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members of the Communist Youth League (CYL) who had, moreover, been
trained for the session. The questions from the CYL audience were vetted
beforehand by leaders of the American Studies Center of Shanghai’s Fudan
University. Efforts by the US side to invite Chinese bloggers were foiled and
the invitees prevented from attending.^47 Xinhua subsequently posted a tran-
script of the session on its website. The contrast with the broad access given
Clinton in 1998 was striking.
By denying Obama media access to the Chinese people, the CCP limited
the ideological poisoning of Chinese television audiences by the American
president’s espousal of bourgeois liberal ideas. It also avoided displaying
the contrast between the open style of an American president and the more
wooden style common to CCP leaders. But such considerations had existed
during earlier US presidential visits and had been overridden. In 2009, the
United States seemed to be in a far weaker position, so its demands were
refused. Beijing also secured in the joint statement issuing from the Obama
visit endorsement of a broad principle implying that each side of the US-PRC
relation would abstain from actions the other deemed deeply offensive. “The
two sides agreed that respecting each other’s core interests is extremely im-
portant to ensure steady progress in U.S.-China relations,” the statement
read.^48 The US military leadership had opposed accepting this provision pre-
cisely because they understood that it invited Chinese tests of US resolve on
issues such as Taiwan or the US alliance with Japan.^49
The next demonstration of Beijing’s new assertiveness came at the global
climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009.
Obama had announced climate change as one of his top priorities and had
billed the Copenhagen meeting as a major venue for dealing with the issue.
In his July 29 US-PRC Dialogue speech, Obama had identified climate change
as an area of common US-PRC interest (as the two largest carbon emitters) in
which he hoped for cooperation. Beijing saw the matter differently; Western
demands for restrictions on carbon emissions were attempts to check China’s
rapid development. Consequently, China’s delegation to the Copenhagen
conference, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, aggressively blocked any action that
might limit China’s ability to emit carbon into the global atmosphere. China
would play a major role at the Copenhagen conference, not in cooperation
with the United States, as Obama had envisioned, but in opposition to it and
by thwarting efforts by the United States and European countries to impose
specific and verifiable caps on emissions of all countries.
Initial sessions at the Copenhagen meeting were conducted by second-level
officials. China joined with India and Sudan to raise repeated procedural
objections. An early-morning emergency meeting of top-level leaders was
convened in an attempt to break the impasse. The US and French presidents,
the German chancellor, and the Japanese prime minister attended. Wen
Jiabao did not. China was represented by Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei.