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At nearly 30 hours and 20,000 kilometers away from Beijing, Buenos Aires in Argentina is one of the furthest destinations in the world from the Chinese capital. In a popular 2024 stand-up comedy show, Yan Hexiang, a Chinese actor and crosstalk performer, humorously pointed out that the antipodal point to Beijing is located in the Pampas grasslands of Argentina. However, the distance between Argentina and China doesn't seem so far. Just about 38 kilometers from Ministro Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires, is a largely commercial section about five blocks long in the district of Belgrano, where a towering Chinese-style archway greets you, inscribed with the words "China Town."

The Global Times has visited many "Chinatowns" around the world, including those in Washington, London, and Nagasaki. However, Buenos Aires' "Chinatown" is quite different from the rest. This is immediately apparent upon entry: On a Sunday evening, the streets bustle with activity, restaurants have long wait times, and shops attend to numerous customers. Upon closer inspection, the Global Times noticed that non-Chinese diners and shoppers actually outnumber Chinese ones.

In Chinese, the word "foreigner" is used to refer to anyone who is not Chinese, therefore within the context of Buenos Aires, it is used to refer to non-Chinese locals. In many other "Chinatowns" in the world, Chinese nationals are surrounded by their own, and while the occasional less-than-authentic Chinese cuisine might remind them that "this is not China," the presence of Chinese nationals gives a sense of belonging. In contrast, in Buenos Aires' "Chinatown," surrounded by countless local faces, the "Chinese nationals" seem more like visitors passing through.

Famous Chinese hotpot restaurant brands like Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, Shoo Loong Kan Hot Pot, and Haidilao Hot Pot, commonly found in American "Chinatowns," are conspicuously absent. However, Chinese culture, cuisine, and products are everywhere, and even bubble tea has become a favorite among the youth in the "Chinatown." A capybara in a shop window observes the comings and goings, much like its counterpart in the trendy toy area of Chaoyang district's Joy City mall in Beijing, 20,000 kilometers away.
In addition to Chinese elements, graffiti in the style of Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist Hayao Miyazaki features the Chinese characters for "Visited Here," and posters of South Korean idols appear in shop windows, indicating that this "Chinatown" not only spreads Chinese culture but also incorporates East Asian elements. A few steps further, a street magician interacts with the audience, with a prominent image of "Guanyin" on the wall behind him, as if everything before us is being witnessed by the bodhisattva.
Why are there so many "foreigners" in Buenos Aires' "Chinatown"? Locals provided various answers. Most people's first response was that "Chinatown" is an important social media hotspot in Buenos Aires. If you plan a day trip to the city, this is a must-visit location. "You visited on the last day of a long weekend, so of course, there were many people shopping and dining; people love going to Chinatown," a local Chinese national told the Global Times.

Another local explained that unlike many other "Chinatowns," Buenos Aires' "Chinatown" has a significant number of Chinese residents, but it is not the main gathering place for the local Chinese community. With its trendy atmosphere, it naturally attracts a lot of young people, making the "foreigners" seem particularly popular.

What is it that attracts so many "foreigners" to this "Chinatown"? "Chinese cuisine" topped the list of mentions, with Chinese products and culture also frequently cited among those interviewed by the Global Times. "Yufu" is a relatively authentic Cantonese restaurant in Buenos Aires' "Chinatown," where Chinese food is on the pricier side compared to local dining options. Yet even at 2:10 pm on Sunday, the restaurant was still packed, and the number of Chinese diners was visibly less than half of all patrons.

"Exquisite, compact, and easy to explore," said Nora, director of a research company in Buenos Aires, when asked about the "Chinatown". She added, "I love the dim sum in 'Chinatown'; I enjoy the exotic atmosphere there. The shop owners are very friendly, and the products are diverse; you can find many things you want in one store."

Liu Jialong, a 19-year-old local of Chinese descent, told the Global Times that "Buenos Aires also has a 'Koreantown,' which is only one street and much smaller than 'Chinatown.' It used to be very popular, but its popularity has declined. In contrast, 'Chinatown' is booming now."

If China were not becoming stronger and developing so rapidly, would people be increasingly interested in China? he asked.

On the diplomatic front, the Milei administration made some comments about China that were deemed newsworthy by some Western media outlets before taking office. However, Argentines, including scholars and businesspeople, that the Global Times reporter met here during the trip place great importance on China-Argentina relations. China is Latin America's second-largest trading partner and holds the top position in several countries. In a recent survey released by the Global Times Institute (GTI), in collaboration with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the China-Latin America Education and Culture Center, on the "China-LAC mutual perception" conducted in both regions found that the most prominent impression left by China on Latin Americans was "technology." When asked to fill in keywords that represent their primary impressions of China, a Gen Z respondent from Argentina mentioned "DeepSeek."
Of all those interviewed by the Global Times, Wu Ditai, a young Argentine scholar who studied at Peking University, was the most knowledgeable about China. Watching him mimic the distinct drawl common among Beijing's taxi drivers was as impressive as it was comedic.

