The situation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Cao Cao, who was hated in the past, is now very popular and the object of emotional involvement [Anime by Chinese Otaku].

My name is Hundred Yuan Kagoyo, and I am introducing this and that about the situation of Chinese geeks.
Since this is the first article of the year 2022, I would like to summarize the situation of the Three Kingdoms in China, which has changed drastically over the past 20 years, and the evaluation and popularity of each power and general.

In the past, it was difficult to talk about the Three Kingdoms in China.

In Japan, many people may have the image that China is the land of the Three Kingdoms, but in fact, the general knowledge and evaluation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in Chinese society is not stable, and has undergone very significant changes, especially over the past 20 years or so.

I attended local schools from junior high school to university from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, and at that time it was quite difficult to meet people in China who were able to talk about the Sanguozhi at the level of Japanese Sanguozhi lovers.
Of course, "Sanguozhi" was considered "China's world-class work," and there were TV dramas about the Legend of the Three Kingdoms, and the places where the dramas were filmed became tourist attractions, but not many people had a proper understanding of the entire story of the Legend of the Three Kingdoms. However, it seems that not many people understood or grasped the entire story of the Three Kingdoms.

In this regard, in China at that time
In China at that time, there were no easily accessible contents related to the Legend of the Three Kingdoms like Eiji Yoshikawa and Mitsuteru Yokoyama in Japan, and it was necessary to read the original works in order to grasp the entire story of the Legend of the Three Kingdoms.
This was probably a major reason.

Traditionally, the Three Kingdoms Yanyi has been very popular in China, and there are many works based on the Three Kingdoms Yanyi, ranging from high-stakes traditional arts to the folk level. However, these works are all based on individual episodes.
Even if you can find the original, "Sanguoku Yanyi" is a classic work, even if it is a colloquial novel called "Bai Wah Josetsu," which is a very difficult task for ordinary people to understand.

In addition, there were few "Sanguozhi" contents for children and adolescents in China a long time ago. The only Three Kingdoms-related content for children and young people in China in the past was renkan-ga (a kind of picture book, said to be a prototype of Chinese cartoons), and the rest was either in school language textbooks (I once studied Zhuge Liang's Deji Table in an ancient Chinese literature class at a Chinese school) or in other media. The Chinese language textbooks were usually found at .......
As a matter of fact, the first full-length drama of "Sanguo Yanyi" was produced in China in 1994, and the first full-length animated TV series was broadcast in 2009. In recent years, we have seen a variety of Chinese-made dramas, games, and manga based on the Legend of the Three Kingdoms, but a decade ago, China had considerably fewer opportunities to come into contact with Three Kingdoms-related content compared to Japan. ......

Therefore, in China until around the early 2000s, it was quite difficult to find "Chinese people who are indeed the home of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms" who were familiar with the situation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms as generally imagined by Japanese people.
Some of the Japanese students who studied in China at that time were very eager to talk to Chinese students, asking, "Would you like to talk about the Three Kingdoms?　but unfortunately, they could not find anyone satisfactory. ......
One of the Japanese students told us about his experience.
According to what the Japanese student told me, he could not communicate with popular (supposedly) Shu-related generals such as Xu Zhong and Wang Ping. I was a bit surprised to hear that they did not understand Xu Ping, who taught Liu Bei the necessity of a military strategist and who was the reason why he met Zhuge Liang, let alone Wang Ping.

It is said that the boom of Yizhong Tian and "The Three Kingdoms" in the late 2000s triggered a major change in the way the Legend of the Three Kingdoms was evaluated and treated in China. Yizhong Tian became very popular for his humorous analysis and modern parables in his history lectures on China Central Television's "Hundred Families Talk" program, and his book "Ping Sanguo" (review of the Three Kingdoms) was a huge bestseller at the time.

Also, among the impacts this boom had on China were
"It is okay to make a joke out of the serious works of the Three Kingdoms, the classics, and history.
The Legend of the Three Kingdoms," which was a serious work.
It is not that there were no works based on Chinese classics and history, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, in China before then, but Chinese society has always had a strong belief that masterpieces of classics and history "must remain unaltered and original.
"The original must remain unaltered.
However, in Chinese society, there has always been a belief that masterpieces of classics and history "must remain original and unaltered.

This idea of "the original must remain unaltered" has been used in various situations in China today, but during the Yizhongtian and the "Three Kingdoms" boom, there was still a kind of taboo against doing so in the public media, such as television. Therefore, there was some strong criticism of the boom at the time.
However, despite the harsh criticism, the momentum of this new genre, which has been called "the entertainment of academia," continued to grow, and the adaptation and entertainment of famous Chinese classics with modern values also spread.
In the current Chinese entertainment scene, visual content of the Legend of the Three Kingdoms in the form of adaptations is no longer a rarity, and in social games, which have become very active in recent years, the Three Kingdoms generals are being used as character content in various ways.

In addition to this, the increase in knowledge and change in the image of the Three Kingdoms in China is due to the development of so-called wiki-like sites on the Chinese Internet and the increase in information in the Three Kingdoms category there. This is due in large part to the explosive increase in the amount of "easy-to-understand information related to the Three Kingdoms that can be accessed in a Chinese environment" (which may sound a bit strange) over the past 20 years or so.
In recent years, in China, the image and knowledge of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has been rapidly strengthened through repeated discussions in the ever-increasing online environment of information related to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the exchange of knowledge and information copied and pasted from wiki-like sites, such as ....... This is one of the reasons why the image and knowledge of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms was rapidly strengthened.