Fallows on that "Great Firewall" Question
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, December 2 2009
The Atlantic's Jim Fallows has been parsing Obama's recent Asia trip from every angle. Fallows has taken a pathologist's interest in understanding how American media coverage of the swing that painted it as a series of empty gestures so differed from perspectives in China. Take Obama's comments on the Great Firewall, that cobbled together system of Internet censorship that dictates the nature of a filtered, nationalistic Internet that all but the most determined Chinese experience. Obama's rebuke of China's online censorship may have seemed timid at the time, suggests Fallows. ("I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information...") But what more could an American president have said while in China, as a guest of the Chinese government? The American press, he suggests, totally missed that his comments -- and the fact that the question about the Great Firewall was raised at all -- was really fairly momentous. Fallows:
We All Know that the Shanghai town hall was an embarrassment, because the audience was packed with young Communist Party stalwarts who could be depended on to ask anodyne questions. ("What's the best step toward a Nobel Prize?" etc.) But remember the moment when Obama turned to Ambassador Jon Huntsman and said more or less, "Jon, did any questions come in via the internet?" I now have heard from enough different informed sources to be comfortable saying that the Chinese government did not know this was coming, and that the ensuing discussion about the Great Firewall was not at all according to their script. Jeremy Goldkorn adds a note about that question -- whose answer, as I mentioned earlier, has the potential to resonate within China. Goldkorn says:
"The Great FireWall question at the Shanghai town hall came directly from the blogger briefing arranged by the Embassy and consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou. "I attended the briefing and live tweeted it. The bloggers included Anti and Bei Feng, two of the loudest voices calling for open media in China at the moment, but also Rao Jin from AntiCNN.com. The most common question, asked several times by different bloggers, was if Obama knew about the Great FireWall and if he would do something about it."
One added note, and one that might actually be important: you could make the argument that what Obama's new media team and White House have done with the Internet stateside was really what laid the groundwork for a provocative Great Firewall question during this China trip that came in "via the Internet," to borrow Amb. Hunstman's phrase. By holding domestic events like "Open for Questions" and other interactions with Obama where he was responsive to comments and questions that came in for him online, as well as blogger briefing calls like the one held by the White House last night after Obama's big Afghanistan speech, we've created an expectation that the American President engages with what's happening online, whether he's at home or abroad. That that's just how these things work these days. Internet-enabled townhalls are neat and nifty in the United States, sure. But they might in fact be game changing in settings, like China, where tradition and diplomatic protocol don't exactly invite an open exchange.