Obama

It was a town hall, but this time Barack Obama was not in Iowa or New Hampshire. There were no hay bales, no bunting and no activists with questions about universal health care, clean coal or legalizing marijuana. This forum, after all, was being held in a nation controlled by the Communist Party.

Instead of being greeted by voters mulling their options, Obama on Monday met with several hundred well-dressed, attentive and relentlessly on-message students, handpicked by Chinese authorities for the occasion. They listened attentively, nodding in agreement at some of his answers and laughing at his jokes. Most of their questions were something less than challenging. "What measures will you take to deepen this close relationship between cities of the United States and China?" asked the first questioner, a young woman whom Obama picked randomly from the crowd. "What's the main reason that you were honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace?" asked another. A third followed up on the Nobel Prize line of inquiry. "What's your university/college education that brings you to get such kind of prizes?"
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It was the first time a U.S. President had ever hosted a town hall in the Communist Party–controlled state, and the terms of the event were carefully negotiated between diplomats from both countries. The selection of the audience aside, Chinese authorities also picked three questions that had been submitted over the Internet — including one that was sharply critical of U.S. support for the Taiwanese military. U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman read an additional question, which the White House said had been randomly selected from a group of online submissions acquired by the U.S. government.

Huntsman's question, the most controversial of the night, asked about the "great firewall" that prevents open access to the Internet in China, where many websites are blocked by government censors. "I'm a big supporter of noncensorship," Obama said in a section of the event that was described on the website of Xinhua, the state-run news agency. "This is part of the tradition of the United States."
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But the Obama Administration's initial hopes for widespread Chinese broadcast of the event were not, in the end, realized. Though the event was covered on Shanghai television, elsewhere in the country the broadcast networks did not carry the feed. The White House website streamed the video, but it was not immediately apparent that any of the major Chinese Web portals had done the same. A TIME reporter tried to find Chinese residents watching the event in Beijing Internet cafés, but a survey of a half-dozen establishments found no one watching. Customers were playing online games instead.

The frustrations over distribution aside, Obama's message of the importance of communication and mutual respect did seem to strike a chord with the audience at the event. Obama received multiple rounds of applause, and when he spoke of the importance of education for women, many of the young ladies in the audience could be seen nodding their heads in approval.
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In an address before taking questions, Obama mentioned the long struggle in the U.S. for equal rights among its citizens, invoking Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson to suggest parallels for increased individual rights in China. "We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation," Obama said. "These freedoms of expression and worship — of access to information and political participation — we believe are universal rights."
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At the end of the event, Obama invited the audience to travel to the U.S. "I think you will find that the American people feel very warmly toward the people of China," Obama said. And then he stepped off the stage, just like in Iowa and New Hampshire, and began shaking hands with the starstruck crowd.

— With reporting by Austin Ramzy and Chengcheng Jiang / Beijing



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Beijing - In the end, it was a display of diplomatic guile by the US Ambassador to China that rescued President Obama's "town hall meeting" with Chinese students on Monday.

After a string of softball questions from officially selected students, Ambassador Jon Huntsman read out a question that someone had sent in to the US Embassy website, asking bluntly what the president thought of Internet censorship in China.

Taking advantage of this end-run around Chinese government efforts to control all aspects of the supposedly unscripted event, Mr. Obama stressed that he had "always been a strong supporter of open Internet use" and "a big supporter of non-censorship."

His response – faithfully transcribed onto the website of the official state news agency, Xinhua – was immediately posted prominently on all four major Chinese web portals, drawing delighted reactions from some readers.

"An open country, a great president and an immortal assertion; we still have a long way to go" wrote one netizen signing himself Jiangzhongshan on Sohu.com.

It was never going to be easy in China, where officials prize predictability, to organize the sort of spontaneous discussion on live TV that Obama has made part of his political repertoire.

The White House had envisioned an unmoderated dialogue between the president and some 1,500 students asking whatever they wanted, broadcast on national television here. After a fortnight of tortured negotiations with Beijing, the US settled for a scaled-down version involving about 400 Chinese students and questions from the Internet, broadcast only on local Shanghai TV, a Hong Kong station, and on the Web.

But only determined viewers would have succeeded in following the event. Whitehouse.gov, which live streamed the meeting, was unreliable in Beijing, and though the White House Facebook page also carried it, Facebook is blocked in China, along with other social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube.

It did not exactly allow the US president to reach out directly and touch the Chinese people's hearts, but the official Xinhua news agency carried a real-time transcript of the proceedings on its website.

Xinhua also did not flinch from the pointed references to freedom that Obama made in his introductory remarks. "These freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation, we believe are universal rights," the president said, referring to four rights curtailed in China.

The questions, though, asked by members of the audience or sent in to a government website, did not pose much of a challenge to Obama – or to Chinese censors. Topics included Obama's hometown, Chicago, his Nobel Prize, US policy in Afghanistan, and what he hopes to achieve on his current visit to China.

The students attending had clearly been vetted and their questions approved by the Chinese authorities. Two of the four questions from the audience came from student officers of the Communist Youth League, it transpired later.

Still, Obama's support for freedom of expression – even if it came in response to a planted question – inspired one viewer.

"I shall not forget this morning" Twittered @philfenghan. "I heard, on my shaky internet connection, a question about our own freedom which only a foreign leader can discuss."