Bold Little Swallow

I remember a while ago reading in Jenny Zhu’s blog that China wasn’t all that interested in American politics:

I’m asked asked how the Chinese see the US election. I’d say first of all, the general public gives it the same amount of attention (or slightly over) as the US public would to Chinese politics. While Obamama drew mega crowds in Europe, he would probably be able to enjoy a bit of privacy and travel incognito in China, so would McCain.

At first, I thought this was a bit strange.  I don’t think of myself as an America-centric person, but I also follow the BBC as my major news source, and found there was hardly a major story on U.S. politics I heard about elsewhere that I didn’t first read about on the BBC news website.  I also occasionally scan German news headlines, and found many of these same major stories made it to German headlines, so I guess I was working on the assumption that much of the world followed much of the American presidential elections.  It also made sense considering that since most countries have to deal with us (for better or, more often, worse), they might be interested in seeing what people will be driving our policies and attitudes, at the very least surrounding U.S. diplomatic relations and unofficial wars.

(As a side note, a possible reason for Europe’s focus on U.S. presidential is found in this PhD Comic, in which a European says to an American, “The U.S. is like our younger sibling.  They’re more exciting, yet we love to roll our eyes at them.”)

Recently, however, I’ve seen a lot of articles about a not-so-small population in China being quite excited about following the U.S. presidential election, at least towards the end: its youth, or more specifically, the young people that are learning English and interested in most things American.  (This is a “not-so-small” group of people considering that every undergraduate student in China must take English classes every semester.)  Obama has increased this interest significantly for many of the same reasons he’s popular among young people in the U.S.

I think it’ll be very interesting to be teaching in China during the first year and a half of his presidency.  I’m quite curious to see how much Chinese people follow it and, of course, what the Chinese popular opinion of him will be.

If you’re interested, here’s a page that translates into English comments left on a Youku (Chinese YouTube-type website) video of Obama’s victory speech.  (Interesting enough, the comments overall seem to be of a higher caliber than what I’d expect to find on YouTube, if only slightly.)