By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
In September 2020, a game released globally by the Shanghai-based studio miHoYo (now HoYoverse) achieved something that no previous Chinese-developed game had achieved: it became culturally indistinguishable — at first glance, and for many players at extended second glance — from a premium Japanese anime product. The game was Genshin Impact (原神 — Genshin, literally “original god”), and the specific character of its achievement is worth examining with precision rather than merely noting as commercial news. The game’s visual design, its character design aesthetic, its voice acting (available in Japanese with the specific seiyuu cast that the Japanese anime fan community most values), its musical direction, and its narrative approach are all calibrated to the specific tastes of the anime fan community with a precision that reflects deep knowledge of that community’s specific preferences — knowledge that a Chinese studio could only have developed through years of careful, specific study of the Japanese otaku cultural ecosystem.
Genshin Impact’s commercial success — lifetime revenue exceeding 4 billion dollars as of mid-2024, making it the highest-grossing video game of its launch year and one of the highest-grossing mobile games ever produced — is in significant part a story about the specific moment in which the Japanese anime aesthetic’s global commercial appeal became large enough to support a major creative industry in a country other than Japan. Understanding that story requires understanding both the specific character of Genshin’s creative achievement and the broader context of the creative relationship between China and Japan in the anime and manga culture sphere.
The Chinese Anime Fan Community: Context and Scale
The Chinese anime fan community — the specific population of Chinese readers and viewers whose engagement with Japanese manga and anime constitutes one of the largest national fan communities outside Japan — is both the primary international audience for Japanese anime and manga products and, increasingly, the primary creator community producing content that competes with and sometimes exceeds those products in specific market segments.
The scale: China is estimated to be the largest single international market for Japanese anime and manga consumption by volume, with a streaming audience whose specific platform is Bilibili (哔哩哔哩 — the Chinese video platform whose initial identity as an anime streaming site has evolved into a general entertainment platform while maintaining anime as a core content category and its most culturally distinctive offering). Bilibili’s reported 341 million monthly active users as of 2023 represent a substantial proportion of the global anime streaming audience, and the platform’s specific community — whose comment overlay system directly derives from Nico Nico Douga’s foundational innovation that I described in the Nico Nico article — is one of the most engaged single-platform anime communities in the world.
The specific Chinese otaku identity: the Chinese anime fan community has developed a specific vocabulary, a specific set of community practices, and a specific relationship to the Japanese otaku culture that reflects both the depth of the engagement with Japanese source material and the specific Chinese cultural context within which that engagement occurs. The term zhai (宅 — literally “house,” used as a Chinese equivalent of the Japanese otaku to describe intense fan investment in anime, manga, and games) has developed its own specific community identity that is simultaneously derived from the Japanese concept and distinctly Chinese in its specific social context.
The Creative Development: From Fan Art to Original Production
The specific trajectory of Chinese creative engagement with the anime aesthetic — from the consumption of Japanese anime and manga, through the production of fan art and doujinshi derivative work, to the development of original creative productions that deploy the anime aesthetic in service of original narratives and original commercial visions — parallels the development trajectory of the Japanese anime industry’s own foundational period in specific ways that are historically illuminating.
The Chinese doujinshi tradition at Comiket: Chinese creators have been selling doujinshi at Comiket since the event began distributing internationally accessible information about participation, and the Chinese circle presence at Comiket has grown substantially in the past decade. The specific creative work produced by Chinese circles — which often demonstrates a technical mastery of the anime illustration style that reflects the specific depth of engagement with the Japanese visual tradition that the Chinese fan community has developed — has earned specific recognition within the Comiket community for its quality.
The manhua (漫画 — Chinese comics, whose specific visual tradition has both specific parallels with the Japanese manga tradition and specific distinct characteristics that reflect the Chinese artistic and narrative traditions from which it develops) industry’s specific engagement with the anime aesthetic: the specific Chinese comics that most closely align with the anime aesthetic’s visual conventions — the character design proportions, the panel composition, the specific expressive conventions — are produced within a tradition that is simultaneously a derivative of and in dialogue with the Japanese original, and whose specific creative achievements are beginning to achieve the global recognition that the quality of some of the specific works deserves.
Genshin Impact: The Anatomy of a Creative Achievement
The specific creative decisions that make Genshin Impact visually and experientially indistinguishable from a premium Japanese anime product to most players who encounter it without prior knowledge of its Chinese origin deserve examination as both a commercial achievement and a creative one.
