Assessing Genshin’s Soft Power Impact on Southeast Asia

At the Anime Festival Asia (AFA) held in Singapore in November 2023, miHoYo assumed the prime spot at the exhibition—squarely at the entrance of the convention centre. Consequently, fans flocked to the booth for physical merchandise, resulting in three days of traffic slowdown. The booth had photo corners and character goods from the game Genshin Impact (GI), miHoYo’s ticket to global fame since its publication in 2020. In the past few years, there has been an uptick of events in the region featuring the company, including soundtrack concerts and production collaborations with the likes of Singaporean bubble tea chain LiHoTEA, the regional branch of American cable channel Discovery Channel, and American pizza chain Dominos (Yan, 2023; Genshin.Global, 2022; Lojo, 2024). In 2023, miHoYo held their annual flagship event, HoYoFest, in six Southeast Asian countries, combining all their game titles, including GI, into one event.

The expansion of miHoYo can be directly credited to the rise of GI to global fame. By March 2021, GI hit US$1 billion in player spending globally, becoming the fastest game to hit the milestone on both Google Play and the App Store (Chapple, 2021). In the same year, it became the first Chinese game to win the Best Mobile Game award at The Game Awards (TGA), considered the Oscars of the gaming industry (Bankhurst, 2021). To handle their international accounts, miHoYo established a global subsidiary in Singapore in 2022, called Cognosphere. Due to the phenomenal and unexpected global popularity of GI, discourse on whether the game can be a source of Chinese soft power has been rife (Song, 2023; Li and Li, 2023). Soft power is defined as power cultivated through a country’s culture, political values and foreign policies to achieve desired outcomes in external perceptions and relations (Nye, 2004). Soft power may be orchestrated by institutions, but there are instances where soft power is cultivated independently, beyond the agency of the state. miHoYo, then, can be seen as an example of a non-state entity that has contributed to the development of Chinese soft power.

How GI is Surveyed Domestically in China

Domestically, GI is a source of national pride. In an article assessing the international outreach of GI, Fan Yanchen (2024) notes that “in the current background that Chinese games are striding from ‘export’ to ‘globalization’, [GI] is not only a simple means of entertainment, but also a good carrier for exporting Chinese stories”, reflecting the familiar call from the Chinese authorities for “telling China’s story well” (讲好中国故事) (Liu, 2018). Another article, written by Song Tang (2023), observes that Chinese netizens have been translating reactions of international players into Chinese for locals, “endors[ing] the game’s global impact as a reflection of Chinese cultural influence”. The high quality of the game, in the view of netizens, serves to reverse stereotypes about China being “backward”. It instead displays the “high modernisation” of the country, thereby contributing to the “collective vision of a culturally rising China”.

The consensus is that GI has contributed to improving the cultural image of China. The Chinese government has reportedly acknowledged this, with miHoYo being one of the key enterprises designated for national cultural export in 2021 and 2022 (Ministry of Commerce, 2021) and subsequent games developed by miHoYo being endorsed by Beijing for production (Cao, 2023). This positive discourse centres, however, on impressions of GI’s global performance among Western and Chinese audiences. Discussing videos created by Chinese fans of the game, Song (2023) notes that one creator claimed GI encouraged Americans to learn Chinese and understand China. This preference for Western perspectives is also observed in another article about the “Chineseness” of GI. Li and Li (2023) note that, regardless of the opinions that netizens have towards GI, the particular weight placed on Western reactions “revealed Chinese players’ anxiety over acceptance by foreigners, particularly Western consumers in developed countries”. The fixation of Chinese netizens on international responses does not extend to East or Southeast Asia.

 There are two possible reasons for this lack of attention to East and Southeast Asian responses and the focus on Western responses. The first is the relative success that other Chinese products already have in the region, such as education, food and, in the case of Southeast Asia, popular culture. The second is that the competition between China and the United States has fuelled anti-China sentiments in the West, especially since Covid-19. Hence the enthusiastic uptake of the game—with the United States being the third-largest revenue generator for GI in 2022 (Chapple, 2022)—may be taken as a sign of changing Western sentiments towards the Chinese.

Nevertheless, sentiments towards the game from other countries cannot be neglected, especially those of Southeast Asia. According to “The State of Southeast Asia: 2024 Survey Report”, China, with 50.5 per cent of respondents’ votes, became the preferred strategic choice to align with in the US-China rivalry, edging out the United States (49.5 per cent). This contrasts with the previous year, when China scored only 38.9 per cent of the votes (Seah et al., 2024). With China’s unexpected surge in popularity over the past year, it is increasingly important to understand how Chinese cultural products—such as GI—are influencing audiences in Southeast Asia.

To address this gap, I surveyed 264 players from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia regarding their impressions of the game and its influence on their perspectives of Chinese culture. At the peak of the game’s popularity, GI topped sales charts in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, while the game came in second in Indonesia and Vietnam (Bashir, 2022). It therefore stood to reason that the survey sample be selected from those five countries because of the high number of players. To ensure consistency in results, Singapore and Malaysia were identified as key countries to study on account of the strong presence of ethnic Chinese communities there. Indonesia was also chosen as there is a large local Chinese community in the country too, making it suitable for comparison alongside Singapore and Malaysia. Vietnam and the Philippines were excluded as they possess smaller ethnic Chinese populations in comparison, and the population dynamics may be quite different.

