Balkingpoints.com / Balkers

8 Responses to “ Obama Town Hall in Shanghai ”

1. Australia / mpgiles says:

   17 November, 2009 at 3:27 AM

   I personally find Obamah an inspiring example of common sense. He has a big job ahead of him
2. USA / Roy G says:

   17 November, 2009 at 12:34 PM

   Welcome to B/P mpgiles! Good to see a Balkbacker from Australia.

   Jeff set up this Balk correctly but for some reason the code that embeds the video is trying to redirect back to the Whitehouse website to play it. This video is the full town hall Obama had in Shanghai during our overnight Sunday / your Monday afternoon.

   I’ll try to adjust it next. I have some remarks about the town hall a little later also, he does have a way of inspiring across borders. Which is arguably the most important job, of a U.S. or any nation’s president.

   Meanwhile, here is the direct link;

   http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/11/16/full-video-and-photos-presidents-town-hall-shanghai

   
   updated;
   Segments imbed OK from YouTube. If you hit the triangle button at bottom right corner of the video, it will show across the bottom some links to the other segments posted to YouTube. I’ll see if they get the whole town hall posted as one video, in the next day or two. Bleeping IT dudes at the Whitehouse, have their embed code wrong… ;^)

   Here is a link to the full transcript as well – remarks and questions taken;

   http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-town-hall-meeting-with-future-chinese-leaders

   

   
3. USA / Jeff says:

   18 November, 2009 at 10:10 AM

   The Whitehouse Channel on YouTube put the whole townhall on today and the embedding code works. So it is changed back now to the entire town hall not the segments. He goes for about 15 minutes with an opening statement and then the rest is questions from Chinese students. The Chinese are not fluent in English like is true in many parts of the world, but these students seem to know it without a problem.
4. USA / Roy G says:

   19 November, 2009 at 1:06 AM

   This is an event pioneered by Bill Clinton during his visit to Beijing in 2000. His staff worked the channels hard to get the Chinese government to allow a town hall and have it televised live. There is no doubt however that for both events, the questioners were restricted on their topics.

   At about 4 minutes in, Obama goes right to 2 themes that are bedrock principles of Balkingpoints.com;

   – people are basically more alike than different regardless of nationality or culture

   – free commerce on the back of modern technologies is the ticket to shared prosperity, which is the ticket to global peace & realization of individual rights

   Or universal rights, as Obama called them in his remarks.

   Those who fear the global economy are sighting short IMO. The free-trade model is now the predominant one on the planet and isn’t going away. It has been and will be, the engine for vast new opportunities for citizens of those nations who get onboard.

   The key is harnessing it with proper coordinations and regulations so that the prosperity created is widely spread, and the destructive tendencies of laissez-faire capitalism that we’ve seen at the close of the failed Reagan/Bush Era, are no longer legal.

   If we do that, the global economy can be the biggest enfranchiser in history for worker’s rights and ordinary citizen’s interests. That is because it links us all into the same interdependent system. And we’re able to meet and converse now across borders, superceding in some ways the boundary lines of nations. See the door that could open up for socio-economic progress over the course of this century?

   Paranoids – it’s not about world government. It is about lifting all boats through free, fair and wisely regulated commerce.

   Capitalism is like a nuclear reactor – control the burn and it throws off enormous yield. Fail to control the burn and it melts down.
5. Canada / Pat Morin says:

   19 November, 2009 at 4:24 PM

   There was a story on television a few months ago where an American journalist had gotten access to interview 3 Chinese who were about 20 years old. The same as these students look like they are. Anyway he showed them a picture of the ‘Tankman’ famous photo from the Tianamen uprising in 1989. They had never seen it before.

   They asked the journalist what the context of it was. It was a stunning demonstration of the Chinese government’s ability to whitewash history. I think the story is that the journalist who shot the photos, who might have been British, shot them from his hotel over the square and was able to smuggle them out. So they would have never appeared through the government media inside China.
6. Canada / Pat Morin says:

   19 November, 2009 at 4:43 PM

   Here it is on Wikipedia ***

   Tank Man
   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   “Tank Man” stops the advance of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989 in Beijing. This photo became one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, and an international symbol at the end of the Cold War era. Photo by Jeff Widener (Associated Press).

   Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel, is the nickname of an anonymous man who achieved widespread international recognition as a heroic figure when he was videotaped and photographed during the protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. Several photographs were taken of the man, who stood in front of a column of Chinese Type 59 tanks.

   

   Four photographers managed to capture the event on film and get their pictures published in its aftermath.[1] On June 4, 2009, another photographer released an image of the scene taken from ground level, just feet away.[2]

   One of the most widely reproduced photographs of the event was taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press, from a lower vantage point in the Beijing Hotel, about half a mile (800 meters) away from the scene. Widener was injured and suffering from flu at the time. Though he was concerned that his shots were not good, his image was quickly reproduced all over the world.[1]

   Another version was taken by Stuart Franklin of Magnum Photos from the fifth floor of the Beijing Hotel. His has a wider field of view than Widener’s, showing more tanks further away. He was on the same balcony as Charlie Cole, and smuggled his film of Tank Man in a tea box with a French student.[1]

   Charlie Cole, working for Newsweek and on the same balcony with Stuart Franklin, hid his roll of film containing Tank Man in a Beijing Hotel toilet, sacrificing an unused roll of film and undeveloped images of wounded protesters after PSB raided his room and forced him to sign a confession. Cole was able to retrieve the roll and have it sent to Newsweek.[1] He won a World Press Award for a similar photo.[3] It was featured in Life’s “100 Photographs That Changed the World” in 2003.

