MOSCOW -- It would be interesting to know who attended U.S. President George W. Bush's talk at Tsinghua University in Beijing on Feb. 22. Obviously planned as a mixture of calculated propaganda and heartfelt preaching, the talk targeted Chinese youth who hopefully will make China democratic, tolerant and prosperous.
It is fair to suggest that the audience was highly selective and, therefore, all but deaf to the president's words. If historical parallels are worth anything, the country to compare China with should be the late Soviet Union, where such an audience usually consisted of junior KGB officers, young party apparatchiks and a number of well-connected individuals who wanted to attend the talk for the sake of future name-dropping.
Of course, Bush's message was not totally lost on Chinese youths, for the talk was intended for broadcast across China, potentially supplying the president with a huge audience. However, it is unclear what impact the talk had. Similar speeches given by American presidents in the Soviet Union normally met with warm reaction. It was typical for a Soviet student to admire America, which produced wonderful things like Hollywood movies and Levi's jeans.