Obama in China

Yesterday, I bought a copy of Barack's autobiography, Dreams of My Father, for about three bucks. There may be something wrong with buying an illegal copy of the president's book, but I couldn't afford the 20 dollar real imported version. I haven't started reading the book, but it looks like someone just scanned it into a computer page-by-page and then formatted it poorly and printed it out on thin paper using pretty weak ink. It's readable. I imagine not much of my 3 bucks will make it back to the poor bastard who stood over a scanner for hours digitizing the thing.

Barack never really got much love from the Chinese, who would prefer a stable, predictable president (Mao said always go with the Republicans), rather than an unknown liberal who might grill them over human rights. On top of this, China remained one of the few countries where Bush's approval rating was higher than America (in fact it was over 50% positive). A country that's okay with Bush couldn't be too excited about a new president talking about 'change.'

One of the best things that's happened since Barack's election is my ability to deal with the "American" question here. I've heard many Chinese say: "you don't look American." More than a dozen have thought I look Iranian. Now I just shoot back, "What's an American look like, anyway? Does our president look American?" Another wonderful thing is debunking decades of anti-American propaganda. Since 1949, the CCP has portrayed America as a horribly segregated, racist country where blacks are oppressed and have no hope. We still have a long way to go before racism fades and people stop making juvenile movies like "Crash" and start trying to get at the roots of black/white inequality. But whenever a Chinese person asks (as happened to me just yesterday during a failed haircut attempt), "Aren't black people all second-class citizens over there?", it's great to be able to respond, "Is our president a second-class citizen?"

Excitement over Barack still hasn't picked up, and while I don't agree with many of his policies, and he's obviously waffling on the banks, the utter lack of enthusiasm for such an historic election has been somewhat disconcerting. To combat the malaise, I bought two Obama/Hope T-shirts made in Guangzhou and I've been wearing them around. Chinese people always comment on it and often I get a chance to proselytize. Barack fever may never sweep China, but after seeing his address to the Iranians, I believe that a similar PR strategy could work incredibly well here too. A couple weeks ago, Wen Jiabao, the Premier, addressed netizens in what was an obviously coordinated series of silly pre-picked questions (how much do you sleep everday?). Still the event was a huge success. If Barack wants to get on the Chinese people's good side (and considering their fear of the dollar's stability, he should), a similar youtube-conversation, although freer than Wen's, could go a long way. Now we just have to wait for youtube to be unblocked.