deleted by creator
Remember all those american movies where a foreign national goes “hey, america! John Wayne!”?
Us westerners are all going to be that: “hey, chine! Jackie Chan!”
It’s a bit of a dumb “gotcha” question to be honest.
Name 3 Indian people right now? Name 3 Russian people right now? Name 3 Argentinian people right now?
Most people don’t have a list of go-to names in their pockets based on nationality. And people in Europe will be much more familiar with other Europeans, and also Americans because we’re inundated in coverage.
I’m British with Irish heritage and I’m struggling on the spot to name 3 Irish people alive right now, yet I see a lot of Irish comedians, actors, musicians and TV shows on British TV.
It’s a specious argument that the question reveals what it purports to. Instead it reveals people are shit when put on the spot, and especially the further outside their day-to-day familiarity you go.
Name a woman!
It’s not that hard.
- The supreme leader
- The Alibaba guy who was kidnapped
- The guy who stood in front of a tank with his groceries
That’s gotta count, right?
Edit: shit, they said alive.
Yeah I sat here trying to name three of:
- Chinese people (Xi Jinping, Jack Ma, uhhh…)
- French people (Marie Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy, uhhhhh damn my brain forgot the name of the current president even though I literally read about him earlier today)
- Swedish people (the King and no I can’t remember what number of Carl he is, a Swedish friend, oh fuck I can’t remember the surname of my other Swedish friend)
- Estonian people (Kaja Kallas, holy shit where do I go now, oh yeah the Disco Elysium guys: Argo Tuulik… fuck who was the main guy? Who was the money guy?)
- Russian people (Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin-- wait he’s dead, ok what about the geopolitics guy on Twitter nuh uh can’t remember his name)
- Americans who aren’t or weren’t the president or the vice president (drew a blank until I thought of the RedLetterMedia guys, then realized I forgot Mike’s last name, then cheated by remembering Mike Morhaime’s last name instead)
And I’m not even on the spot in a studio. The human brain just doesn’t work that way.
edit: and for context I’m Finnish, so I picked neighbouring countries that I should (and do) know people from
Teemu selanne, miikka kiprusoff, linus torvalds…
first 3 finnish people i could think of…
If i had to name 3 more, they’d also be hockey players, :(
I just realised that you could just guess based on the country if you know the naming system well enough. For Iceland I thought of Olafur Waarge, Bjork, and then tried and failed to name the female prime minister/president around the 2008 finacial crisis and just threw out “Freya Thorsdottir” and it’s a person. No idea who the fuck she is, but she exists.
Yeah I feel like sports fans probably do better than average on this quiz. Nationalities are quite prominently considered there.
Name 3 Indian people right now?
Narendra Modi. Raoul Gandhi. Gina Gopinath.
Name 3 Russian people right now?
Vladimir Putin. Dimitry Medvedev. Oleg Deripaska.
Name 3 Argentinian people right now?
Lionel Messi. Mauricio Macri. Cristina Kirhsner.
🇮🇳 : Visby anand, gukesh d, Modi.
🇷🇺 : Ian/yan nepomnyaschchi , daniil dubov, Putin.
🇦🇷: Christina Kirchner, Alberto Fernández, Mirta legrande.
🇮🇪: dará O’Brien, RT game, foil arms & hog. Danny Dwyer. The bastard transphobe Graham lineman.I came up with these names on the spot. I might not be able to make three Mauritians, but come on, if you follow anything international, you can name 3 Chinese people. They are there from politics to snooker.
🇨🇳: ding liren, Wei yi, Hu jintao
Edit: I only put gukesh with d because it is acceptable, and I might misspel domajaru
Yeah, chess and YouTube would be my go-to as well. Apart from irish, I watch a lot of canadians and kiwis.
Xi Jinping
Jackie Chan
Jet Li
Yao Ming
Yi Jianlian
Does Jeremy Lin count?
I watch movies, basketball and the news. That should be enough.
Limited to Chinese Nationals or do we count people of Chinese heritage?
Ming-Na Wen - Born in Macau to Chinese parents. James Hong (97!) - Born in Minneapolis to Chinese parents.
Michelle Yeoh? Born in Malaysia but with Chinese heritage.
Can you name 3 alive chinese people
li wei.
i asked for three
i just named at least 100,000.
Thank you, Mr John Smith
Honestly? I’d be hard pressed to name 3 politicians from most other countries than my own.
