ONTD: Politics

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Evidently, the only person in all of Western news media that Premier Wen Jiabao will talk to is Fareed Zakaria. I don't blame him; there are few people in news media in general -- whether it be Eastern or Western -- that are capable of presenting an interview in a way as thoughtful, impartial, objective, and non-judgmental as Dr. Zakaria.

The entire video is about forty minutes long, but it is more than worth it. The interview with Premier Wen is interspersed in relevant segments throughout the broadcast.

The main topic, of course, was economics. What does Premier Wen think about the way the US handled the financial crisis? How does the US stimulus package compare with China's stimulus program, which Premier Wen engineered? What is Premier Wen's take on and deconstruction of the trade and currency imbalance between the US and China?

I thought the segments where Dr. Zakaria directly and frankly asked Premier Wen about censorship in China -- especially Internet censorship -- were interesting, but not very enlightening as far as Premier Wen's answers went; he did some major waffling.

I wish I could have listened to Premier Wen without the voiceover translation. I much prefer subtitles when it comes to these things. Much of the nuance of his rhetoric in the original Chinese may have been lost in translation, since Chinese is one of those finicky languages with turns of phrase for oddly specific things.