
Apparently all the publicity surrounding Tony Stark has led the Chinese to believe he is real.
Little-known Chinese smartphone maker TCL has enlisted a powerful ally to help its nascent push into global markets: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. The firm said that its mobile handsets, cloud technology and smart TVs will feature in the forthcoming Iron Man 3, the first co-production between Hollywood and a Chinese studio. …
Whose IS that man? Fabulously wealthy and charismatic, somehow he finds enough time in between bedding beautiful women to tinker in his marvellously equipped workshop, the envy of all men who meet him... it can only be a Reg journalist!
Hmmm, I wonder what fizzy pop he drinks, and what car he drives? I want to drink that and drive like he does!
It certainly is true that if you look at the Iron Man comic book, in the beginning Tony Stark got his suit, and the wound that led to him requiring its chest plate as an early version of the pacemaker, in the jungles of Vietnam; he had been fighting Russian spies for ages - and in a relatively recent comic, from the 1980s, he expressed his distaste for the Chinese totalitarian regime when circumstances pressed him to make a visit to that country (he had the suit project a hologram of a flunky to give the impression that Iron Man didn't have a secret identity, but was just a name used by whichever Stark security guard was wearing it at the time).
So, yes, Iron Man is an odd representative for a Mainland Chinese product. Taiwanese or South Korean firms, though, would have done nicely.