China has plenty of professional journalists, musicians, authors and artists. China's newspapers are heavily censored and vehicles for propaganda but people still write for them. Musicians make money in China the same way they do in the West, gigging. Rampant piracy doesn’t stop people trying and occasionally succeeding in making a living as authors or artists either, anymore than the small chance of making a good living at it in the West does.
No it isn't. It’s because no one speaks Mandarin and Chinese music and movies are dreadful by comparison. One of the hardest things about studying Chinese is finding media to watch to improve listening comprehension that are actually enjoyable to someone used to Western levels of quality in production, writing and story telling. Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com took s break from learning Mandarin and learned Cantonese instead because the corpus of good movies is better, and it’s mostly pre-handover Hong Kong stuff. Widespread censorship leads to terrible movies.
I live in China and I’d say it’s plausible that people watch more Japanese, Korean and Anglophone media than Chinese, dubbed and subtitled. I wouldn’t bet on it but it’s at least 30%. Chinese tv and movies are dreadful.
Movies? Bollywood movies sell more tickets in India than Hollywood does in US+Canada, releases more movies, etc. Sure, they make less money but India is considerably poorer than US+Canada.
