China Is Here, Mr. Obama

10:31 am, 11/16/09

Obama in Shanghai:

President Barack Obama gave China a pointed, unexpected nudge to stop censoring the Internet access of its own people, offering an animated defense of the tool that helped him win the White House - and telling his tightly controlled hosts not to be wary of a little criticism.

"I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable," Obama said Monday in a town hall with students during his first-ever trip to China. "They can begin to think for themselves."

That's certainly a polite way of addressing it, since that is precisely why China censors the internet: to avoid being held accountable and to prevent people from thinking for themselves. Indeed, Obama's call to end censorship will, itself, be censored.

In fact, that's already how China handles public discourse on internet censorship, even outside of China, thanks to the assistance of helpful United Nations staffers.

The day before Obama spoke out on Internet censorship, officials from the United Nations were reportedly doing their best to support the Chinese position. On Sunday, Open Net Initiative, an anti-censorship group, held a reception as part of the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The reception was interrupted when IGF security officials entered the event and demanded that a poster mentioning the Great Firewall of China be removed. When event organizers refused, the UN officials removed the poster themselves.

The poster in question was advertising a new book called Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, which was being introduced at the reception. One organizer said he planned to file a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Commission over the dispute.

It's a nice sentiment and, unlike many of Obama's other foreign encounters, not a complete blunder (it took the President only a month or two to so inflame the British press that on both the left and the right there was talk of "the end of the special relationship", and last month he managed to find himself attacked by French President Sarkozy as an appeaser, an irony lost on no one), but Obama may as well be in 1938 Berlin talking about how free speech and a free press will help make Germany more tolerant of ethnic minorities.

Update: Of course.

President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.