Another Clue to How China Managed Obama's Visit

By SHARON LaFRANIERE | The New York Times
December 05, 2009

In case President Obama is curious, some students who went to his town hall meeting in Shanghai last month wonder how he gets along with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, given their bruising battle for the presidency.

They didn't ask him. They weren't allowed.

"This is a sensitive question," Ni Shixiong, one of the Chinese organizers of the event, said in an interview published in the new edition of Southern People Weekly. "It's better not to ask things related to U.S. politics."

The interview was the latest indication of efforts by Chinese authorities to stage-manage Mr. Obama's visit here and the shaping of his public image in China.

They had rejected a White House request to nationally broadcast the town hall meeting, and one student reported that she and other participants had undergone an afternoon of training for the session.

The town hall event had been Mr. Obama's one chance to interact with ordinary Chinese on his three-day trip.

The White House said the president had wanted an open discussion with no screening of questions -- allowing for the American-style mix of incisive and ill-informed queries from the public.

There was precedent for a lively interaction, even if the Chinese vetted the questions beforehand.

When President Bill Clinton visited Peking University in Beijing in 1998, students challenged him about arms sales to Taiwan and whether the United States sought to contain China geopolitically.

Some sparks also flew during President George W. Bush's question-and-answer session with Tsinghua University students in Beijing in 2002.

But Mr. Ni, a professor at Fudan University and a specialist on American-China relations, faulted the Beijing students for having asked "offensive questions."

Organizers of the Shanghai event felt "there was no need to make both sides embarrassed and stop our guests in their tracks," he said.

He said they also had not wanted to upstage events on Mr. Obama's next stop, Beijing.

There, Mr. Obama had two dinners with President Hu Jintao. He and Mr. Hu wound up by reading prepared statements to reporters. They took no questions.

"The climax was in Beijing," Mr. Ni said. "We could not overshadow what really counted."

Still, he said the town hall showed that China had loosened control over such events.

Although guidelines were set and some questions were rejected, he said, the students themselves drafted the queries and were not required to rehearse.

He contrasted the session with a visit that Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli prime minister, made to his classroom at Fudan University in 1993.

About 200 students were picked to attend, but 180 of them were ordered to remain silent, he said.

The 20 people who were allowed to ask questions were handed text that had been prepared for them. "They had to be able to recite the questions word for word," Mr. Ni said.

The plan went awry, he said, when Mr. Rabin began the session by posing a question of his own. No one answered. "It was very embarrassing," Mr. Ni recalled.

Mr. Ni said he repeated the question aloud and winked at his students, hoping to signal that someone should respond.

Finally one student raised his hand. But instead of answering the prime minister's question, he recited his own.

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