You and 2.68 million other people may be following him on Twitter, but don’t expect any tweets from @BarackObama to actually be from the president.
Obama admitted yesterday that he’s never used Twitter, his account is maintained by ghost writers.
The president called himself “an advocate of technology and not restricting Internet access” in a town hall forum in China.
President Barack Obama told Chinese students yesterday he did not fear their nation’s rise, ahead of talks on trade imbalances and currency strains that underline the sometimes tense embrace between the two giants.
In his first trip to China, Obama also used the forum to champion Internet freedom and human rights on the first full day of his trip. But he did not mention Tibet or other sensitive issues that could have drawn ire ahead of his talks with Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he arrived later yesterday.
“These freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation, we believe are universal rights, they should be available to all people including ethnic and religious minorities,” Obama told the audience in Shanghai.
“I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use,” he said. “The more open we are, the more we can communicate and it also draws the world together.”
Testy exchanges between the world’s biggest and third biggest economies have continued even after Obama began his first visit to China on Sunday.
A Chinese government spokesman rebuffed calls for the yuan currency to appreciate, a step Obama has urged to correct imbalances in the global economy.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was not so reticent about Washington’s frustrations with Beijing’s currency settings. “I think it’s quite clear all around the world as to the views of what China should do with its currency,” Locke said.
China has had a huge trade surplus with the United States, and is also the largest foreign holder of U.S. government bonds.
The U.S. trade deficit with China widened 9.2 percent in September to $22.1 billion, the highest since November 2008, according to U.S. data released last week.