This past week President Obama came to Asia and visited Singapore, Japan, China and South Korea. He spent four days in China which included trips to Shanghai and Beijing. In Shanghai he spent time speaking in a town hall style meeting with university students where he talked about human rights (especially the treatment of Tibetans and the Uighur people in Xinjiang province) and censorship (the Chinese do not have access to many internet sites including ones like Twitter, Facebook and Blogger). I like what Daniel had to say about this in his blog, "Also speaking of great moments in censorship, Obama is in China and during one of his speeches called on the Chinese government to uncensor the internet, a comment that was promptly censored in all the Chinese sources."

After spending time in Shanghai, Obama traveled to Beijing where he met with Chinese leader Hu Jintao and the two spent time talking about trade, the economy, nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, and the environment among other things. While in Beijing, Obama was also able to visit the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. Most of the news reports that I have listened to or read seem to think that overall the visit went fine and was necessary to maintain positive relations with China, but popular opinion shows that most people think he made little actual progress. Some blame him for focusing too much on similarities and shared interests between the two countries instead of trying to work through some important and central disagreements.

My students were very excited about Obama's visit and spent a few minutes talking about it in class this week. Most said that China would be very welcoming to him while a few said that the jury was still out on the U.S leader and that they would wait and see if they approved of his policies or not. I used Obama's visit as a segue way to talk about racism in China (a touchy subject) which led to an semi-awkward and difficult discussion, but one in which I learned quite a bit. When I asked the students if they could ever envision having a leader who wasn't of Han descent (the huge ethnic majority) the answer was a resounding "never."

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