My daughter [in Argentina] knows more about Halloween than about the local Independence Day. Every kids show in Netflix has a special episode about Halloween.

There are companies in germany that sell red plastic cups in case you wish to throw an "American" theme party.

That’s great; we also have “Oktoberfests” and drink from big mugs. What does that mean; we know German politics or at least royal traditions?

That means that, beyond all the movies, although germans have been watching Magnum, The Denver Clan, The Duke Brothers, etc. I doubt their american counterparts have been watching DSDS, Die Rosenheim-Cops, GZSZ, usw.

They're not buying red cups because they've heard about them, or have seen them on product tie-ins; they buy them because the american media they consume includes them, and red plastic drinking cups stand out as something peculiarly american.

This not an apt comparison. Else we could say American kids know more about Anime than about our Independence Day. Kids like kid things.

I doubt people in the Podunks of interior China have much awareness of what the US is about other than what their official propaganda tells them.

This sounds like an easily testable proposition... (for someone with better hanzi-fu than I?)

EDIT: ok, so I was just on douyin.com (seeded with what deepl told me were "farmer" and "opinion of american people") and there's a fair amount of official line delivered by news commentators, a fair amount of not-the-best-of-the-Old-Country phone footage that's been helpfully subtitled in chinese, and not infrequent tubes of chinese-on-the-street commenting about the US or interviews in the US, eg https://www.douyin.com/video/7253009716257836347

(the latter two categories are easy to spot because they've been subtitled in english as well as chinese, but I'm most curious about if the people standing in front of tractors while speaking their bit are ranting as their stateside counterparts often seem to be?)

Anyone with better language skills have a better site, or better query?

EDIT2: finally found the deep link: just click X to dismiss the QR code popup; no idea what that may be...