US first lady Michelle Obama brought the importance of education to the foreground today on the third day of a visit to China, where she has won praise for her approachability and admiration for her comments supporting freedom of speech.
Michelle Obama, traveling with her two daughters, has been photographed at famous spots including the Forbidden City and Great Wall during the first independent trip by a US president's wife to China. She has won compliments for her elegant clothing and her interactions with ordinary people in a country where it is rare to see leaders' spouses or children in public.
"She is very warm and frank, and when she is talking to people she conscientiously listens to what they have to say," said Wu Qing, a retired professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University who met Michelle today.
"In China, we usually use weather to express our mood or state of mind, so the fact that the weather has been so nice these few days means she is very welcome in China," Wu said.
Michelle hosted a discussion about education with a handful of Chinese professors, students and parents, as well as the new US ambassador to China, Max Baucus, at the US Embassy today. In the afternoon, she visited part of the Great Wall in the northern Beijing suburbs with her daughters, 15-year-old Malia and 12-year-old Sasha, and her mother, Marian Robinson.
There, the first lady and her daughters walked a stretch of the wall that looks out to a massive rock inscription on a hillside that reads in Chinese: "Loyal to Chairman Mao."
T-shirts of President Barack Obama in a Mao hat that are common at Beijing tourist sites were absent from souvenir stalls today, although at least one vendor showed a whole box of them when asked.
The purpose of Michelle's weeklong visit is to promote educational exchanges between the US and China, although she brought up a contentious issue yesterday in a 15-minute speech at a university.
She said that freedom of speech and unfettered access to information make countries stronger and should be universal rights. But she did not call out on Beijing directly in her speech at Peking University's Stanford Center.
China has some of the world's tightest restrictions on the Internet, and Michelle's comments were absent today from state media but circulated in social media, where they were widely praised.
