What the Copenhagen shows us is that this kind of summit doesn’t work when facing such a complicated and pressing issue. Many were over-optimistic before the summit, hyped by Miliband himself, to expect the countries would smooth over their huge difference and work out a treaty with binding targets that will affect all involved. The summit now looks ill prepared, badly organised, without a solid foundation and well communicated understanding. Trying to knock out a deal while all the participants having their own interests to protect, was not realistic.

All major players came to Copenhagen with their own baggage. China, along with India, Brazil and Russia, doesn’t want the binding carbon emission cutting targets to straightjacket its economic growth. Developing countries like China and African countries rightly feel the injustice of taking the burden of emission cut while the industrialized countries who had burned a large amount of fossil fuels now washed their hands by passing the manufactory to developing countries.

The fatal flaw is that the world leaders failed to bring their people with them. There is no real public pressure for the leaders to do something racial now. President Obama arrived Copenhagen empty handed, and then diverted to attack China for not agreeing an international inspection system. (Do we really like WMD style inspectors jetting around the world searching for secret carbon emission?) He went back to the States somehow claiming victory over China. Yes we know his hands are tied, with a resisting domestic opposition to pacify. But that just illustrates how unhelpful and hollow that Ed Miliband decided to single out China.

It’s sad that after all the efforts of scientists and environmental campaigners, the world population are largely not convinced that they have to do something themselves. But all is not lost. The bright side is that the political will does not seem to diminish despite all the disappointment. I believe China is committed to cut carbon emission because for China there is an opportunity to catch up or even lead the green technologies and low carbon industry, and the leadership sees that.

Post-Copenhagen, people are desperate to find a way forward. But playing the blame game isn’t the way.

Well they are fighting a losing battle. Bai Gong has been commonly used to call the White House for many years (I doubt it has ever been called anything else). Bai Wu is plainly ridicules. I’m not sure whether this is political correctness or purely bureaucratic – in order for Chinese not to confuse President Obama with a monarch?

Washington Post also managed to read into the choice of Aobama and Oubama as a political gesture. Aobama is used in China mainland, while Oubama is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. So Beijing’s insistence of using Aobama in the face of American ’standardization’ must have some political undercurrent? It even suggests Ao (奥) in Chinese could mean ‘difficult to understand’, ‘abstruse’ and ‘obscure’, as if using Aobama is Beijing’s way of subtly demeaning Obama. I have to say this is fanciful over-reading. The simple fact is Aobama or Oubama doesn’t have much difference. Aobama, if you read aloud in Mandarin Chinese, sounds better, more masculine I would say, than Oubama. The character Ao itself, meanwhile, belongs to a pool of Chinese characters often used to translate foreign names, not associated with ‘difficult to understand’ etc. in such case.

Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on Obama’s official Chinese name, because he’s in danger of acquiring an unflattering nickname there. A lot of English media reported in headline that in a Shanghai ‘town hall’ style meeting, Obama ‘attacked Chinese internet censorship’. No he didn’t ‘attack’ anything. Instead, he was trying to tip-toe around this sensitive issue in order to satisfy his domestic audiences, not to offend the Chinese authorities, and charm the Chinese internet population. A difficult task indeed.

Chinese internet users, the proud ‘netizens’ as they call themselves, were not amused. Often fierce and verbally inventive, they have started to call Obama ‘Xi Ni Ma’ (稀泥马), which can be roughly translated back to English as something like ‘muddling horse’. If you’re familiar with the story of ‘Cao Ni Ma’ (grass mud horse), you will know this plays on the similar spirit. ‘Ma’, the last syllable in Obama’s Chinese name, means ‘horse’ – nothing derogatory here, mind you. ‘Xi Ni’, though, is to describe the act of muddling through to make everyone pleased.

To be fair to Obama, nobody should expect him can somehow change China’s internet censorship by denouncing it publicly in China. Indeed part of exchange on that meeting itself was censored, so is his interview with Southern Weekly newspaper rumoured to be. I guess that is not the first thing in his mind when he touched down in Shanghai. He certainly has more pressing issues to talk about with the Chinese leaders. The result is that Obama bat off this censorship question relatively well but, (not) helped by the social network media, he may have to leave China with a nickname that I don’t think he’s too eager to keep.

I’m afraid this just reinforces the perception that liberal European are dazzled by the Obama, in that they are so fed up with George W. Bush and willing to award the Nobel Prize for the ‘vision’. If this means to be an encouragement, would being a Nobel laureate help Obama to negotiate peace for middle-east for example? I think not. It won’t help Obama to pursue his domestic agenda either. Judging from the reaction on American media, it only farther polarizes his supporters and detractors. Prize for peace, what an irony.