It’s not that hard.
That’s gotta count, right?
Edit: shit, they said alive.
Edit 2: ByteDance CEO, because he was at Trump’s inauguration wasn’t he?
Yeah I sat here trying to name three of:
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.
Name a woman!
🇮🇳 : 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
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.
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.
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.
If you really want to piss them off, name politicians from Taiwan. They tell us it is part of China after all. (/s)
Doesn't make him less of a shill.
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.
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.
Yeah the open air slavery was pretty fucking worse than guaranteed human rights.
Yao Ming too
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!"
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.
Jackie Chan. Sammo Hung. Yuen Biao.
Can you name 3 alive Chinese people right now?
I can, but I do not expose my AliBaba contacts. :)
Besides, Chinese salespeople and even some engineers have the silly habit of adopting Western-sounding first names for business communication, so you don't get a real name in casual talk.
It's a bit like Xi Jinping naming himself Timmy Jinping for easier diplomacy. I wonder why. :D
Another silly bit... I'm from Estonia. Back a few years ago, some Chinese gal decided that advancing business relations would be well served by sending me Ramadan greetings (note the cultural dissonance in a country where a Muslim celebrating Ramadan would experience difficulties).
I happily explained to her that we don't celebrate Ramadan here, except for very few people. What I found out: Estonia in Chinese is "Àishāníyǎ", which strongly suggests a place with lots of sand, so she guessed I was probably Arab. The language barrier is pretty high both ways. :)
Le Figaro is originally a royalist paper, which ended up being bought by the Dassault family who makes money selling weapons.
I think we should not spread their words too much.
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?
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.”
Cixin Liu, Eileen Gu, Ai Weiwei, Xi Jinping…
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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.
save