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:

But it is questionable if the President achieved his goal of speaking to the Chinese public, showing the Chinese government’s continuing control over the people’s access to information. The Chinese government refused to broadcast the event on the government run China Central Television (CCTV), and then reneged last minute on broadcasting it live on the Xinhua News Agency’s website (the Beijing morning papers on Monday all reported that the event would be broadcast late that morning live on Xinhua’s website). Even clips of the town hall have not been shown on Chinese evening news. Ultimately, the event could only be watched through the White House’s website, giving only those Chinese people who know there is a White House website access to the event (Youtube is a blocked site in China).

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-lynch/obamas-town-hall-in-shang_b_362024.html

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

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 .

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

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.

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