President Obama's Town Hall from Shanghai was broadcasted by the U.S. State Department using ConnectSolutions Podium.
It was an amazing weekend for us here at ConnectSolutions. We had the privilege of supporting the State Department in President Obama’s historic Town Hall in Shanghai, China with a group of university students. You may have read about the tenuousness of the Town Hall and the American and Chinese governments were negotiating up until the last minute to figure out if and how the event would be run.
In the end the decision was made that the event would go on, but it would not be broadcast on National Chinese TV leaving the internet as the only vehicle through which many Chinese citizens could view the event. (Note: The event was broadcast on local Shanghai TV, providing another venue for residents.) Taking this challenge head on, the State Department enlisted us to help them reach as wide an audience as possible with the event.
On Friday, the Co.Nx team at the State Department opened up an Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro chat room on our QuickConnect Platform where Chinese citizens were encouraged to submit questions for President Obama and share their biggest concerns. What was most clearly articulated in the chat room was an apprehension over the censorship of the internet in China, and a growing movement was revealed. In fact, over 75% of respondents in the chat room cited internet censorship as their greatest concern. They dubbed this the “Great Firewall of China” and they aligned themselves with the 20th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, speaking out against what they perceived to be widespread government censorship of the internet.
This chat room proved to be pivotal, as cited in The New York Times, as it produced the infamous Twitter question asked of President Obama in the Town Hall in which he spoke out in favor of freedom of information and openness on the internet.
The Connect Pro Chat Room where Questions for President Obama were submitted by Chinese Citizens
But our involvement did not end there. Needing a way to get the broadcast out to as many people as possible, the State Department enlisted the use of our ConnectSolutions Podium webcasting product to provide a video feed of the Town Hall to those inside China. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and many universities in China would rely on this feed to host viewing parties where Chinese citizens could congregate and hold discussions after the event was over. Similarly, the event URL was proliferated by influential Chinese bloggers (and some here in the U.S.) to promote viewing by as wide an audience as possible.
The event was able to reach such a large audience in a short time in large part because of Twitter and the rest of the social web.
Facebook was also utilized to get the word out. The Co.Nx program already has over 36,000 fans on the site and created a Facebook Event that was shared with their network.
The Co.Nx program also utilized Facebook and its 36,000+ fans to help spread the word about the event.
We were truly blown away by the number of people who were able to reach the event, especially considering that promotion did not start until the day before due to the uncertainty around if the event was going to happen or not. In the end, we were able to help the State Department connect with 10,000 viewers from 60 countries with the event with our HD Quality stream of the event.
A student from the audience asks a question...
...and President Obama Responds
What’s more is that nearly 70% of this audience was inside China from over 200 cities. And the response to the video quality and overall experience has been something we are very proud of. While this raw number works out to something near 7,000, the actual number of viewers is likely much larger, as the State Department facilitated viewing parties at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and at Universities around the country, and each individual view had the possibility of being consumed by entire households or groups of viewers.
Our event reached nearly 7,000 Chinese sites in over 200 different cities.
I cannot articulate how honored we all were to part of this effort and I wanted to personally thank Mark and Tim at the State Department for the privilege of supporting their efforts. We are continually blown away by how they keep pushing the envelope and taking the State Department’s Co.Nx program to new heights.
If you missed it the first time around, here the Obama Town Hall meeting in China in its entirety:
Watch Town Hall Video
Download Town Hall Video
I watched that live yesterday. I’m in Inner Mongolia China. Thank you very much for this live. God bless you all.
It’s great. Thank you for the live. –From China
I was one of the 7000 audiences from China. I am in Shenyang.Thanks for your good work.
I am in Nanjing. The live is great and fast! Thanks for your good work !
good job! keep telling the truth!
–from shanghai
Congratulations on the success of the technology, but in terms of any real communication with any significant number of Chinese people, the project was an exercise in utter futility. The students in the audience and thus their questions were hand-picked Party members and sympathisers, and 7000 viewers (or even if you multiply by ten) is totally insignificant even if you consider the inflated figure of 350 million Internet users in China let alone the population as a whole. As proved with an earlier supposedly free and open debate broadcast from Shanghai, an edition of the BBC Television ‘Question Time’, the Chinese government ran rings round the producers, largely controlling the conversation, restricting access to it, and fortunate insofar as the current president of the U.S. has an entirely craven approach on human rights and other non-business-related issues so that little of substance was said (as the need to select the ‘Twitter question’ for particular comment amply demonstrates). It’s not the success in creating live Internet feed that the world needs to learn from here, but the almost complete failure of the project to reach its target of communicating directly with the Chinese people.
Hi Peter,
Thank you for contributing your take on the event. Luckly we live in a free society so we are able to have an open discussion on the topic. While I agree with many of your points I also think there are other ways to look at this. I don’t think the event itself can be evaluated in isolation but rather, it should be viewed as part of a larger continuum.
In one model, change is evaluated on a macro level, from the top down. What is the immediate, large scale impact of this event in China? And through that lens, reaching 7,000 does not seem significant. But another way of looking at this issue, as has been put forth by Benedict Anderson, Michael Omi, Howard Winant, and others, is through the lens of micro-level change that happens at the individual level, from the bottom up.