"It's not just 'Chinatown'; if you look deeper, Argentines are very curious about China. They want to know why China is developing so quickly and what experiences Argentina can learn from," Wu Ditai said. He has plans to return to China soon and hopes to travel across all provinces to gain a deeper understanding of the country.

Of course, the reality is that many Argentines do not have a sufficient understanding of China. Most of their information comes from the media, especially Western media sources and social media.

An Argentine journalist told the Global Times that while there is considerable coverage of China in local media, the current lack of understanding among Argentines about China is unlikely to change in the short term.

"'China Travel' is a trending topic now, and Argentina has visa-free access. The real China is right there, and everyone is welcomed to learn about it," the Global Times told Wu Ditai.

One million deaths. That is now roughly the toll of COVID-19 in the United States. And that official milestone is almost certainly an undercount. The World Health Organization’s data suggest that this country hit a million deaths early in the year.

Whatever the precise dates and numbers, the crisis is enormous. The disease has taken the lives of more than 6 million people worldwide. Yet our minds cannot grasp such large numbers. Instead, as we go further out on a mental number line, our intuitive understanding of quantities, or number sense, gets fuzzier. Numbers simply start to feel big. Consequently, people’s emotions do not grow stronger as crises escalate. “The more who die, the less we care,” psychologists Paul Slovic and Daniel Västfjäll wrote in 2014.
But even as our brains struggle to grasp big numbers, the modern world is awash in such figures. Demographic information, funding for infrastructure and schools, taxes and national deficits are all calculated in the millions, billions and even trillions. So, too, are the human and financial losses from global crises, including the pandemic, war, famines and climate change. We clearly have a need to conceptualize big numbers. Unfortunately, the slow drumbeat of evolution means our brains have yet to catch up with the times.

Our brains think 5 or 6 is big.
Numbers start to feel big surprisingly fast, says educational neuroscientist Lindsey Hasak of Stanford University. “The brain seems to consider anything larger than five a large number.”

Other scientists peg that value at four. Regardless of the precise pivot from small to big, researchers agree that humans, along with fish, birds, nonhuman primates and other species, do remarkably well at identifying really, really small quantities. That’s because there’s no counting involved. Instead, we and other species quickly recognize these minute quantities through a process called “subitizing” — that is, we look and we immediately see how many.

“You see one apple, you see three apples, you would never mistake that. Many species can do this,” says cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez of the University of California, San Diego.

When the numbers exceed subitizing range — about four or five for humans in most cultures — species across the biological spectrum can still compare approximate quantities, says cognitive scientist Tyler Marghetis of the University of California, Merced.

Imagine a hungry fish eyeing two clumps of similarly sized algae. Because both of those options will make “awesome feasts,” Marghetis says, the fish doesn’t need to waste limited cognitive resources to differentiate between them. But now imagine that one clump contains 900 leaves and the other 1,200 leaves. “It would make evolutionary sense for the fish to try to make that approximate comparison,” Marghetis says.
Scientists call this fuzzy quantification ability an “approximate number sense.” Having the wherewithal to estimate and compare quantities gives animals a survival edge beyond just finding food, researchers wrote in a 2021 review in the Journal of Experimental Biology. For example, when fish find themselves in unfamiliar environments, they consistently join the larger of two schools of fish.

The approximate number system falls short, however, when the quantities being compared are relatively similar, relatively large or both. Comparing two piles, one with five coins and the other with nine coins, is easy. But scale those piles up to 900,005 coins and 900,009 coins, and the task becomes impossible. The same goes for when the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 goes from 999,995 to 999,999.

We can improve our number sense — to a point.
The bridge between fuzzy approximation and precision math appears to be language, Núñez says.

Because the ability to approximate numbers is universal, every known language has words and phrases to describe inexact quantities, such as a lot, a little and a gazillion. “For example, if a boy is said to have a ‘few’ oranges and a girl ‘many’ oranges, a safe inference — without the need of exact calculations — is that the girl has more oranges than the boy,” Núñez writes in the June 1, 2017 Trends in Cognitive Science.

And most cultures have symbols or words for values in the subitizing range, but not necessarily beyond that point, Núñez says. For instance, across 193 languages in hunting and gathering communities, just 8 percent of Australian languages and 39 percent of African languages have symbols or words beyond five, researchers reported in the 2012 Linguistic Typology.
The origin of counting beyond subitizing range, and the complex math that follows, such as algebra and calculus, remains unclear. Núñez and others suspect that cultural practices and preoccupations, such as keeping track of agricultural products and raw materials for trade, gave rise to more complex numerical abilities. As math abilities developed, people became adept at conceptualizing numbers up to 1,000 due to lived experience, says cognitive scientist David Landy. Those experiences could include getting older, traveling long distances or counting large quantities of money.

