Obama Runs into the Great Blogger Wall of China
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 17 2009
It was rather attention grabbing how President Obama pooh-poohed China's so-called Great Firewall, the somewhat holey and ever shifting set of restrictions on what China's people are able to read, hear, watch, and do when the go online. Given the setting -- a townhall in Shanghai organized in part by the Chinese government, Obama was fairly forceful in disagreeing with the basic premise of the wall. How it came up:
"In a country with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers, do you know of the firewall?" the question began, referring to the Chinese government's practice of blocking sites it dislikes, a system of Internet censorship known as the Great Firewall.
And Obama's response:
I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship.
Supporting "non-censorship" is one thing. But there's a point where a restricted approach to technology starts to shade into a oppression of the humans who use that technology, and that's a somewhat dicier spot for the president of a struggling United States to be in while on a grand tour of an ascendant China. To wit, the New York Time's Edward Wong and Helene Cooper report that team Obama had wanted to invited popular Chinese bloggers to the townhall, billed as a meeting of "future Chinese leaders." No dice, said Beijing:
[M]ost of the questions appeared to reflect the careful vetting of the crowd by the Chinese. Beijing vetoed the White House’s attempt to invite a group of popular bloggers, an audience component that administration officials hoped would make the session more authentic, according to several people who were asked to participate in the forum. “I was invited, but then a few days ago I was told we can’t go,” said Michael Anti, a popular blogger who formerly worked as a research assistant at The New York Times and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard last year. “I don’t know why.”