The World, Shanghaied

by Lauren Hilgers

Exposition: a type of nineteenth-century madness.

- Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idess recues

In April, on the third day of the soft opening of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai (theme: "Better City, Better Life"), officials held a press conference. They trucked journalists in on lime-green Expo buses, delivering the group to a building near the fairground's many-chambered heart. Desks were set up for us, all facing a series of live video projections of the Expo grounds. The supertitle atop each screen identified SCENES FROM THE MEGA-EYE. The job of running the press conference and keeping us happy fell to a man named Xu Wei, the Expo's natty yet slightly haggard Minister of Propaganda. He offered to answer questions on Expo services, most of which concerned complaints about Internet access. "That's why we have soft openings", Xu told the grumbling crowd. "To learn from our early mistakes". Louisa Lim, an NPR reporter sitting next to me, shuffled papers and pulled two printouts from a plastic sleeve, one of Gumby and the other of a squat blue Play-Doh biped with thick legs and a cowlick giving a thumbs-up. This was Haibao, the Shanghai Expo's Mascot: soft power in a cute blue package.

Haibao, whose name means "sea-treasure", has been leading the campaign to promote the Expo since 2007. According to the World Expo website, he is "a baby creature from the sea who has magical powers to become a robot". Below the many statues of Haibao recently erected in Shanghai, plaques feature an English caption: "It is created in the image of humanity and expresses our capacity to create wonderful lives and enjoy the fruits of our work". It also looks an awful lot like Gumby.

When Xu finally acknowledged her, Lim held up her two printouts. "Have you looked into the similarities between these?" she asked. With a great screeching of chairs, all the Chinese journalists in the room ran for her. Those who had nodded off started shouting: "What media are you from?" "Hold up the photos!" "Who are you?" Back in the crowd, someone hollered, "Who is Gumby?" Farther back: "Did you make Gumby?" "Are you Gumby?" Lim tried to escape but the rugby scrum followed, from one end of the room to the other. The portraits of Gumby and Haibao lay trampled on the floor.

The next day Gumby showed up in newspapers across the nation. "No one expected the female news reporter to shout accusations", reported one Chinese TV anchor. Chinese bloggers suspected that reruns of Growing Pains, which regularly features a Gumby doll, were at fault. Xu Wei's original answer also made the news: "If anyone felt their copyright had been violated, they would have sued us by now".


In the history of World's Fairs, none before Shanghai has been quite so large or international. More than 200 exhibitors have assembled on the banks of the Huangpu River, representing a selection of foreign and Chinese corporations and nearly all the nations in the world. Seventy million visitors are expected to attend the six-month event by the time the gates close in November. Never mind that the World's Fair faded from the consciousness of the West decades ago; China has spent on the Expo nearly twice as much as it did on the Beijing Olympics. City officials have done their best to re-create the hoopla of history's most iconic World's Fairs, and, along with excitement, they have invited the chaos that has marked the event since the Crystal Palace went up in London's Hyde Park.

The first World's Fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition, was championed by Queen Victoria's popularly unloved German husband, Prince Albert, who felt that Britain was lacking in both education and appreciation for the arts. He was not the first to have the idea -France had been holding national fairs since 1798, claiming that the events were "dealing a deadly blow to English industry".

Albert's plans for the fair were widely disparaged. British companies feared an open exhibition would draw foreign copycats eager to steal their ideas, and the populace balked at plans to fund the public event with private money. It took a mammoth effort to bring it about.

But once the gates opened, the fair - advertised as a mini-utopia, a ruler by which to measure mankind's development and a place to see (and purchase) really cool stuff -attracted enormous crowds. All classes of people mingled, checking out a leech-based barometer, model houses, and a gigantic lump of coal. Subscription clubs were started across the country, requiring members to put away a small amount of money each week, like pilgrims, for their eventual trip to the fair. The queen sometimes roamed the grounds unattended. "We are living at a period of most wonderful transition", said Albert, during a pre-exhibition meeting at London's Mansion House, "which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end - to which all history points - the realization of the unity of mankind".

