While he was here, he hosted a town hall meeting with students from the many universities here in Shanghai. We were not able to attend in person, and had to make do with watching the coverage on CNN and the White House's live streaming site.
It's not clear how large a role the Chinese government played in the selection of the students. The questions, for the most part, were "soft lobs," although there was one pointed question about American arms sales to Taiwan, and another from a student wondering whether winning the Nobel Peace Prize will increase the pressure to make progress on long-standing global conflicts.
Chinese national TV did not carry the event live, although Shanghai TV did, and the Xinhua news agency is reported to have run a transcript on its Web site. There was even a rumor that Twitter was unblocked for the duration of the event, although yours truly is not himself a tweeter, so he did not verify this for himself.
The president had, and took, several opportunities to make the case for the freedom of speech that is still lacking in today's China, even after much progress towards openness. Here is one especially elegant statement:
I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me. I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader, because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear. It forces me to examine what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis to see if I'm doing the very best that I could be doing for the people of the United States.From Shanghai, Obama has by now already gone to Beijing, for high-level meetings, and some sight-seeing. He'll be taking tours of many of the same sights I saw last week, including The Forbidden City and The Great Wall.
To close this post, here is another of my Shanghai compositions. (If you've been counting you'll think it's my third, but it's really my fourth. The third was written especially for Miles' birthday last week.) It's another Prélude, and, if anything it is even more animated and intense than its predecessors. It's very short, so don't be surprised if your download starts playing right away. The .m4a version (for iTunes) is here and a .mid file (for QuickTime) is here.
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