At yesterday's closing ceremony for the Shanghai World Expo, China's Prime Minister, Wen JIaobao, expressed lofty sentiments regarding the event's impact: "Only when the ideas behind the accomplishments of civilizations are shared can they become treasures for all of humanity and be carried on forever,"
Judging by these poetic, open-armed standards, the Expo has been a collosal failure. Despite the official tally of 73 million visitors, the vast majority of them mainland Chinese, the world's response to Shanghai's self-proclaimed moment in the sun has been been a gigantic collective yawn. And no wonder. Anyone who has visited the fairgrounds themselves has been, yes, impressed by the architectual marvels of the 250 or so corporate and country pavillions. (China, Spain, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Italy, among others wowed visitors. While the United States effort was compared to a suburban office complex.) But the combination of interminably long lines, few sparkles of on-the-ground humanity, robotically-chirpy volunteers and limited green space left many visitors, local and foreign alike, underwelmed. Furthermore, the Shanghai government did precious little to entice foreign travellers to the event. It's public relationships efforts -- a bizarre fusion of propaganstic "bureaucrat-ese" and brain-dead imagery dominated by an onmipresent, neotonized, pale-blue critter named "Hai Bao" -- ensured that overseas figures remained below projections of (only) 5 million people.
According to meticulously orchestrated closing-day news reports, Shanghai Expo was all about a 21st century global village for which China, arms stretch wide, had become a beatifically smiling citizen. As Shanghai Daily wrote, "For the past six months, the Expo site was a place where people could see rare cultural treasures from around the world - such as the Bronze Chariot and Horse sculpture from China's Qin Dynasty, the statue of Athena from Greece and the masterpieces of French Impressionist artists - and also get a taste of the world's diverse cultures through more than 20,000 events."
Please.
The central and municipal governments, despite pervasive bi-lingual signage and visitor booths scattered throughout the city, had its eyes focused squarely on domestic concerns. With these objectivese as benchmarks, however, Shanghai Expo 2010 was a success.
In China, everything is a means to an end. Shanghai Expo was conceived and executed to catalyze a host of internal breakthroughs. Most importantly, in a system riven by political factionalism and ever-present fiscal competition between central, city and district-level organs, the event forged order from chaos. Petty, bottom-up, back-room inflighting was supplanted by top-down, command-and-control decision making. In the years leading up to Expo, infrastructural breakthroughs -- ten subway lines, several bridges and a new ring road, high-speed trains between Shanghai and neighboring cities, massive real estate/retail developments for which eminent domain concerns were swept to the side --were unveiled with clock-like efficiency. To boot, a massive clean-up effort has left behind a sparkling urban landscape. Store signage has been upgraded, roads have been repaved and sidewalks are infinitely more walkable then even a year ago.
The Chinese Everyman has always been impressed with the government's ability to, yet again, mobilize resources for large-scale projects. Despite the clumsy efforts at behavior modification -- illegal DVDs shops went further underground, cigarettes (well, at least ashtrays) were banned from many restaurants, slogans promoting "civilized" behavior were everywhere -- the population fell in line. (I issued a plea to "forge a harmonious society" during Expo when my lanehouse neighbors insisted on placing trash outside my door. It worked.) Work units, government teams, senior centers and high schools made pilgrimmages to the fair ground by the busload. Very few grumbled. Wide-eyed smiles and a lack of cynicism were hallmarks of a hundred thousand forced day trips. Openning and closing ceremonies, bereft of spontaneity or joy, nonetheless rivaled Beijing 2008 in terms of scale and pagentry. And the fairgrounds themselves, while sanitized to the point of Stepfordization, were collosal, epic in every sense. While waiting in interminable lines, the masses oohed.
Finally, Chinese citizens were impressed with the government's ability to cajole foreign leaders to acquiese to its demands, a harbinger of the Middle Kingdom's 21st century superpower status. Every country -- from America to Russia and Croatia to Nigerial -- fell in line. No one dared not to participate. China's ability to coerce foreign leaders to bend to its will, even for a second-tier international event, reassured the hoi polloi.
In the end, Shanghai's World Expo was not an international event. It was orchestrated as a domestic power display, in the same vein as the country's 60th anniversary military parade and this fall's Asian Games. The government's goal was a Hurculean projection of organizational mettle and global stature. Despite acute awareness of the game their government was playing, the Chinese -- even, grudgingly, the anti-Shanghai Beijinese -- acknowledged the job got done.
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