The success of the London fair was taken as a challenge. France held its first international expo in 1855, pointedly adding a section focusing on the arts. In 1853 New York City held a small and relatively unsuccessful fair, conveniently skipped in most histories, in which they attempted a copy of the Crystal Palace; Philadelphia's is generally remembered as America's first World's Fair, scheduled to coincide with the country's centenary. Congress called the event "an exhibition of the natural resources of the country and their development, and of its progress in those arts which benefit mankind in comparison with those of older nations".

Not everyone over the years has been thrilled with the Enlightenment rationality of World's Fairs, which organize the universe according to the ideals of industrialization. An early critic, Dostoyevsky's underground man derided London's Crystal Palace for its soul-crushing utopianism. "You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed - a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly", he complains. Indeed, as the Fair's themes evolved in the twentieth century, free will does seem to have yielded to, in a Chinese phrase, kexue fazhan, "scientific development". Technological progress was thrilling at the early fairs, where many people first experienced electricity, the telephone, or, at Saint Louis, iced tea. Industrialization and the space race may be things of the past in the West, but in China factories are still changing lives and space walks are important television events. China's government still has an interest in suggesting a logic to all this upheaval. As the Shanghai Expo's chairman, Hong Hao, put it in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, "I think the key is now to solve the problems that have been brought about by development through development. The priority is development." If the Olympics were China's chance to present itself to the world, then the Expo is the inverse: this is China's chance to show the world to China, on its own terms.


My first day out after the official launch, I hoped to visit the North Korean, pavilion, a gray concrete box with a giant DPRK flag on one side and, on another, a giant photo of fluffy clouds. It was closed. I looked next door at Iran, a few yards away in what people had taken to calling "Axis of Evil Square", but Iran had what I considered at the time a long line to get in, so I headed to the Maldives.

The Maldives pavilion was misplaced in a little ghetto of Central Asian countries, small one-room affairs clustered together as an afterthought. Inside the Maldives there was a bank of sand that looked suspiciously like kitty litter, surrounded by a bunch of blue bathroom tiles on the floor. Some travel brochures were taped to a table. If this is what millions of Chinese will remember about the Maldives, they will come away from Mongolia thinking about a cashmere shop, a giant plaster dinosaur egg, yogurt, hard liquor, and some cans of Russian bean soup. Kyrgyzstan is an authentic-smelling yurt and a video of attractive models in colorful clothing.

Having breezed through the little countries, I decided that if any nation could keep alive the Expo's vaunted lineage of futuristic doodads, it would be Japan. Apparently, future Japan will be all about Chinese spectators fighting with Japanese ushers in pink fanny packs. It will also be about sewage-treatment plants and tricked-out one-person pod cars for people who seem like they'd be fine walking.

The Japan pavilion's most impressive technology was the crafty obscuring of incredibly long lines. The wait at first looked reasonable - maybe fifteen minutes - and ended up taking two hours. People kept cutting in front of me whenever the line wrapped back on itself. I was an utter failure at this game of Chinese lines: I tried stretching my arms out to grab the railings on each side, but somehow the cheaters still got by; to create a diversion, one person poked me in the face with an umbrella.

Inside at last, I was rewarded with a video presentation recounting the story of the crested ibis, an endangered waterfowl with white plumage and a beak resembling a letter opener that had been re-introduced to Japan through a joint Chinese-Japanese research project. In the video, people drove their pods along little roads in the woods and went off-roading in meadows. They made phone calls from their pods to say they'd spotted birds. The video concluded with a performance by a violin-playing robot. The pavilion's final stop had two Chinese opera performers in pods, trying their best to look comfortable while coordinating the pods in a dance. They then sang about the crested ibis.

The next day I visited the UK pavilion, a bristling sphere of acrylic rods with plant seeds embedded in the base of each rod; according to a pavilion staffer, the "Seed Cathedral" evokes the circle of life, the power of creativity, and everything else that is good in the world. The Brits had a rough start. Fairgoers angry about the long lines at the soft launch started scaling walls and throwing rocks, focusing their frustration on the "Dandelion", as they called it, whose interior consists of one small room, all rods and seeds. "People keep asking me where the queen is", the usher said. "Where are the tea and cakes, and where are the men in tall hats?"