Regular experiences, however, rarely hit the really big number range, says Landy, a senior data scientist at Netflix in San Francisco. Most people, he says, “get no experience like that for a million.”

Numbers that exceed our experience perplex us.
When big numbers exceed our lived experiences, or move into the abstract, our minds struggle to cope. For instance, with number sense and language so deeply intertwined, those seemingly benign commas in big numbers and linguistic transitions from thousands to millions or millions to billions, can trip us up in surprising ways.

When Landy and his team ask participants, often undergraduates or adults recruited online, to place numbers along a number line, they find that people are very accurate at placing numbers between 1 and 1,000. They also perform well from 1 million to 900 million. But when they change the number line endpoints to, say, 1,000 and 1 billion, people struggle at the 1 million point, Landy and colleagues reported in the March 2017 Cognitive Science.

“Half the people are putting 1 million closer to 500 million than 1,000,” Landy says. “They just don’t know how big a million is.”
Landy believes that as people transition from their lived experiences in the thousands to the more abstract world of 1 million, they reset their mental number lines. In other words, 1 million feels akin to one, 2 million to two and so on.

Changing our notations might prevent that reset, Landy says. “You might be better off writing ‘a thousand thousand’ than ‘1 million’ because that’s easier to compare to 900,000.” The British used to do this with what people in the U.S. now call a trillion, which they called a million million.

Without comprehension, extreme numbers foster apathy.
Our inability to grasp big numbers means that stories featuring a single victim, often a child, are more likely to grab our attention than a massive crisis — a phenomenon known as the identifiable victim effect.

For instance, on September 2, 2015, Aylan Kurdi, a 2-year-old refugee of the Syrian Civil War, was on a boat with his family crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Conservative estimates at the time put the war’s death toll at around 250,000 people. Kurdi’s family was trying to escape, but when their overcrowded boat capsized, the boy drowned, along with his brother and mother. The next day a picture of the infant lying dead on a Turkish beach hit the front pages of newspapers around the world.

No death up until that point had elicited public outcry. That photograph of a single innocent victim, however, proved a catalyst for action. Charitable contributions to the Swedish Red Cross, which had created a fund for Syrian refugees in August 2015, skyrocketed. In the week leading up to the photo’s appearance, daily donations averaged 30,000 Swedish krona, or roughly $3,000 today; in the week after the photo appeared, daily donations averaged 2 million Swedish krona, or roughly $198,500. Paul Slovic, of the University of Oregon, Eugene, Daniel Västfjäll, of Linköping University, Sweden, and colleagues reported those results in 2017 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Earlier research shows that charitable giving, essentially a proxy for compassion, decreases even when the number of victims goes from one to two. The flip side, however, is that psychologists and others can use humans’ tendency to latch onto iconic victims to reframe large tragedies, says Deborah Small, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some research suggests that this power of one need not focus on a single individual. For instance, when people were asked to make hypothetical donations to save 200,000 birds or a flock of 200,000 birds, people gave more money to the flock than the individual birds, researchers reported in the 2011 E-European Advances in Consumer Research.

Framing the current tragedy in terms of a single unit likewise makes sense, Västfjäll says. Many people react differently, he says, to hearing ‘1 million U.S. citizens dead of COVID’ vs. ‘1 million people, roughly the equivalent of the entire city of San José, Calif., have died from COVID.’

Milestones do still matter, even if we can’t feel them.
Kurdi’s photo sparked an outpouring of empathy. But six weeks after it was published, donations had dropped to prephoto levels — what Västfjäll calls “the half-life of empathy.”

That fade to apathy over time exemplifies a phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation, or humans’ ability to eventually adjust to any situation, no matter how dire. We see this adaptation with the pandemic, Small says. A virus that seemed terrifying in March 2020 now exists in the background. In the United States, masks have come off and people are again going out to dinner and attending large social events (SN: 5/17/22).

One of the things that can penetrate this apathy, however, is humans’ tendency to latch onto milestones — like 1 million dead from COVID-19, Landy says. “We have lots of experience with small quantities carrying emotional impact. They are meaningful in our lives. But in order to think about big numbers, we have to go to a more milestone frame of mind.” That’s because our minds have not caught up to this moment in time where big numbers are everywhere.

And even if we cannot feel that 1 million milestone, or mourn the more than 6 million dead worldwide, the fact that we even have the language for numbers beyond just 4 or 5 is a feat of human imagination, Marghetis says. “Maybe we are not having an emotional response to [that number], but at least we can call it out. That’s an amazing power that language gives us.”