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of the world’s economic, technological, industrial, and strategic reality, yet many people still relate to it through outdated mental maps.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.”
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.
…
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.”