To be horrified at how many cities I’d never heard of?

[CruCru]

I’ve just read a thing about how mega cities account for over half of greenhouse emissions. This is awful - but I am also horrified that I’ve never heard of so many of these places. Handan, Suzhou, Dalian, Tianjin - all really big cities and I’d never heard of them. I have heard of Wuhan but only because of Coronavirus.

Am I surprisingly ignorant or have you also not heard of these places?

Meant to add I doubt if their teachers were bothered as I doubt they would have done much better.

Tianjin I'd heard of.

It's easy to forget China is huge. Over 1.4 billion people. India's not much smaller. Both unsurprisingly have loads of cities bigger than London. We tend not to know them and really we should.

I have…but only because I did live in China for a while. Some of these places are horrendous, industrial, polluted, packed cities.

@2tired2bewitty

It might make you feel better if you watch last night’s episode of university challenge where a group of supposedly intelligent students showed such a woeful grasp of British geography I bet their teachers were crying with shame

I watched that too. It was amazing how little they knew about the UK. They hadn't a clue. I think a lot of kids learn about where UK towns and cities are when they start applying for Uni. I guess the super brainy only have to learn where Oxford Cambridge and London are 😅

Up until my 30s I assumed Dunkirk was in Scotland blush. Luckily I have never voiced this in RL

Me too! Though I did make the mistake of voicing it IRL 🙈

@ApplyWithin

I remember in my first job meeting a man from Uttoxeter and thinking he’d made up the name. Turns out I grew up about an hour’s drive from Uttoxeter. Took me 22 years to hear the word.

? your father never had the racing on tv, then. racing from uttoxeter, i loved the sound of the name, sounds so posh.

I have, but only because I have made it my mission to improve my geography over the last 6 months or so as it was really bad how little I knew of other countries and where they.

Found out there are 14 countries in Oceanian, not the 2 I thought

I have. I could not point out where on a map of China they are located but I have heard of them. Chinese cities are huuuge.

@Northernsoullover

Up until my 30s I assumed Dunkirk was in Scotland . Luckily I have never voiced this in RL

Until embarrassingly recently if someone had asked where Thurrock is I would have placed it Edinburgh way.

It is not Edinburgh way

I have heard of Tianjin and Suzhou though like a PP it’s because I’ve dealt with factories there.

China is enormous. Take the footprint of China and slap it over any other random part of the globe, and that area will probably be chock full of huge cities you've never heard of as well. Siberian Russia springs to mind, probably Amazonian Brazil as well.

OK I have no idea where Thurrock is without googling - is it Sussex way?!
OK here's some no googling either

Where's Mytholmroyd

Chinese cities are huuuge.

I've been to China and have heard of some of these. But until you've been there, the sheer scale of China is impossible to grasp. They build groups of enormous towers the way Barrett built housing estates. Plopping them out in groups. Massive tower blocks.

I spent days with my mouth open looking at it.

China is enormous. Take the footprint of China and slap it over any other random part of the globe, and that area will probably be chock full of huge cities you've never heard of as well. Siberian Russia springs to mind, probably Amazonian Brazil as well.

Not really because population plays a part as well. There are less than 50 million people living east of the Urals in Russia so they're pretty spread out. There are less than 150m Russians in total in a country almost twice as large as China by land mass

I always look in my trusty big world atlas book, when I am not sure where some obscure places are.. It is more interesting and informative than just checking on google.

@Quaggars

OK I have no idea where Thurrock is without googling - is it Sussex way?! OK here's some no googling either

Where's Mytholmroyd

Mytholmroyd is in the Calder Valley, and probably many people have not heard of that either. It is lovely, very scenic.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to be unaware of China’s ,ega cities. They are really new. In just the last 10 years China has added nearly 200 million people to its urban population. Nearly half a billion in the last quarter century. That’s a lot of cities that have either appeared overnight or gone from next to nothing to incredibly huge in very little time at all.

What is a bit unreasonable is how little people in the west know about quite how incredibly fast China has developed in the last 40 years. Europe and Northern America have been standing still in comparison. China’s been going through a revolution that is akin to (more pronounced than) the massive changes the Industrial revolution wrought in the West in the 18/19th century.

Not really because population plays a part as well. There are less than 50 million people living east of the Urals in Russia so they're pretty spread out. There are less than 150m Russians in total in a country almost twice as large as China by land mass

Depends on your definition of 'huge'. To us who live in a place with a small population, anything over 100,000 is a huge town or city. There are plenty of places that size in central and eastern Russia, and in the Brazilian interior as well. Not the size of Chinese cities, granted, but still significant enough that they'd be considered huge, and it would be taken as granted people would have heard of them if they existed here.

It's just a matter of scale. I'm sure there are plenty towns and villages of a few thousand people in England that English people have never heard of and couldn't point to on a map. It doesn't mean they are ill-educated or ignorant.

Thurrock is Essex but it always sound more like it should be in Yorkshire to me.

I’m pretty educated and I’m still awful on English towns! I would only be able to hazard a guess for Leicester, Hull, Blackpool, Grimsby. I know the south, south east and west ooookkkkk and not too bad on the big cities.

'What is a bit unreasonable is how little people in the west know about quite how incredibly fast China has developed in the last 40 years. Europe and Northern America have been standing still in comparison. China’s been going through a revolution that is akin to (more pronounced than) the massive changes the Industrial revolution wrought in the West in the 18/19th century.'

Educated people know this, even if just vaguely. The detail of the names of the new megacities, not so much.

Sorry I don't mean 'educated' people, just people who take an interest in current affairs I suppose. Or just listen to radio 4 sometimes.

Another point to note is that the English spelling of many Chinese cities has changed; eg, Suzhou used to be Soochow, so it's not unreasonable to find some of these names unfamiliar.

As a PP said, the Chinese cities have grown exponentially. When I was growing up in Hong Kong in the '70s there was a town of about 30,000 just over the border, called Sham Chun. Now it's a megacity of almost 20 million and its name is Shenzhen.

@Quaggars

OK I have no idea where Thurrock is without googling - is it Sussex way?! OK here's some no googling either

Where's Mytholmroyd

Thurrock is in Essex.

Mytholmroyd is about half an hour from where I live, I've been many times, because you can go on nice country walks from there.

Advanced question - how do you pronounce it? Clue, they got it wrong when they talked about it being flooded on the BBC and in the Houses of Parliament a few years ago.

But the most polluting Chinese cities are not same as the largest cities in the world, and as a PP says, some of them have changed their name along the way.

The pollution is a shame, because when building something from scratch in the 21st Century you've got the chance to do it in an environmentally friendly way from the start.

But then you've got to balance it against providing the necessary facilities for a large city and providing the inhabitants with amenities that those of us in Europe have taken for granted for decades, eg up until 10 years ago, fewer than half of households in China had a fridge and going back 20-30 years ago, almost no-one had one. Now nearly every household in China has a fridge.

www.statista.com/statistics/278747/number-of-refrigerators-per-100-households-in-china/

fewer than half of households in rural China having a fridge 10 years ago that is.

Dalian in China pastabest. One went there to work and said it was grim and industrial (and shudders if you mention the place) and the other went there on holiday!