   Arthur Tsang Hin Wah of Reuters took several shots, but the one shot of Tank Man climbing the tank was chosen from his batch of photos.[1]

   On June 4, 2009, in connection with the 20th anniversary of the protests, A.P. reporter Terril Jones revealed a photo he took showing the Tank Man from ground level, a different angle than all of the other known photos of the Tank Man. Jones has written that he was not aware of what he had captured until a month later when printing his photos.[2]

   
   “Tank Man”, in the background to the left, prepares to face down the row of oncoming tanks

   Variations of the scene were also recorded by BBC film crews and transmitted across the world. One witness recounts seeing Chinese tanks early on June 4 crushing vehicles and people, just one day before this man took his stand in front of this tank column.[4]

   The still and motion photography of the man standing alone before a line of tanks reached international audiences practically overnight. It headlined hundreds of major newspapers and news magazines and was the lead story on countless news broadcasts around the world.[1] In April 1998, Time included the “Unknown Rebel” in a feature titled Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.

   The incident took place near Tiananmen on Chang’an Avenue, which runs east-west along the south end of the Forbidden City, Beijing, on June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests. The man placed himself alone in the middle of the street as the tanks approached, directly in the path of the armored vehicles. He held two bags, one in each hand. As the tanks came to a stop, the man gestured towards the tanks with his bags. In response, the lead tank attempted to drive around the man, but the man repeatedly stepped into the path of the tank in a show of nonviolent action.[5] After repeatedly attempting to go around rather than crush the man, the lead tank stopped its engines, and the armored vehicles behind it seemed to follow suit. There was a pause for a short period of time with the man and the tanks having reached a quiet, still impasse.

   Having now successfully brought the column to a halt, the man climbed up onto the hull of the buttoned-up lead tank and, after briefly stopping at the driver’s hatch, appeared in video footage of the incident to start calling into various ports in the tank’s turret. He then climbed atop the turret and seemed to have a short conversation with a crew member at the gunner’s hatch. After ending the conversation, the man alighted from the tank. The tank commander briefly emerged from his hatch, and the tanks restarted their engines, ready to continue on. At that point, the man, who was still standing within a meter or two from the side of the lead tank, leapt in front of the vehicle once again and quickly reestablished the man-tank standoff. Video footage shows that two figures in blue attire then pulled the man away and absorbed him into the crowd; the tanks continued on their way.[5] Eyewitness reporter Charlie Cole believes that the man was taken away by secret police and was just one of the many executed in the aftermath of the military crackdown, since the Chinese government was never able to produce him after the photo became public.[1][4]
   [edit] Identity and fate

   Little is publicly known of the man’s identity or that of the commander of the lead tank. Shortly after the incident, the British tabloid the Sunday Express named him as Wang Weilin (王维林), a 19-year-old student[6] who was later charged with “political hooliganism” and “attempting to subvert members of the People’s Liberation Army.”[7] Numerous theories have sprung up as to the man’s identity and current whereabouts.[8]

   There are several conflicting stories about what happened to him after the demonstration. In a speech to the President’s Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn—former deputy special assistant to President Richard Nixon—reported that he was executed 14 days later; other sources say he was executed by firing squad a few months after the Tiananmen Square protests.[5] In Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong writes that the man is still alive and is hiding in mainland China.

   The government of the People’s Republic of China has made few statements about the incident or the people involved. In a 1990 interview with Barbara Walters, then-CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin was asked what became of the man. Jiang first stated (through an interpreter), “I can’t confirm whether this young man you mentioned was arrested or not,” and then replied in English, “I think never killed” [sic].[9] A June 2006 article in the Hong Kong Apple Daily stated that there are rumours that the man is now living in Taiwan.[8]
7. USA / Jeff says:

   20 November, 2009 at 4:17 PM

   Some of the students did have headsets for translation. Some of the questioners had great english, some had more hesitating english. And one behind Obama had her headset off, and was doodling on a paper pad
8. UK / Martin says:

   20 November, 2009 at 6:18 PM

   I’m not certain actually that all of the questions were pre-screened.

   The one submitted online through the American Embassy asking Obama if he knew about the firewall and unfettered usage of Twitter, would not seem to fall in that category. The writer was referring to the wall of filtrations the Chinese authorities have for those connected to their ISP servers. Which they would certainly have full monopoly on. I don’t believe that one could lease any ISP access within China which was not tethered to the government.

   Obama did not answer at all about the firewall, but went instead to a nicely conceived defence of free speech and unfettered internet usage. This would not have been a subject the Chinese authorities would
   have been keen to have asked, nor to have Obama’s answer heard by Chinese youth. One gets the impression there is great potential from this generation to embark on easing those restrictions in decades to come.

   As well it was clear that president Obama was not informed in advance of the questions. He was not prepared for the one pertaining to American arms sales to Taiwan, and generally exhibited numerous pauses to think through his responses. In that sense then they were real questions, which fact was not lost on that audience I am certain.