[superconduct123]

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries

Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

[lurk2]

They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).

It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).

Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.

You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.

[stickfigure]

> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries

Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.

I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.

[makeitdouble]

Mainland China is coming the other side through anime.

Productions like "The Legend of Hei" are of truly high quality and it's getting a decent reception in Japan for instance (not breaking the box office, but the fact it's there and talked about so no positively is already something)

[lurk2]

> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.

You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.

The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.

The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.

It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.

[inemesitaffia]

Xanxia and Wuxia

[stickfigure]

As far as I can tell, that export mostly came out of Hong Kong and has mostly stopped.

[inemesitaffia]

Most of my contact with it has been via TV shows and English/Korean writers

[Apocryphon]

Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.

[CapricornNoble]

For anyone else who enjoyed The Raid, the sub-genre of graphic and brutally violent Indonesian action movies is a gem.

The Raid 2; The Night Comes For Us; The Shadow Strays....those should get anyone started going down the rabbit hole.

[elgenie]

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

[veeti]

The only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in...

Many such cases.

[fnikacevic]

The island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.

[awongh]

I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.

Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.

I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.

[mcmoor]

At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.

[Froztnova]

I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.

[cdmckay]

Which assumptions are those?

[Froztnova]

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.

I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.

[flopsamjetsam]

> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.

I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.

[bouncycastle]

Also, the Indonesia that most Australians only ever visit is Bali, which is mostly Hindu.

[elgenie]

The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.

[deepspace]

That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.

[lurk2]

> What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography?

This doesn’t fall under the category of basic geography. I can guarantee you that the majority of people you attended school with would not be able to locate Indonesia on a map, much less tell you about the religions practiced there.

[Froztnova]

TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.

[lurk2]

He’s being obtuse, it isn’t common knowledge at all.

[faizmokh]

Now figure out how Christianity got around in SEA region.

[mmooss]

India (also not Middle Eastern) has the largest population of Muslim people, but it is not 'majority Muslim'.

[rafram]

Only 20% of the Muslims in the world live in the Middle East.

[lawlessone]

Yeah if i only went by TV news i'd come to the same general conclusion. And if i narrowed it down to just Fox i'd probably think it was the UK.

[aruggirello]

It seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing?

https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/

[screye]

I would treat these rankings with suspicion.

I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.

[screye]

There no middle-eastern countries among the top 5 muslim countries by population.

It goes: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh & Nigeria, in that order.

[manquer]

It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus

[lordnacho]

Ask someone in the West what the largest muslim country is.

[aprilthird2021]

You must not have known about Malaysia then either?

[Froztnova]

Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.

[throwaway290]

Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year

[_DeadFred_]

How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.

[rar00]

typo? Rounding it up to 2 billion, 30% means 600 million per year

[throwaway290]

Maybe. Could be somebody was repeating some sort of misinformation. Quick check says more like 20% in 10 years.

[yieldcrv]

Check out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!

[nokun7]

What sorts of assumptions?

[numpad0]

Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].

1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...

[Squealer2642]

I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.

[yen223]

I feel the same way about China tbh

Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?

[CapricornNoble]

I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.

[fragmede]

Don't forget Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Wu Jing, Michelle Yeoh, Simu Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Tobin, Olivia Cheng, Dianne Doan,

Lucy Liu isn't famous in China but she is in the US.

Not Chinese but recognizable because of HBO's The Warrior: Andrew Koji, Hoon Lee, Joe Taslim

(I cheated, my parents are from Hong Kong.)

[yen223]

Not sure if I'm being whooshed here, but a large chunk of those people are not from China.

Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian

Bruce Lee is American, baby

A lot of the others are Hong Kong celebrities, from before Hong Kong was returned to China

(Probably should've specified Chinese as people from China, specifically the mainland)

[fragmede]

Yeah, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and had a US passport, but he grew up in Hong Kong. Point is, Chinese diaspora exists and can be seen for those who want to look. Projecting a viewpoint that no one knows about China or Chinese people because you don't want to think they do, so you feel slighted, and can then rage against that; it just seems kind of hollow to me.

[yen223]

I was hoping to talk more about (Mainland) China being uniquely bad at exporting pop culture, especially when compared to the success of Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese pop culture.

The fact that nearly all celebs you mentioned were famous from HK film seems to at least confirm that.

[autoexec]

Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.

[quickthrowman]

The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.

Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.

[aurareturn]

The west deliberately blocks Chinese media.

In asia, China's culture is far more prevalent and gaining quickly.

[an0malous]

What Chinese media is blocked in the west? First time I’m hearing of this

[yen223]

Japan and Korea, yes. China, not really.

Unless you want to include Hong Kong, but even then

[aurareturn]

Random Chinese culture routinely comes up on my IG reel.

[wraptile]

Opression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.