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White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod must be on cloud nine right now; or at least his head is.  Yesterday, Axelrod spoke about President Obama’s town hall in China, saying "The fact is that he had the first-ever town-hall meeting in China -- broadcast in Shanghai, streamed on our website, a text of which was on their website and widely read.”  However, a quick glance at Obama’s predecessors’ trips to China reveals that there was nothing “unprecedented” about this meeting.  As Josh Gerstein of Politico reports: 

• When President Bill Clinton visited China in 1998, he took questions from Chinese students while visiting and speaking at Peking University (Beida). The following day, Clinton fielded questions from a radio audience as part of a call-in talk show in Shanghai.
  
  
• And when President George W. Bush visited China in 2002, he also took questions during a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

And, as The Washington Post reported Monday, “virtually every aspect of the meeting was scripted.   Obama's audience, selected and coached by Chinese officials, was bused to the venue from eight universities. Questioned briefly as they were hustled into the hall, the students said they were mostly members of the ruling Communist Party.”

While we applaud the President for this event, let’s not exaggerate the truth.  The White House may talk a big game on China, but at the end of the day, President Obama’s spinmeister can’t change that face that Obama’s trip left many Chinese disappointed.