The character design approach: Genshin Impact’s character design team — which includes both Chinese character designers trained in the anime visual tradition and specific Japanese character design consultants — produces character designs whose specific visual character draws from the same sources as the Japanese anime character design tradition: the specific proportions, the specific expressive range, the specific costume and accessory vocabulary, and the specific colour palette approaches that are associated with high-quality anime character design. The specific quality of Genshin’s character designs — which have produced some of the most extensively discussed and most extensively fan-created characters in the global anime fan community since the game’s release — demonstrates that the anime character design tradition’s specific knowledge has been successfully absorbed and deployed outside Japan.
The voice acting strategy: Genshin Impact’s decision to cast specifically recognisable high-profile Japanese seiyuu for its Japanese voice acting track — and to treat the Japanese voice acting as a co-equal primary localisation rather than as a secondary market adaptation — reflects specific knowledge of the Japanese anime fan community’s specific investment in seiyuu identity that I described in the seiyuu culture article. The specific casting choices — which have included major seiyuu whose existing fan bases are specifically relevant to the character types being cast — are informed by specific commercial intelligence about what the Japanese otaku market’s seiyuu investment dynamic produces in terms of fan engagement and merchandise purchasing behaviour.
The musical direction: the Genshin Impact score, produced by HoYoverse’s in-house music team with specific collaboration from external composers, draws from the specific anime music tradition — the orchestral-electronic hybrid, the specific use of cultural instrumentation from the specific in-game regions’ musical identities — with a sophistication that reflects specific knowledge of what the anime music tradition has achieved and what the globally engaged anime fan audience expects from premium game music production.
The Broader Donghua Tradition: Chinese Anime as Its Own Category
Beyond Genshin Impact — which is a game rather than an animated production — the specific tradition of Chinese-produced animation that engages with the anime aesthetic is developing a body of work whose quality and creative ambition is beginning to achieve the international recognition that its best examples deserve.
Donghua (动画 — Chinese animation, whose specific sub-category of anime-aesthetic Chinese animation is the one most directly relevant to the otaku cultural context) has produced several works in the past decade whose specific creative quality places them in genuine conversation with the Japanese anime tradition rather than in the position of merely derivative work.
Ne Zha (哪吒之魔童降世 — Ne Zha, 2019, directed by Jiaozi) achieved 5 billion RMB at the Chinese box office — the highest-grossing Chinese animated film ever at the time of release — with a production that drew on the specific visual traditions of the Chinese mythological narrative tradition rather than on the anime aesthetic, demonstrating that Chinese animation’s global commercial potential was not limited to the anime-adjacent products that international anime audiences were most familiar with.
Fog Hill of Five Elements (雾山五行, 2020) achieved specific international critical recognition for its specific visual approach — a blend of Chinese ink painting aesthetics with the fluid motion and character expressiveness of the anime tradition — that represents perhaps the most creatively interesting synthesis of Chinese visual traditions with the anime medium’s specific possibilities available in the current landscape.
The Intellectual Property Question: Adaptation and Original Creation
The specific question of intellectual property — whose specific navigation in the Chinese creative industry’s engagement with Japanese source material has been one of the most contested commercial and legal dimensions of the China-Japan creative relationship — deserves honest engagement rather than the dismissive account that treats the Chinese industry’s historical engagement with Japanese IP as simply derivative.
The specific IP landscape: the Chinese market’s specific historical engagement with Japanese manga and anime IP — including the specific phenomenon of shanzhai (山寨 — the specific Chinese term for unauthorised reproductions and copies) product in the merchandise market, and the specific tradition of Chinese fan productions that reproduced or closely imitated specific Japanese character designs without license — reflects both the specific inadequacy of IP enforcement mechanisms in the relevant period and the specific enthusiasm of the Chinese fan community for the specific properties it loved. The subsequent development of legitimate licensing relationships between major Chinese platforms and Japanese IP holders — most visibly the Bilibili-Shueisha and Bilibili-Kadokawa licensing arrangements that have made legal anime streaming available on the platform — represents a specific commercial normalisation of the relationship whose terms continue to evolve.
The creative independence trajectory: the most significant development in the China-Japan creative relationship of the past decade is the specific increasing independence of the Chinese creative industry from Japanese source material — the development of original Chinese properties whose specific quality and commercial ambition makes the “derivative” characterisation increasingly inadequate. The specific Chinese properties that have achieved this creative independence — Genshin Impact most visibly, but also specific donghua productions and specific Chinese game properties — represent a specific maturation of the Chinese creative industry from a consuming market to a producing industry in the specific aesthetic tradition whose consuming began the process.
— Yoshi 🌏 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? Continue with: “Otaku Abroad — Global Japanese Pop Culture Communities” and “AI and the Future of Anime Production” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
