11:45 a.m. EST November 12, 2014 BEIJING — After the leaders of the world's two largest economies walked, talked and dined together during several hours of official and less formal bilateral meetings this week in Beijing, they capped it off Wednesday with an incredibly rare news conference.
The very fact that President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping took questions — even if they were supposed to be restricted to one each, and the Chinese media question had a prepared answer Xi read aloud — represented a diplomatic breakthrough for the United States in a nation where the ruling Communist Party severely restricts press freedom and keep its leaders away from even the slightest media grilling.
U.S. officials had lobbied hard for the leaders to take questions, instead of the usual arrangement in China whereby top officials read statements — and then leave. In a sign of official nervousness about the event, viewers in China were not given live access to this historic press conference, and only shown edited highlights later.
While Obama and Xi spoke, the news channel of the state broadcaster instead ran packages on the leaders' summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), the other main reason for Obama's presence here.
Such is the level of news and information control in China that its leaders hardly if ever face genuine press conferences of the kind that Obama and other world leaders commonly face every week. The Chinese leader, whom Obama met Wednesday afternoon, must endure one once a year, after the National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp parliament, holds its annual full session, but most questions are submitted in advance. Xi, the leader of China's Communist Party, has zero scheduled press conferences.
When Mark Landler of The New York Times, appointed to ask Obama a question, grabbed his chance and also threw two questions Xi's way, it appeared that Xi was ignoring him, as the Chinese leader asked for the question he knew was coming, despite the translation into Chinese of Landler's question.
At the end of his prepared remarks, Xi looked up and turned to the reporter's questions, notably one on the visa difficulties experienced by foreign reporters in China. Authorities here have forced reporters at the Times and Bloomberg News to leave China due to their detailed exposure of elite Communist Party wealth, including of Xi Jinping's family.
But instead of an olive branch, or a move in the spirit of the visa liberalization program that Obama and Xi had announced earlier, Xi said the reporters themselves were to blame.
