenomenon, crowning Ne Zha 2 as the highest-grossing animated film in history. If you're reading this from the Chinese site Gamereactor, chances are I don't have to tell you what Ne Zha is (besides the fact that you would have known about it before it was made into an animated film), as it is one of the best-known stories in Chinese animation tradition: Xu Zhonglin's Investiture of the Gods. For those of us who were not familiar with the work before this week, Ne Zha 1 (a 2019 animated film) tells the story of a sphere of immense power, the Chaos Pearl, which begins to devour all kinds of life and matter in the world. But an immortal manages to separate the sphere into two parts (a clear allusion to the dual nature of all things, the main foundation of Taoism) and from each of them a special being will be born. On the one hand, the reincarnation of the Dragon King (at first kindly) in Ao Bing, and on the other, that of the Demon Orb, whose essence will be transferred to the new-born NeZha. The child, marked as a demon and with a curse that will kill him in three years, tries by all means to defy his destiny.

The animated adaptation tells, in broad strokes, that we all have the power to change our fate within ourselves, even if the world is against us. It's a good message, and that first film from 2019 seems to have resonated well with Chinese audiences: $729 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing non-English animated film of all-time, and the second highest-grossing film of all-time in China.

Six years and a moderately successful locally distributed spin-off, Ne Zha 2 arrives, and then collective madness sets in. The whole country flocks to the cinema to see the animated film, and in just one month it has broken the $2 billion mark at the global box office, although there is a bit of a trick to this figure: less than $40 million of that $2 billion is from distribution outside China. And so the question arises, how can the most profitable animated film in history be completely unknown in the West?

The answer is simple to write, but difficult to explain: An invisible wall between East and West. The distribution of entertainment and cultural products in the Asian country has to go through a deep scrutiny by the authorities, in addition to a relentless censorship and an unattractive model for foreign companies to invest there. Outside its borders, the situation is not imposed by deliberate censorship, but by unwritten laws of the market in which Chinese products are seen as having no implication for Western thinking or interests, and if there is no business, they are never discovered by the general public.

There is no doubt that the story of Ne Zha 2 can be something fantastic and memorable, but if there is no bridge across the chasm that separates these different mentalities, there will always be one side missing out on the fun of the other.

The great door to understanding between China and the West: Video games

Here is my personal bet for that bridge: Asia is becoming even more prominent in today's video game industry. In a sphere where Japan continues to struggle to remain the leading historical development power, South Korea and China are emerging as new contenders to share the pie. Korea has chosen to explore the video game market alongside important foreign partners such as Japan (in the case of Sony and the launch of Stellar Blade, or the rise of its competitive side with League of Legends or StarCraft, from the American companies Riot and Blizzard, respectively). But China has chosen to follow a different path. Taking advantage of their enormous capital, the big Chinese companies (Tencent, NetEase, etc.) invested in well-known studios and developers in Europe, Japan and the United States. And for a while, this partnership worked and prospered.

But with the bursting of the post-pandemic bubble and the current crisis in the industry, China has retreated into an investment of its own home-grown developments, only this time the projection is global. The success of Black Myth: Wukong, with 25 million copies sold since August 2024 worldwide, is proof that such great projects can also succeed abroad. However, I should add here that Wukong, besides taking a popular genre such as the Soulslike ARPG and the most famous Chinese pop culture character outside the country (Sun Wukong, the inspiration for Son Goku and Dragon Ball) may be an isolated case, despite all the hype it has created. The Dynasty Warriors franchise, developed by Japan's Omega Force and Koei Tecmo, has never managed to create such an impact, despite being the studio's best known (and most lucrative) musou franchise, in its 20 years of telling and re-imagining "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", another hugely important Chinese folk tale.

There's a promising horizon ahead, with other ARPGs like Phantom Blade Zero or Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, but I think I'd stick to the examples of The Bustling World and Where Winds Meet. While the first two focus more on presenting action and a twisted vision of certain elements of folklore, Where the Winds Meet (which we met for the first time at Gamescom 2023) wants to offer a title closer to the myth, also taking advantage of another cultural phenomenon such as martial arts cinema or Wuxia. But if what you want is a cultural immersion and to learn some history, the closest thing to reality could be in The Bustling World, a simulation RPG that still has no release date, but we should keep an eye on it.

We are at a time when China is permeating very strongly into our entertainment and therefore in a privileged situation to share cultures. Ne Zha 2 may be the media attention grabber in the short term, but I think the big race to the bottom currently depends on how Chinese studios understand the foreign market to present their stories to the rest of the world.