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It's a slam dunk to Obama

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily) Updated: 2008-11-07 07:59

I was looking for a John McCain supporter - in Beijing. It proved much harder than I expected.

On China Daily's website there was a survey on the two presidential nominees, open to all. Obama got an 80 percent approval rating. So, shouldn't I have had a one in five chance of locating someone who favored the Arizona senator?

We all know Obama mania is not limited to the United States. The Illinois senator has fans all across the globe. And over here in China, he seems to have a grip on the imagination of Chinese youth.

Mind you, I'm not saying "the Chinese people" because I have a sense most people don't really care either way. It's not our election anyway. And my hunch was later corroborated by data: A Horizon poll found out that more than half of those surveyed in China did not know and did not care about the US election. At least not as much as about the NBA playoffs, I guess.

Maybe it would be different if one of the contenders was a Chinese American or was raised in China.

Those I talked to were college students who major in international politics or trade. They were not a representative bunch by any measure. Instead they'll be the future elite. And it's interesting how they view the first black president in US history.

Honestly, the very first reason that surfaced was skin deep. "Obama is young and black," was why several students voted for him in the mock election organized by the US Embassy on Wednesday at Beijing's Renaissance Hotel. So, I asked them whom they would vote for if McCain were black and Obama white. That sent them scratching their heads. Well, they would have voted for Will Smith - if he had a less belligerent foreign policy than that projected by his screen persona.

The articulate ones told me that choosing Obama had a symbolic meaning larger than the man himself. Obama belongs to an ethnic minority, which will change the way people outside America perceive racism and the American Dream. More importantly, Obama's multicultural dimension, including his Muslim relatives, will make him more understanding of the perspectives of other cultures.

Not many directly compared this particular strength of Obama's with McCain's Iraq war strategy but probed further, they admitted they did not know much about the latter's platform. What they did know, though - McCain for the war, Obama against it - was enough to put them on Obama's side. People just didn't like to see America play the role of "world cop", period.

While not everyone had a clear picture of what Republicans and Democrats stand for, many tended to associate the two nominees with their predecessors. It is an understatement that Bill Clinton is a favorite here (he beats Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan in the China Daily website poll) while George W. Bush is not popular to say the least. The Clinton halo was so infectious that, had the final election been between Hillary and Obama, a Chinese college campus would have selected the former first lady - according to a random sampling done by yours truly at Renmin University of China, a week before the Election Day.

The much bigger gap between Obama and McCain here in China than in the States could be partly explained by the somewhat lopsided coverage in the local press. While more subdued than across the Pacific Ocean, the media attention here has been mostly on the young and charismatic Obama. Several cited their ignorance about McCain as the main reason for supporting Obama. Others did not hide their penchant for "age discrimination". "That McCain is soooo old," squealed a college girl.

All the college girls in my small study sided with Obama, yet not everyone thought him good-looking. Or maybe they did not want to admit it lest I thought them shallow. However, they all admire his charisma and eloquence.

"Would you go to a movie starring Obama if he were a movie star?" I asked. There's a resemblance between Obama and Denzel Washington - I mean the latter's public image. Yet Washington is not really big in China. I'm still wondering why some stars say Nicole Kidman clicked with Chinese audiences, and some never caught on, like, Reese Witherspoon. There's more at play than simply race. It could be people got to know of Obama mainly through the print media, thus deprived of the opportunity to watch him speak and interact with the public.

While Americans watched Obama grow and mature in the past two years, passing one test after another with flying colors, most Chinese got more or less a copy of the real McCoy. I noticed a correlation between how knowledgeable one is about the election and what media he or she is exposed to. A group of students from the Beijing Foreign Studies University gave me a list of why they favored Obama and then explained they got most of the information from online sources, often directly from the US. "Chinese media uses second-hand material," they said.

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