China’s ‘soft power efforts’, on the other hand… just by being ‘soft power efforts’, they’re state-driven. They’re trying to put out a message, instead of being simply what people want to see.

The key to this is the phrase “The art that the Chinese state has chosen to put forward to represent itself”. Western states would probably fail similarly hard if they chose art to represent themselves… but by and large, I don’t think they do. The Muse song might be an exception, but even then I doubt it went through as many committees as ‘Beijing huanying ni’.