Southeast Asian Attitudes towards Genshin Impact

Conducted between 1 February 2024 and 20 February 2024, the survey showed that the soft power reach of the game in Southeast Asia is limited for two reasons. First, players in the region are already exposed to Chinese culture through their ethnic Chinese neighbours and friends, minimizing the impact the game would have. Second, players do not regard GI as exclusively Chinese; instead, they perceive it as a global game, thereby diluting the soft power potential it has. The survey involved 264 respondents, with 37 per cent from Indonesia, 33 per cent from Malaysia and 30 per cent from Singapore.

Positive but Limited Reach

Based on the survey results, GI has a positive but limited soft power reach in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (see Figure 1).

* Figure 1: To what extent do you agree with the following statements?

According to this figure, most respondents remained neutral about Chinese culture in general. However, the proportion who said the game increased their interest in Chinese culture after playing it (35.5 per cent) exceeded those who disagreed that the game had increased their interest (18.2 per cent). These findings point therefore to a limited but positive soft power reach of the game in Southeast Asia. But what were the possible reasons for this overall neutral effect of GI on local audiences?

For the statement, “I am more open to products influenced by Chinese aesthetics after playing GI”, the respondents were asked to explain their perspective. From the answers, two major camps could be discerned among those who took neutral stances: (1) the first camp involved players who did not regard games as important influencers in cultural dissemination and therefore were not in the habit of actively seeking out games for cultural value, and (2) the second camp involved the ethnic Chinese population of Southeast Asia, which is already locally exposed to Chinese culture, blunting the soft power influence of GI.

Players from the first camp noted that, so long as the game was fun, they would play it. The cultural influence that the game carries was secondary for them and did not affect their perspectives of China. The second camp comprised Chinese participants or non-Chinese participants who had Chinese friends. As they were already exposed to Chinese culture, they did not view GI as particularly influential on their perspectives. However, while the existing Chinese culture in Southeast Asia limits the soft power influence of GI, the game still seems to have had a positive influence in the region. Among those who answered “Agree” and “Strongly Agree”, there was a higher proportion of non-Chinese than Chinese respondents. This suggests that GI had a slightly greater influence on non-Chinese players than on Chinese players (see Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3).

* Figure 2.1 "I am more curious about Chinese Culture after playing GI".

* Figure 2.2  "I am keen to visit the places in China that inspired the locations within GI in the next few years".

* Figure 2.3  "I am more open to products influenced by Chinese aesthetics after playing GI".

 A Chinese-Made Global Game

Aside from rating the influence of GI on their perspective of Chinese culture, the survey also attempted to assess the respondents’ perceptions of the game as a global one (see Figure 3).

* Figure 3 GI is a Global Game

The results showed that 51.9 per cent “Strongly Agree” that GI is a global game, followed by 38.6 per cent who “Agree”. Only 0.16 per cent of the respondents “Disagree” and “Strongly Disagree”, with 8 per cent remaining “Neutral”. The reasons for this overwhelming consensus that GI is a global game include (1) it introduces other types of cultures, (2) the game is global in reach and (3) the game allows players from around the world to connect.

 The next question that the respondents were asked was whether they viewed GI as a Chinese product (see Figure 4).

* Figure 4 Do you view GI as a Chinese product?

The results showed 85 per cent of the respondents responding “Yes”, while 15 per cent stated “No”. Many among those who answered in the affirmative were straightforward, stating that the game is Chinese in origin since it is produced by a Chinese company. Some respondents stated that the game is Chinese because of the prominent emphasis on “Chineseness” within the game. The minority who indicated that they did not see the game as a Chinese product pointed to the incorporation of Japanese art styles as a key reason for their conclusion, reflecting current debates on the Chineseness of GI.

Despite the differing views on whether GI can be regarded as a Chinese or global game, an intriguing perspective emerges upon comparison of the two questions— the game is seen as simultaneously Chinese (local) and global. An explanation arrives in “worlding multiculturalism”(Goh, 2015) where cultural commodities (like GI) are created by corporations (like miHoYo) by infusing the new or relatively unknown (traditional Chinese culture and aesthetics) with both local (Southeast Asian) and familiar (Japanese anime art styles) content, thereby creating interesting new cultural products for consumption (Otmazgin and Ben-Ari, 2015). By maximizing the aesthetics of Chinese culture within a game that is designed to be at once local and global, the developers had unwittingly drawn on the dynamics of worlding multiculturalism to their advantage. It is unsurprising, therefore, that players in the region regard the game as both Chinese and global.

Conclusion

From the responses, we can conclude that GI has indeed been successful in improving the impression of China’s ability to produce a popular cultural product with global appeal, but this impression does not necessarily lead to the kind of political impact corresponding to Nye’s concept of soft power. Thus, through the respondents’ view of GI as both a Chinese and a global game, the survey reveals that the soft power impact of GI in Southeast Asia is ultimately limited because of the perception that its globality far outweighs the emphasis on Chineseness within the game.

*This article is a shortened version of “Assessing Genshin’s Soft Power Impact on Southeast Asia” previously published in SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol.39, No. 3 (Nov 2024).

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