China: “Destroy Japanese Anime!”

A recent comment by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao decrying the lack of Chinese anime has incited a flurry of online support, with Chinese net users vigorously denouncing Japanese anime.

The Premier started the fracas by publically lamenting the current poverty of Chinese visual culture:

“There are times when I watch TV anime with my grandchild, but they’re always foreign works like Ultraman and so on, and few are domestically produced. We should be cultivating a domestic anime industry.”

Ultraman (which is a tokusatsu live action show rather than an anime per se) is currently all the rage amongst the youth of China, but parents are said to be anxious about the programme; net users criticise it: “Ultraman is Japanese. All he does is fight. Have all the Chinese who can make anime disappeared?”

More extreme voices of support are also heard: “Kill Ultraman and all the other Japanese anime!”

China has in recent years been working to strengthen its domestic anime industry, with a variety of successful titles being brought to air, such as 喜羊羊与灰太狼 / Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, a hit children’s show with over 500 episodes aired since its inception in 2005.

However, heavy restrictions on the amount of foreign programming allowed also ensure that fans of international anime have no legitimate recourse for viewing their favourite titles, although mass-market anime such as Doraemon or Detective Conan is of course in a different league to niche Japanese titles.

Chinese are said to be generally critical of their country’s anime output so far, characterising it as “insipid, tedious and preachy”, suggesting more effort is required.

Via Record China.

Although the development of Chinese visual culture shows promise, and represents a potentially substantial market, with artistic expression so firmly curtailed by the state and with plagiarism and copying so rife, it seems the Premier’s utterances may miss the point…