Current guy Carney, last guy Trudeau, before that, hmm. Wait, the guy who… smoked crack, I think? Doug Ford. Don’t remember what office he held.
That was close. I don’t know if I could manage any other country. Putin, Medvedev (if he’s still alive, would have to look it up), and… Dang I know the name of the head honcho of Chechnya but I can’t call it to mind.
Wait, the guy who… smoked crack, I think? Doug Ford.
close, that’s his brother! who is the current premier of ontario, much to the chagrin of everyone.
the one who smoke crack was rob ford, and he was mayor of toronto.
Xi Jinping, Jack Ma, and Jackie Chan are three that come to mind.
Loll I thought of the first two too. Of course the first is a given considering his picture is right there on the post.
The third was Naomi Wu. One of the few influencers who really managed to captivate the west (in her niche). But unfortunately she was silenced as she was too critical about the government (and IT security issues in particular in the pinyin input module, which she had really good points about). Basically she was arrested and told to stop youtubing or else…
I think this plays a role too. Influencers that capture a western audience often get silenced when they don’t toe the party line. And when they do they are obvious shills so they don’t appeal to us. The same reason linkedin is insufferable as social media.
It’s too bad because people like her really fostered understanding of Chinese culture. Which is good for China and its government too but they’re too focused on their internal hold on power to see that.
I miss Naomi. Her content was always interesting, and often informative. She was a solid presence in the open source 3d scene too. Between the pinyin IME input vulnerabilities and telling personal stories of her life and suffering under the government as well as her Uhyger partners suffering. Even though she didn’t word it like that. Put it as vanilla and non accusatory and just mater of factly. Oppressive authoritarian governments can’t tolerate ANY criticism or allow ACTUAL liberty.
You are 1000% correct though. She was a fantastic internet ambassador for china and their technology sector.
Yes I miss her too. I found her stories super interesting, even more so than her tech content. Like the one where she explains how and why she looks so heavily feminised.
A lot of people were complaining she used her sexuality to get attention but I never thought that was the case. She didn’t seem to be playing a role. And I can totally understand her story. ❤️
A lot of people were complaining she used her sexuality to get attention but I never thought that was the case.
I thought it was just a case of “I’ll be using these to my advantage” and it’s ok. She showed correct gear to work on stuff with as well (AFAIK), and it was for publicity stunts/going to fun places where that attire is acceptable. IDK at what age I’d share her stuff with my daughter, so there is a downside to sexualising your content, but it’s self expression. She had enough thumbnails and whatnot in her work clothes too.
Nice try. Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong, not mainland China
If you really want to piss them off, name politicians from Taiwan. They tell us it is part of China after all. (/s)
Yeah name Chiang Kai-Shek in particular hehehe
Doesn’t make him less of a shill.
How about Shaohao, Zhuanxu, and Emperor Ku?
Hong Kong is mainland China, now that they’re no longer under colonial guidance from England. There’s a reason Dr. Chan is so pro China, given the hell he grew up in in occupied hong kong.
given the hell he grew up in in occupied hong kong.
lol. What weird fucking timeline are you from or do just know absolutely nothing about history and society of HK?
Do you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s_in_Hong_Kong
It was invaded by England and made to be a British Colony for decades where slavery was openly legal, HK had no control over its fate whatsoever, and the UK enforced a strict class and social hierarchy where native peoples were massively oppressed compared to Brits.
It’s actually genuinely disgusting you’re defending both imperialism, the genocide that the imperialism fueled, and violently hostile occupation of a foreign land.
Well, TIL…
- Jackie Chan is at least 187 years old
- A treaty of rule and lease is “occupation”
- The Hong Kong protests are because indoctrinated imperialists and the CCP is a force of liberation
Or you’re an idiot that knows nothing of HK society, culture, governance, and life in the past century.
Try talking to someone from there if you can’t be bothered learning. You’ll be very quickly corrected and possibly punched in the face.
deleted by creator
^ That’s you btw. And it being Winnie isn’t coincidental. Kind of a triple on calling me retarded + your own contradicting link + the irony of even the CCP wishing you’d stfu at this point
Was it really more of a hell than it is now?
Especially if you don’t exactly agree with the government it’s not a very nice place to be right now.
Yeah the open air slavery was pretty fucking worse than guaranteed human rights.
Yao Ming too
Any Chinese people? Because I’ve got several Chinese friends and coworkers I could name but probably wouldn’t on live TV, lol.
More of an indictment on the insularity of our media systems than random individuals.
