Chinese People Struggle With World Geography in Funny Video

A video questioning several Chinese pedestrians demonstrated an apparent lack of world geography.

In a recent video, Asian Boss took to the streets of Shanghai to randomly quiz strangers, many of whom struggled to point the locations of countries in question.

The video begins by asking the passersby to rate their current knowledge of other countries.

“I’d say a 3. Even though I’m a liberal arts student, I’m not good at geography,” one says.

Another replies, “I’m a 1. I don’t even know China that well.”

Annie from the Asian Boss team then shows a blank world map and challenges the passersby to locate a given country.

First up: America.

Next: the UK.

“The UK, I think it’s far from the US,” one answers. “I sincerely want to apologize to my geography teacher. I actually don’t know!”

The passersby are then asked to locate Germany, Brazil and Nigeria, but many continued to struggle.

However, they succeeded when asked to name any other country in the map, with many identifying and pointing at countries close to China.

One boy fared better than the rest by naming and locating Canada, Mongolia, Russia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and North Korea.

After the challenge, the passersby confided that they often knew the countries’ general locations but had difficulty pinpointing their exact spots.

“South America is difficult for me,” one says. “They don’t produce enough movies that inform us more about their culture.”

When asked about what they think of the stereotype that Chinese people know little about the outside world due to censorship, the passersby were quick to dismiss.

“I think they should really come to China and see,” one replies. They should experience it for themselves. Some foreign friends of mine visited China and they realized some things they had heard weren’t true.”

“Web development in China is very fast. The Chinese economy is flourishing as well. It’s better than before. China isn’t as isolated as it was before. Chinese citizens definitely know what’s going on in China and foreigners don’t understand our situation. So, I think every country has the same problem,” another points out.

Finally, when asked how they plan to learn more about the outside world, the passersby knew what to do.

“Probably the best way is through traveling since you can have fun while learning,” one says.

Another answers, “I would use search engines like Google and Baidu.”

Images via YouTube / Asian Boss

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