Geopolitical scientist Gilles Gressani, co-founder of the magazine Le Grand Continent**, poses this** "paradox" in the latest book of his journal devoted to the enemies of Europe, while China represents "half of what matters in geopolitics and economics".
Small moment of floating on the set of LCI, on May 28, during David Pujadas' daily show." I ask you the question around this table: who can mention the name of three living Chinese today?", says the presenter to his guests, journalists Ruth Elkrief (LCI), Jean Quatremer (Libération), Pascal Perri (TF1/LCI) and Thierry Fabre (Challenges). Embarrassed silence. We are thinking. We rack our brains. "There is Xi Jinping, the president," begins one of them. That will be all. To discover
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"There is a problem when cultured people, who are interested in international business, who read the press, have difficulty imagining the existence of three Chinese figures," says Gilles Gressani, director of the magazine Le Grand Continent. It is he who, in the introduction of the latest book published by his magazine, L'Ennemi qui nous désigne (Gallimard, 2026), poses this "paradox": China weighs "half of what counts in geopolitics and economics", but no one is able to sing three names of living Chinese. "We continue to totally ignore what is happening" "It says something fundamental," adds the essayist. "We live with mental representations that are those of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. We still live in 2000, when in reality we are much closer to 2050." The book, which brings together several texts by "renowned sinologists and key doctrinaries of Xi Jinping", under the direction of the Italian-Swiss writer and political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, offers precisely an "exclusive file" on the Middle Kingdom. "If we feel such a vertigo in the face of the ongoing upheavals, it is perhaps because we still refuse to integrate a massive dimension of the contemporary: China," plants the presentation of the volume.
Gilles Gressani invites you to look at the "impressive" figures: between 2018 and 2019 alone, China produced more cement than the United States throughout the 20th century, he says. In addition, "more than half of AI research is done in China", and renewable energy installations are "vertiginous". "However, we continue to completely ignore what is happening," he notes.
Probably helps that I consume a fair bit of japanese media (and don't necessarily remember their entire names) but off the top of my head
Plus Takashi Miike, Shinya Aoki, Mariyah Takeuchi, Yuki Yoza, Joji sort of counts I guess, George Morikawa, Shinsuke Nakamura, Antonio Inoki (recently passed tho), Naoya Inoue. Japan is a pretty fucked up society but the impact of their cultural exports isn't really up to debate. I could walk up to my gym in the middle of small city Mexico tomorrow and I bet there's hardly anyone in there can't name three japanese people quickly.