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This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure. As a newcomer, the structure dominates your perception, until you've exposed yourself to enough instances that you can filter out the common features and notice the details, which are where the actual creativity lies.

The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).

I have no idea about Chinese pop culture, but it could be that for someone not familiar with it everything may be too unfamiliar for the differences to become appreciable.

For example I don't listen much electronic dance music (house, techno, trance etc), and whenever I end up in a club it sounds to me that its always the same loud thumping song playing. Those who go frequently do seem to find a lot of variation though.

Is that really any different to Hollywood and western pop songs?

This reminds me of South Korea. IDK if its still a thing but apparently there was an official puffer jacket tier list and 90% of high school students wore 1 of about 8 different jackets.

Social games that drive conformity.

I think you may want to interrogate why you feel this way a little more before you assign it to a "feature of Chinese culture." Frankly your comment comes across as aggressively ignorant.

To me China seems much more diverse than the US.

While true, that probably says more about what you’re looking for at home. I could be wrong, maybe you’re really into the late pop fads, mass market tv events and all of that. To an extent this comes down to comparing an entertainment landscape you know how to navigate to find the stuff aimed at you, with a foreign one.

Western reality tv, procedurals, game shows, soap operas and so on are incredibly samey after all. BUT the other factor is that creative endeavors in China take place under a censorship regime. Some topics are safer than others, so the mainstream tends to be quite formulaic and focused on fantasy, sci-fi, or pseudo historical shows.

Might I direct you to the popular American culture? The US comics for a long time were _required_ to be pre-AI slop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority#1954_Cod...

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