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Q: What do mainland Chinese think of ancient Western philosophers?
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, etc.; what do they think of those men and their ideas? Are they even aware of them?
I've never met a Chinese person that knows world history, or probably the world. I think they only watch movies.
They actually have copied a lot from western philosophy. They stole Aesop's fables outright.
The few people in China I met who know a bit about them were educated abroad. They appreciated the early ideas that led to the scientific method.
For sake of demonstrastion let me reverse your question - can you tell me if you know the difference between for instance Mencius (Meng Zi) and Lu Jiu Yuan or Wang Yang Ming teaching?
And can you tell me how many forigners do know at least their names?
What I want to say that such knowledge can be very cultural and education dependent.
Even in Europe many people are not really able to explain the difference between by you mentioned three philosophers teaching despite of knowing their names (one would then ask why should they then know these names but that is a different topic).
On top of that education does not necessarily mean knowledge of the foreign language - look at majority of English speaking people - they cannot speak any other language except of English but many have great education and vast knowledge. Same applies for China. What I want to say by this is that unless you are superfluent in Mandarin (and I am of the opinion that normal conversional fluency is for such topics not sufficient) so you may not get the chance to talk to people who has this type of education.
99% of Chinese know nothing about western philosophers. But 100% of Chinese know the top 3 Chinese philosophers.
