Corwin Sullivan is a Canadian palaeontologist based in Beijing. He co-blogs at Canada's World.

In the West, the headlines have been dramatic, even breathless. “World leaders hail Obama triumph”, the BBC trumpeted on its website. “Obama overcomes”, cried Paul Koring in the Globe and Mail. The international edition of Der Spiegel went so far as to write of “The resurrection of the American dream.”

Here in China, the People’s Daily was more restrained, reporting simply, “Obama wins U.S. presidential elections: media”. This tone of studied blandness, as far as I can tell from casual discussions with Chinese friends and colleagues, is not far out of step with public attitudes. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone in Beijing, other than fellow expats, express a solid preference for either McCain or Obama, and indeed the topic of foreign politics rarely comes up in conversation. Today a friend told me, when I mentioned the U.S. election, that he knew Obama had won but didn’t care very much.

A poll of people in many countries, conducted before the election by Gallup, seems to bear out my subjective impressions. Had the election been carried out in China, Obama would have won emphatically: he would have captured a whopping 12% of the popular vote, compared to 5% for McCain. The other 83% of respondents to the poll answered “don’t know”, or didn’t answer at all. Only 16% of people felt that the election result would matter to China, compared to 25% who felt that it would not. The remaining 59% apparently weren’t sure whether it would matter. Perhaps the 12% of the population who like Obama partied enthusiastically as the election results rolled in on Wednesday morning, Chinese time (the whole country is one big, happy time zone), but no signs of particular excitement were apparent on the streets of Beijing.

I can only speculate about the reasons for this general indifference, but America’s geographic and cultural distance from China is perhaps a good starting point. Can the average citizen of the People’s Republic really be expected to know more about Obama and McCain than the average American does about, say, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao? Also, Western-style electoral politics does not exist in China, and I suspect that many people here must find the whole process odd and a bit perplexing. It’s easy for Canadians to get caught up U.S. elections partly because a similar circus performs in our own neighbourhood every few years. But I suspect the biggest factor is simple and rational. Obama may have somewhat more protectionist instincts when it comes to trade, but otherwise he and McCain do not appear to differ very much on the geopolitical issues that matter to China. So why should anyone here be either delighted or dismayed by his victory?

Even from my Canadian perspective, I must admit that the unruffled Chinese attitude strikes me as intuitively more reasonable than all the gushy talk in the Western media. Obama is not going to change America overnight, and I see no reason to believe that he will change the substance of American policy towards Canada and most other countries very much at all. Yes, he’ll probably be easier to deal with than McCain would have been, and more palatable in many respects to Canadian sensibilities. With Obama the diplomatic tone is likely to improve. But that’s about it, unless we Canadians get so excited by his charming demeanour and endless promises of “change” that we rush slavishly into an even closer and more suffocating embrace with the United States. That would be a mistake whose consequences could endure well beyond Obama’s time in office.