Five minutes southwest lay Tanzania, which, for a small pavilion whose main attraction was a life-size model of a giraffe, proved oddly popular. The commemorative-passport stamping line spilled out of the pavilion, stretching all the way to Malawi. Moses, a Tanzanian studying in China, had volunteered to man the stamp. He'd arrived in China five years ago, speaking no Chinese, on a scholarship to Dalian University.

"People love the giraffe", Moses said. "One guy came up and he asked, 'How does it eat?' Then he picked up a bottle of water and said, 'Does it drink like this?' I said, 'No, man, that thing has hooves'."


I met with Jose Villarreal, commissioner-general of the US delegation, in his office inside the US pavilion, which is notable mostly for being incredibly drab and boring, flanked by a Burger King and a KFC (which, unlike the other Shanghai KFCs, does not offer a "Thick and Spicy Beef Pentagon"). Given the current state of world markets, Villarreal told me, it would have been inappropriate to build something whimsical and eye-catching.

"People say it looks like a mall", he said. "That's garbage". He preferred to consider the pavilion from above; from the air, someone once told him, it looks like a catamaran. From below, it looked a little like an eagle, or so Villarreal liked to think. He defied anyone who saw in it a resemblance to a multiplex to produce photographic evidence. I definitely thought it looked like a multiplex, a multiplex emblazoned with corporate logos; a friend of mine called it the NASCAR pavilion.

Still, day after day the crowds came, drawn by brand recognition alone. Usually the line was so long that Brazil took to bringing out a loudspeaker and encouraging the US queue to defect. "You will wait a thousand hours!"

The mere existence of a US pavilion is miraculous, considering how little attention Americans have given the World Expo. Our membership in the Bureau of International Expositions lapsed in 2002, when we refused to pay our dues. The last fair held in the United States (1984, New Orleans) was the only expo ever to go bankrupt. The federal government had to intervene. US law now forbids government spending on pavilions, so it is hardly surprising that America's Expo presence was very nearly a bust. Plans fell so far behind schedule that a Canadian architect had to be called in.

Nevertheless, Villarreal, a San Antonio lawyer, was thrilled to be in Shanghai. "The Expo is the greatest show on earth right now", he said, adding that he considered it "political malpractice" not to visit China in this day and age. He had insisted the US pavilion stock straw cowboy hats in a range of colors. "We had a week's supply", he said. "They sold out in a few hours!" When Hu Jintao visited, Villarreal gave him a giant belt buckle. "This", he said, "is public diplomacy at its best".


After weeks of brushing past the German pavilion, watching crowds wrestle with the military police, I finally got in on someone else's VIP pass. Rumor was, Germany really had a handle on how to expo.

The Germans named their pavilion, in Chinese, "Harmonious City", which sounds oddly similar to the slogan "Harmonious Society". (In China, getting "harmonized" is a euphemism for having your blog post mysteriously disappear or your art exhibit shut down.) George Trow called the World's Fair "the loneliest place in the world", but he never saw the happy, disharmonized mess inside the German pavilion or the British Elvises coiffed in repurposed floor carpeting and singing glory, hallelujah from the rooftops.

The German pavilion was filled with sustainable consumer goods, and there was a black-light chamber with aggressive techno music, but the main attraction was a circular room with what everyone called the Germans' "technology ball" hanging in the middle. People filed in along the walls. Two performers popped out. "Welcome to the Harmonious City", one of them said, in Chinese. "This sphere will show you what you can do with your energy". The gigantic ball, covered in LED screens, started changing colors. "Look!" he cried. "It's chaaanging". Apparently the ball responds to noise. "Look! It's a bus!" said the performer. "The bus is following me!"

At first the bus was not a hit. Then the performers invited the audience to yell. And after five hours in line, yell they did, hollering so loud the ball started swinging back and forth, changing colors. The performers hopped on scooters and wheeled around, and the ball began to follow them. People were screaming and banging on the metal netting in front of them, and under that spinning technology ball, in that overcrowded, superheated thunderdome, the banter began to sound meaningful. "What do you dream of?" they asked. "What is your harmonious city like?" "Harmonious city", bellowed one of the scooting performers as he went whizzing by. "It's. In. Your. Mind!"

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Lauren Hilgers lives in Shanghai.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/