Did The Chinese Watch Obama's Town Hall?

[babylonsister]

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/did_the_chinese_watch_obamas_town_hall.php

Nov 22 2009, 2:13 pm by Marc Ambinder
Did The Chinese Watch Obama's Town Hall?

snip//


The China gig was tricky, given the practicalities of internet communication in China and the reality of a very sensitive host government. But something seems to have worked: of about 200,000 live stream requests, 120,000 were from China. (67,000 were from the United States.) The number of peak concurrent users suggested that there was no sudden drop-off or bottleneck, which would have suggested a concerted censorship effort by the Chinese government.

The official Xinhua site in China put out a transcript in real time. It was unfiltered at first -- and only later was it updated to remove certain sections, particularly when Ambassador John Huntsman reminded Obama of China's massive Internet firewall.

"...And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged," Mr. Obama said.

The White House later received word from its embassy that its own Chinese government sources reported that the official Xinhua transcript received more than 50,000,000 page views. (Separately, the U.S. Embassy hosted a live chat about the event. generating about 6,400 unique hits from IP addresses in China.)

The numbers aside, U.S. officials are looking at what they call the "long tail" of the town hall meeting. They hope that Chinese students and citizens share the video over peer-to-peer networks.

"Still, it is not an irony that escapes anyone that an American president gave what I consider to be a good answer on Internet freedom at an event in China and the Chinese government had a different message," an administration official said.

[FrenchieCat]

1. That's what happened in Iran with the Cairo Speech......

Good that this President's view is in the long term,
even as we, the people, are into getting our instantaneous groove on!

[Jane Austin]

5. Yeah, especially Tweety, whose show this morning

was all about Obama's "humiliation" in China.

Read Jame Fallows on both Tweety and Chuck Todd completely missing the point with their China coverage.

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/manufactured_failure_4_more.php

[Cha]

2. Thanks, babylonsister..PO got

the "long tail" started and the Dalai Lama thinks he wasn't soft on China.

[ClarkUSA]

3. Does the Pope wear red Gucci loafers? nt

[BlooInBloo]

4. Heh. They've got proxy-browsers and all sorts of other tricks to get word out...

It won't be as widespread as we would like, but nor will it be so bottled up as we fear.

[ellie]

6. I was just over on Balloon Juice

and there was a link to James Fallows from The Atlantic talking about the trip:

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/on_obama_asian_diplo_1.php


It is in several different parts and a really good read.

[Clio the Leo]

7. And they saw the man at his best. NT