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Obamamania in China
The photograph on the cover of Friday’s China Daily showed a poster of Michael Jordan soaring towards a slam dunk — with a picture of President-elect Barack Obama taped over his head.
The image highlights China’s growing infatuation with Obama. While Beijing analysts expected a McCain or Obama administration to have similar China policies, average Chinese have been caught up in the global Obamamania.
“The Illinois senator has fans all across the globe,” an editorial by Raymond Zhou in the China Daily read on Friday. “And over here in China, he seems to have a grip on the imagination of Chinese youth.”
One recent survey on the China Daily’s website found that 80 percent of respondents preferred Obama to McCain.
Why do Chinese like Obama?
According to informal poll Zhou conducted on Beijing college campuses, the top reason was that “Obama belongs to an ethnic minority, which will change the way people outside America perceive racism and the American Dream,” Zhou wrote.
Other respondents said they expected an Obama administration would be more likely to work with foreign governments than a McCain administration would have been.
Even Beijing seems to be warming to Obama. An official editorial in the China Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called Obama’s message “forceful and uplifting”.
“China waits to see the change it can believe in,” the paper said.
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