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Comment by espeed | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in the West knows MIT. That's a clue the Reuters headline target audience is in the East.

You overestimate the knowledge of MIT in Europe. I worked there and had to explain it to a small but not negligible fraction of my German friends.

They know MIT in China too. They don't read Reuters much though.

I used to live there and they don't really know MIT in China. I'd say only among the academics. Certainly not a household name.

Are you sure? Because there’s a bus load of fascinated Chinese tourists clamoring to look at MIT every other hour.

China has many people: a large number of tourists for Cambridge MA, but only a few percent of Chinese citizens knowing about MIT are compatible facts.

I live in South Africa. One of my local malls has a busload of Chinese tourists arriving not hourly but possibly daily. Not a special mall.

China is so big that even if a tiny percentage have any interest in you, you'll think it's a heck of a lot. MIT can be a non-household name and still attract hundreds of thousands.

Yea they used to say for startups that any number of users for your free social app considered significant in Silicon Valley, you’d have to multiply that by 10x (paraphrasing) for the Chinese market.

I used to live in China too, and I'd certainly say it's known among the university educated.

Name dropping is a big thing in China. "Oh, my son went to Beijing University/Harvard/etc".

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