Looking at the event from this perspective provides a very different picture. Every movement needs its flash point, and it seems as though the opening up the Chinese firewall to Twitter & Facebook for this event (and their subsequent re-closing) has not only brought the “Great Firewall” issue onto the global stage, but evidence on Twitter and other sites shows that the specific response to the poll in the Chat Room about internet censorship and the fact that this information was excluded from Chinese language sites has been used as a rallying cry by the movement as a way to articulate their frustrations and bring light to this issue within China to a much broader audience.
For example take a look at this post (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiruan/4111227492/)…in the last comment in the chain, user jiruan writes:
虽然7000人和中国人口相比是极其少数，但这些都是希望的种子 Although the 7000 and the Chinese population is extremely small in comparison, but these are the seeds of hope.
Similarly a Tweet by influential blogger Michael Anti has started to make the rounds: On Co.NX platform for asking Obama, 75% Chinese say Internet Freedom most concerned. On Xinhua platform, ZERO asks this.
I do not think that we can truly measure the success or failure of this event for some time. It may fade away into obscurity or it could be a seminal moment for a nascent movement that just found its rallying cry, and in my opinion its too early to know which category this will fall into.
In the end though, I am just glad that we get to have this discussion without risk of repercussions. And thank you again for sharing your opinion.
Best,
David Yun
I’m sorry but this is entirely misled.
The idea that this (non-)event is ‘part of a larger continuum’ is entirely correct, although that it is an infinitesimally small part is overlooked, and the point is forgotten in what follows.
The current situation in China is living proof of the falsity of the ‘bottom up’ theory so beloved of businessmen, although I must admit that I haven’t before seen its use quite so flexibly to attempt to snatch credibility from the jaws of complete lack of effect: The less we achieve, the more we can claim to be the start of something bigger. The ‘bottom up’ theory has licensed doing business with an utterly repugnant regime in a were that has merely reinforced the status quo in China, helping to create a tiny but growing middle class with every interest in maintaining that status quo rather than helping to bring about change.
The temporary partial opening up of the Internet for this (non-)event had not the slightest novelty for the Chinese, long used to seeing publications suddenly disappear and re-appear, sudden changes in the political wind, and so on over the decades. In this ‘continuum’ even names such as Southern Weekend, Caijing, and Freezing Point are lost, although vastly more significant than this Town Hall hoop-la. As the tiny Internet-sophisticated proxy-using firewall-breaching audience you appear to be addressing well knows from long experience, access to sites comes and goes. When important foreigners come to town, dissidents get locked up, the grass is painted green, factories are shut down to improve the air, and there’s a temporarily flexible Internet. There’s nothing new here at all.
Nor can the (non-)event in any way claim to have stimulated protest concerning the Great Firewall. In fact, it has benefited from a sense of grievance already long existing, and widely commented upon in even the Western press in recent days, notably in the context of the Chinese take-over by tweet of a site commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, and which drew the obvious parallels. The ‘Twitter question’ (and really the emphasis on this is pathetic, I’m sorry, compared to what ought to be asked about freedom of speech and assembly in general, about political prisoners, about democratic reform, about institutionalised corruption, about land grabs, etc.) was well in the rear of this advance, not in the vanguard.
That 75% of respondents mentioned Internet freedom merely tells you how biased the sample was by the medium chosen with which to do the sampling. Two thirds of the population of China is still down on the farm, and had there been representative sampling it would have been found that freedom of speech, let alone freedom of the Internet in particular, likely insignificant compared to issues around official corruption, abuse of authority, land grabs, pollution, unfair taxation, provision of education, the one child policy, and provision of healthcare. These are the real issues affecting real people, rather than the well-educated, digitally savvy, technology-rich tiny sub-set that was reached.
We don’t have to wait ‘for some time’ to measure the success or failure of this event. It contributed nothing new (isn’t a ’seminal moment’) and generated no new debate. It failed to reach its target audience. It almost entirely failed to address issues of real substance (and even promoted, in Obama’s opening words, some real canards). Its impotence, except as a demonstration of effective Internet broadcast technology, was comprehensive.
If it isn’t already forgotten, it will be by the time Obama boards his plane.
7000中国人分布 I want to know more detailed data.
Here is some interesting commentary on both sides about the Town Hall for those of you who want to hear some other viewpoints:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/on_obama_asian_diplo_1.php
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/11/19/opinion/opinion_30116883.php
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/11/18/decoding-china-love-me-tender/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-lynch/obamas-town-hall-in-shang_b_362024.html
I’ve like to point out an factual error in your article.
you said “the internet as the only vehicle through which Chinese citizens could view the event. ”
but this is categorically untrue.
Local Shanghai TV carried the meeting live, as did CCTV’s english channel, CCTV 9. Also China’s biggest web news portals like sina.com, xinhuanet.com etc carried the transcript, word by word live online.
it casts serious doubt about your credibility when you can’t get the basic facts right about a major event you’ve put so much effort to service .
Hi wukong,
Thank you for the post. I was not in Shanghai so I can’t verify where the event was and was not broadcast, but others have reported a similar situation as to what is my understanding of what transpired. This quote is from Elizabeth Lynch, who edits chinalawandpolicy.com from a blog on The Huffington Post:
I’ve updated the post to reflect the fact that the desire was to have it on National TV, and that request was denied, but that it was broadcast locally in Shanghai. If what you mention is true, that makes me very happy because the more people the event reached, the better. Furthermore, the intent of this blog post is not meant to be a single source of truth, but rather, a view of how the event was run from my perspective.
I do appreciate your report and thank you for sharing more facts so that this blog post can reflect what really happened. It is an important story and needs to be told with as much truth as possible.
Best,
David
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