Yes, America can (but does China care?)

I spent this morning in an overcrowded, overpriced, smoke-filled pub--the kind of expat hangout that caters to foreigners who would prefer to spend their time in China pretending they're at home in Philadelphia/Leeds/Toronto/Adelaide. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be caught dead in one of those places.

But this morning's events were certainly not normal circumstances.

By 8 a.m. the three-story pseudo-pub was packed to bursting with Americans, almost all of them sporting Obama/噢巴马 '08 T-shirts, posters and other sundry paraphernalia. They sat and stood, eyeballs glued to the flatscreen televisions on every wall of the joint, and launched into raucous, morning booze-fuelled shouts at every CNN PROJECTION that flashed across the screens (The Virginia table practically burst into hysterics when the state was called--it was kind of alarming).

When the race was called just after West-Coast polls closed, the building went berserk: Businesspeople, tourists and expats cheered and hugged and applauded the TV screens. The exuberance was palpable.

But outside "Malone's American grill," the real world was more or less unmoved. Apart from a handful of fist-pumping foreign students on campus, no one seemed terribly interested to know the United States had just made its most cataclysmic and exciting political decision in a helluva long time; certainly one of the mosy symbolically progressive steps since Brown v. Board of Education (which, hold on a sec--was just 54 years ago. Holy crap. No, seriously. Incredible).

Which kind of makes sense. About half the people asked what candidate they prefer in a poll by Beijing-based Horizon said they hadn't been following closely enough or didn't care; whoever's elected, for a lot of Chinese people the United States will still be a superpower to be feared, emulated, grudgingly admired and regarded with suspicion.

That, or people just find it hard to get worked up about elections in a place where the only votes that occur are foregone conclusions--choices between equally unknown candidates where the winner is guaranteed to be a Party member.

As usual, the blogosphere is way more opinionated. This blog seems to sum up the general feeling pretty well: Cool guy; seems to like Asia; also seems to inclined to protect America from aggressive, cheap (Chinese) exports and may try to bully China into doing things it doesn't want to do--like float the RMB and impose stricter labour or environmental regulations.

This one, written before the election, seems more inclined to suggest Obama's talking a lot tougher than he'll be able to act once he's actually in power and attempting to steer the good ship U.S.A out of the shoals of a global economic crisis and into more friendly, less crappy metaphor-laden waters.

At the very least, the demand for those ubiquitous political posters, T-shirts, buttons and wristbands (cause if there's one thing you need, it's another cause-declaring rubber bracelet) should boost their U.S. manufacturers just a little. Unless of course all that swag is actually made in China.