Don't know if this was posted here yet, but I see Westerners have been in pandemonium about this all week.
Some people dropped truth bombs that while stuff like MiHoYo and the Bilibili otaku subculture in China is moderately succesful in the West, in Asia particularly Taiwan that stuff is huge amongst Gen Z and bigger than anything culturewise being exported into Mainland China. There's also the fact that at this point the DPP's propaganda on China accounts to crying wolf and they don't have legitimacy due to poor handling of the economy.
To me this is why China can afford to be patient on Taiwan. Much has been said of
Russia's soft power failure leading up to the Ukraine war, that even with the common culture and Ukraine's backwardness Russia didn't do enough to broaden its appeal to the Ukrainian populace, as such most still preferred to lean towards to the EU and saw countries like Germany as the model to emulate instead. Yes, obviously there was copious amounts of CIA propaganda, but that doesn't discount the fact that Russia didn't do anything soft power wise to further its own cause.
China on the other hand is winning the hearts and minds of younger generations with its multilateralism, improving cultural exports, and being generally well run while the liberal democratic world falls to right wing governments that have nothing to sell but fear and anger, including the current DPP.
