Spectacularizing China: Cultural Heritage and Representation in Genshin Impact

This paper examines how Genshin Impact, miHoYo's 2020 open-world role-playing game, represents Chinese cultural heritage, situating it within the broader "guofeng" (national style) trend in Chinese game development and the state's "game-going-global" strategy. The authors note that Genshin Impact was selected in 2021 by China's Ministry of Commerce as a national "Chinese Cultural Export" project, which frames their central concern: how cultural representation in a globally oriented product may be shaped by export imperatives.

The study's core argument is comparative. It contrasts Genshin Impact's region of Liyue, which stands in for China, with Canal Towns, a domestically oriented game by the independent studio Coconut Island. Both draw on Ming- and early Qing-dynasty heritage, yet the authors contend their aesthetic effects diverge sharply. Canal Towns, inspired by the painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival and informed by research on vernacular architecture, foregrounds everyday residential, commercial, and industrial life in Yangtze river towns and structures play around daily routines. Liyue, by contrast, relies on extraordinary visual symbols, drawing primarily on Fenghuang Ancient Town's stilted houses and on iconic landscapes such as Zhangjiajie, Huanglong, and the Guilin karst.

The authors conclude that Genshin Impact treats these sites as objects of awe and consumption rather than as lived spaces shaped by labor and habitation. They draw a parallel to the spectacularization of early 2000s Chinese blockbuster films aimed at global audiences, suggesting that export-oriented strategies may encourage simplified, visually legible images of China that risk flattening complex social realities. The analysis is largely qualitative, based on textual and visual analysis of the two games and archival research into design teams' stated intentions.