Anime & Donghua

The main thing I was thinking of was the Palace Drama subgenre. Here are some examples: https://www.newhanfu.com/30448.html

If you know the anime Apothecary Diaries, they're a lot like that. There are other courtly dramas, especially recently, but I really don't care for the genre in general (though I did like Apothecary Diaries), no matter which set of aristocrats are being represented (British, Korean, etc.), so I don't know all that much about Chinese dramas specifically, having mostly watched British ones before getting sick of it.

In my head, they share a common lineage with the worn-out rhetoric about "national rejuvenation" as though the country isn't more powerful than ever and, more importantly, the people are better off than ever. Looking at a lot of the aforementioned works, you'd think that less than 85% of the population of Imperial China was a brutally exploited peasantry.

Heading off an obvious objection, I really think these shows are different from other sorts of escapist fantasies. What bugs me about them is that, while we might metaphorically call them fantastical, more literally they are meant to be "historical fiction," and then have this zoomed in view of people bathing in the fruits of the workers' labor with no interest at all in the workers and the blood the palace is continually washed in, beyond usually the attendants and such within the palace itself. That grounding makes such works often have a very reactionary content not because they tell you that the peasants should be trampled, but because they don't even bother to address that question while uncritically enjoying the outcome of the trampling, which itself becomes an answer (and obviously I'd also apply this to more modern courtly dramas, like the ones centered on Queen Victoria, just with the proletariat being ignored along with the colonized populations, where applicable (oh, and also to corporate dramas, which are just capitalist courtly dramas)).

What I'm whining about is not universal to Chinese courtly dramas, and there are other drama subgenres that are a little less popular in China but still very popular that deal with all sorts of topics and often have a much more progressive character. I've seen it remarked multiple times that the popularity of courtly drama is due to them being a way to criticize The Regime without being Censored (insert Parenti quote), but there are actually "anti-corruption dramas" that take place in the PRC and are principally about fighting extensive corruption within the CPC, like "In the Name of the People," which was apparently a big popularizer of the subgenre. Obviously, that's not the full scope of what critics might want to say, but I think it's hard to argue that it's historically the main source of public backlash against the CPC, and you can wake me up when an American studio produces a film or show where the moral of the story is openly that America should be overthrown. Come to think of it, Star Wars is actually kind of a good example of how the aforementioned western commentators characterize those C-dramas and does end with the America stand-in being destroyed by a bombing campaign and the killing of the head of state.

Sorry about the volume of overly long replies I've subjected you to recently. I mean, I guess I'm not that sorry because I only cut this one down a little, but yeah . . .