My family and friends are all university educated as well; a combination of teachers, physicists and an artist (holding multiple degrees, that damn oddball). I

My family and friends are all university educated as well; a combination of teachers, physicists and an artist (holding multiple degrees, that damn oddball). I am myself not university educated. Started working early instead, which paid off in my case. All of "us" have visited the US at least once. I am excluding the older generation from the mix, but they would generally know even less about the US. That information should give you an idea of what kind of person I am observing when I make the claims about the knowledge of a "normal" Scandinavian. I am of course not claiming that no Scandinavian knows more than this. From the US, we have media coverage of the presidential elections, but apart from the commentator track while votes are being counted, they only really talk about the candidates, never the country itself. Other than that, we have the usual bloopers reel that is US politics, but "Trump does XYZ" doesn't tell you much about the internal dynamics of the country either. On the Chinese side, I don't actually recall seeing that much in local media, but we would hear if something drastic happened... I guess. Now that I think about it, I don't even think local media had coverage of the huge protests in Hong Kong when mainland started changing the rules, but I may be wrong. Between Brexit, Syrian emigrants, internal Scandinavian dynamics, and the rest of the Europe, we have plenty of politics to satisfy our relatively small thirst for political drama. As for its popularity, US is basically laughing stock these days, although progressively moving into the "oh god, they're pulling us down with them, aren't they? fuck" area. There's a small number of people that think the grass is greener on the other side, but they're the minority by far. As for China, people know Tibet, and they know the Dalai Lama, but they won't know that China is effectively terrorising Tibet. They certainly won't know anything about its special status as an autonomous region in China, and I seriously doubt that they know anything about Xinjiang. My spouse is Chinese, and I'm therefore far from an outsider and kept relatively well updated on current news from Shanghai and HKSAR, and even I know nothing about Xinjiang. It's not all blank, though. Some may remember what happened in Tiananmen Square, even if they only remember the tank. As a closing shower thought: Maybe some of the reason that we see US as one thing comes from how we're used to much more drastic cultural differences? If I drive for an hour, I'm not simply crossing a state border, but I'm in an entirely different country with entirely different culture and language, and depending on the direction I drove in, it doesn't even have to be in EU. This is much more drastic than the differences between American states. Consider the differences between Italy and Poland, vs. Texas and Alabama (similar distance). While not necessarily an explanation, this might be part of why the US seems like one blob to us.