As an Aussie, I could name 3 people from a handful of countries, and mostly only because we see their media a lot.
Jackie Chan. Sammo Hung. Yuen Biao.
The Trinity.
What a stupid fucking question.
You don’t need to know the names of powerful people to know they are powerful.
China is a key player in the global economy and greatest benefactor of the collapse of the USA. They also have a sizable military and nuclear weapons that can reach anywhere in the globe.
I’d say that makes them a pretty major world power.
You don’t need to know the names of powerful people to know they are powerful.
The point is not that China only becomes powerful once Western readers can name its elites. The point is that this ignorance reveals how shallow the dominant understanding of China still is.
“There is a problem when cultured people, who are interested in international affairs, who read the press, have difficulty imagining the existence of three Chinese figures” then emphasize Gilles Gressani, director of the journal The Great Continent. It was he who, in the introduction to the latest work published by his journal, The Enemy who designates us (Gallimard, 2026), poses this “paradox” : China weighs “half of what matters in geopolitics and economics”, but no one is able to list three names of living Chinese.
“We continue to completely ignore what is happening” “That says something fundamental”, adds the essayist. We live with mental representations which are those of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. We are still living in 2000, when in reality we are much closer to 2050. ⁇ The book, which brings together several texts by “renowned sinologists and key doctrinaires of Xi Jinping”, under the direction of the Italian-Swiss writer and political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, suggest just one “exclusive folder” on the Middle Kingdom. “If we feel so dizzy in the face of the upheavals underway, it is perhaps because we still refuse to integrate a massive contemporary dimension: China”, plants the volume presentation.
Gilles Gressani invites you to look at the figures. “impressive” : Between 2018 and 2019 alone, China produced more cement than the United States in the entire 20th century, he says. Moreover, "more than half of the AI research is made in China ⁇ , and renewable energy installations are “vertiginous”. “Yet we continue to completely ignore what is happening”, he notes.
…
I’d say that makes them a pretty major world power.
Yuh… His argument is not that naming officials is some trivia test for geopolitical seriousness. It is that China now occupies an enormous share of the world’s economic, technological, industrial, and strategic reality, yet many people still relate to it through outdated mental maps. We keep thinking with the categories of the year 2000 while living in a world that is already moving toward 2050.
China is not just “a major power” in the generic sense that people usually mean: big economy, large army, nuclear weapons, permanent UN Security Council seat. That description is technically true, but it barely scratches the surface.
The scale is the issue.
China is central to global manufacturing. It is decisive in supply chains. It is a major force in AI research, green technology, batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, infrastructure, rare earth processing, telecommunications, finance, and development lending. Even the cement comparison is not just a fun statistic, it shows the scale of the transformation.
So yes, obviously China is a major world power. No one serious is denying that.
The argument is that even people who accept that fact often underestimate what kind of power China has become. They treat it as one important state among others, when in many sectors it is already one of the central organizers of the global system. The usual analysis stops at: “China is a key player in the global economy, has a large military, and possesses nuclear weapons.” That’s like describing the United States in 1945 as “a country with a strong economy and a large navy.” It is not wrong, but it’s insufficient.
Not knowing the names is a symptom. If they took china seriously and the analysis was deep, the reporting on it would surface those names and they would become common household names.
Why is Elon Musk treated as a world-historical industrialist, but Wang Chuanfu of BYD is still obscure, even though BYD is central to the global EV transition?
Why is Sam Altman a household name, but not Robin Li of Baidu, or Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance?
Why is Jamie Dimon constantly quoted, but not Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People’s Bank of China?
Western coverage turns mediocre American figures into global characters while reducing China to “Xi” or “Beijing.”
I think the contrary. I feel French people (like me) are not sufficiently exposed to Chinese culture and people in general. We barely know where big cities are on a map, what are the regions, etc.
History teacher-ass logic
- Jet Li
- Jackie Chan
- Michelle Yeoh
that wasn’t hard…
Michelle yeoh is from malaysia, jackie chan is from hong kong…
Yes, i am stirring up controversy
you’re right, but I said them for the same reason.
I guess it worked?
They’re all ethnically Chinese, and the question was ambiguous enough
Cixin Liu, Eileen Gu, Ai Weiwei, Xi Jinping…
I know one. It’s Dr Ying Fu Yip, Wang Shong… Pang Fang Wang Dang Dong Ning Po Ku.
Edit: it’s a Peep Show quote for everyone who thinks I’m being wasis.
