Obama walks on eggshells in Shanghai

It was a wet and windy Monday in Shanghai, but for Houston Wu it wasn’t the weather that rendered United States president Barack Obama’s ground-breaking townhall-style interaction with “China’s future leaders” a “colossal damp squib”.

It was, he says, Obama’s “needless, excessive caution” about offending official Chinese sensitivities, which reduced him to “a mere shadow of his inspirational, lyrical self.” 
Everything about the meeting, says Wu, had a “surreal quality” to it: From the fact that the student audience was made up of handpicked Communist Youth League cadres, to their lobbing of ‘softball’ questions at Obama, to Obama’s walking on eggshells so as not to risk offending Chinese leaders…

“There was a big build-up about this event and the White House spent weeks negotiating it,” says Adam Minter, an American journalist in Shanghai, who blogs at shanghaiscrap.com. “But in the end it was a wasted opportunity as Obama didn’t say anything of substance.”  

After a brief opening statement, in which Obama outlined the values that define America (“but are not unique to America”) and spoke of a shared Sino-US destiny, he fielded a clutch of questions - from the assembled students and from online submissions. But the questions - on, for instance, the qualities that helped him win the Nobel prize and whether he intended to visit the Shanghai Expo next year — rarely rose above the pedestrian or challenged Obama’s intellect.

Even the one reasonably substantive question - about China’s internet censorship - had Obama resorting to verbal gymnastics. 

“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship,” said Obama. Although he went on to speak about the merits of free flow of information, that “overly calculated” turn of phrase struck Minter as “particularly awkward” and ineloquent.

“Obama’s performance reminded me of nothing so much as an overly coached American businessman on his first trip to China who is so concerned about what he should or should not say that he forgets what he wanted to say in the first place.” 

However, others, like Beijing-based Chinese-American writer and digital media expert Kaiser Kuo, say that Obama made the most of the “obvious constraints” that apply to such an event in China.  “It was carefully stage-managed from the Chinese side (which is no surprise), but so are political townhall meetings in the US,” he adds.