I personally do believe that you need enough artistic freedom to create those worldwide popular shows.
As an example, I'm watching Korean police shows which constantly have corruption as a main plot line, good luck filming corrupt cops in a series in China with the CCP.
What they can produce for now is limited to the dullest stories and that's not going to cut it.
The most popular K-Dramas are the formulaic 1 guy and 1 girl, with a 3rd person for a love triangle. Don’t worry though, true love wins and the 3rd wheel finds someone as well. Eg: Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha.
CCP would heartily endorse these brainless plots. Consumers would eat it up.
Not everything needs to be Infernal Affairs. The vast majority of Korean TV isn’t Infernal Affairs. I will admit that China could never make Parasite, but that’s ok. The metric we’ve chosen is popularity, not Oscars.
Side note I’m a bit sad that Hong Kong can’t make Infernal Affairs type of movies anymore. It would show the Party in a bad light.
Oh yeah, I'm sure they will have their success as well, their drama series with the emperor in imperial China (whatever it's called, I don't know) is also very popular. It's just that relative to their massive size, they will stay underperforming as long as the CCP cuts every head which steps a little outside their comfort zone.
Having corrupt cops in a Chinese series is no problem at all, as long as they're the bad guys and are defeated by the heroes in the end, or at least have a redemption arc.
Here's a Zhihu question where someone asked to be recommended anti-corruption series, maybe you should watch some of the shows mentioned in the replies before concluding that only dull stories can be produced: https://www.zhihu.com/question/502243280
> good luck filming corrupt cops in a series in China with the CCP
I don't know about China, but when Poland was communist and there was widespread censorship - it was still OK to talk about corruption, it was just supposed to be shown in a way that makes it clear that corruption is western influence and communism is getting rid of it.
Funnily enough - Polish cinema was probably better artistically during communism, because it had to work hard to work around the censorship. So you had movies that were trying to be universal, say the things that can't be said using symbols, etc.
Modern Polish cinema is pretty awful, mostly shitty romcoms.
I'm not saying censorship is good, it's evil obviously, but the effect on art can be counterintuitive.
I personally do believe that you need enough artistic freedom to create those worldwide popular shows.
As an example, I'm watching Korean police shows which constantly have corruption as a main plot line, good luck filming corrupt cops in a series in China with the CCP.
What they can produce for now is limited to the dullest stories and that's not going to cut it.