The sad truth is that those who have made the effort of climbing over the GFW in order to access Twitter and like are belong to the 30%. In the same survey, over half the participants said their online activity won’t be affected by Google’s leave. This figure looks to increase if nothing happens.

Shanghaiist’s has a good summary of the Google v. China standoff. On the Guardian website, Tania Branigan has canvassed the opinions of some bloggers and media insiders. Whether Google decided to end its self-censorship purely out of moral reasons I’m not sure. I agree with some of Evgeny Morozov’s analysis. I guess it’s more likely they are fed up with the restraint and criticism while not seeing much gains in Chinese market.

Anyway, what Google has done is to blow it into the open, burn the bridge, making the stakes incredibly high. Now Google.cn is not censored, will the servers be forced to shut down, or moved out of China? And then what? Will Chinese government have to block Google.com as well?

Among the multinationals in China, Google is the one who has the power, influence and resources to make a clear stand on censorship. And now it has the will too. For that it should be praised.

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.