Last week I criticized the White House for backing down when the Chinese insisted on limiting coverage of Obama's townhall meeting in Shanghai. I still think the Chinese were bluffing, and that their bluff could have been called without any fallout. But James Fallows actually raised the issue in a conversation with a government official who helped organize the trip, and the official's explanation is worth reading:

"We negotiated endlessly against a very difficult Chinese government on the issue. Their intransigence tells me several things. It was the day before the meeting with Hu Jintao, and there were uneasy about what might be said in a live format. ["Surprise" = "unacceptable risk" in many official Chinese dealings.]  This was also a townhall format of a type they had never had before. [What about Bill Clinton's? That was a roundtable plus a speech, not a town hall.] We wanted to have 1000 or 1500 people. They said No. Security problems, and so on. So, we got to 500. We insisted on live streaming. Endless fights on that. Then live TV. Endless fights. And questions from the internet. Huge fights over who would pose them and who would screen. There wasn't  a single aspect of the meeting that wasn't hard fought.