James Fallows recommends Fareed Zakaria’s interview on CNN with China’s premier, Wen Jiabao. “Interview appearances by Wen or president Hu Jintao are so rare, let alone with the foreign media, that this session is noteworthy simply for its existence,” writes Fallows, as well as for Wen’s “openness and non-defensiveness.” Fallows just wishes Zakaria hadn’t called Wen “Your Excellency.”
The interview transcript includes this bit from Zakaria:
There were some conditions to my interview with Premier Wen. My condition was that I be allowed to ask any questions I wished, which the Chinese accepted. One of theirs was that I not comment on or characterize the substance of the interview. So I won’t – except to say that I thought it was the most open and frank conversation I had ever seen or read with a Chinese leader.
If that was “one of” their “conditions,” I wonder what the others were?
UPDATE: Thanks to a CJR reader for pointing out my misspelling of “Zakaria” in the first sentence. Corrected.
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.