ChinaGeeks will be more or less dormant for the next two weeks as I will be leading a group of students from my school on an exchange program to Wuxi. I’m not bringing a laptop, as I don’t anticipate having any time to be on the internet anyway.
Feel free to use this thread as an open forum for discussion on anything. Your thoughts on Obama’s town meeting in Shanghai would be a good start.
See you in a couple weeks. Have a good Thanksgiving, those of you who celebrate it.
Apparently Xinhua carried a running transcript of the town hall meeting speech and questions, which included Obama’s remarks on internet freedom, and human rights in general, but it seems to have disappeared. You can still find a transcript on the White House website. Obviously politically sensitive aspects of the meeting aren’t going to resurface anywhere on the Chinese official media.
It was good that the ‘firewall’ came up, though I was surprised only Twitter was singled out for mention.
Here’s a link to the transcript:
http://www.examiner.com/x-15615-Asia-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m11d16-Full-transcript-of-Obamas-town-hall-meeting-with-Shanghai-students
James Fallows also makes a good point that at times, his inexperience speaking to non-native English speaking audiences showed through.
Overall, though, I thought he was bold in stressing things like human rights and internet freedom. I also thought it was clever the way he answered the question about cross-straits relations by saying that he hopes cross-straits relations improve and supports the one-China policy, but never mentioned which he thinks is the legitimate one-China. I think it was rather obvious that he just ignored the bit about weapon sales entirely, though.
BBC doesn’t seem too happy with the way the town hall was portrayed in the media in China:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8363669.stm
There’s also a video available, where one can observe the strong accent of the American ambassador: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/11/16/full-video-and-photos-presidents-town-hall-shanghai
Good stuff! In other news, leading a group of high school kids around China is pretty damn tiring…