Su Fei Examines Chinese Views on the Election
American Su Fei has a video up where she goes around asking Beijingers what they think about the American election, primarily the Obama-Hillary aspect. I should mention that I was planning to do this bit based on message boards a few weeks back–except the discussions about Obama had almost no participants and made little sense. She also pushes the gender aspect a bit heavily, but then again the show is called Sexy Beijing, so it’s kind of fair.
The only other gripe I have is that she keeps insisting that Clinton’s Chinese name is two syllables and actually sounds like ‘Clinton,’ when in fact it’s three syllables and sounds like, well, nothing in particular. On the other hand, I couldn’t find a single Chinese newspaper article that used her family name, instead relying on the moniker “希拉里” or “Hillary.” I guess in a country where foreigners are usually referred to by one name it doesn’t help much for someone to run for the same office as her husband if she wants her own identity. Anyway, here’s the Su Fei clip, which I’m about 10 days late on. Below I discuss a bit about China’s coverage of the election.
While I was poking around to see what the mainstream media outlets were reporting, I came across a breakdown of the candidates’ China policies according to The People’s Daily.
Hillary: 1. For agreements of cooperation 2. supports punitive taxes (on imports?)
Obama: 1. Wants strict inspection of Chinese imports 2. ONE CHINA TWO SYSTEMS! They love this guy!
(My favorite Obama-China snippet is that his Chinese name (奥巴马(do you like the use of parenthes inside parentheses?)) has the character usually associated with the Olympics, ‘奥.’ Since Chinese names for foreigners are fairly arbitrary, and his was chosen after the Games were awarded, I feel like either this is a tacit endorsement, or they are trying to imply that he is just like all of the kids being born this year whose parents were dumb enough to name their children ‘Olympics.’ I could go either way on this one.)
Romney: against trade barriers.
Huckabee? That box is left blank on the analysis grid. That seems about right.
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