WORLD EXPO:DO YOU REMEMBER what happened in Hanover, Germany in 2000 and in Aichi in Japan in 2005? A clue – it was big, expensive, at times remarkable, but no one was entirely sure what it was for.
The answer is that these cities hosted the last two World Expos. This year the Expo, or the World Fair, a showcase for national achievement in an increasingly internationalised world, is being held in Shanghai and it’s bigger and better than ever.
This is, after all, the event that gave us the Eiffel Tower in Paris and it is filled with the desire for progress in societies in transformation, such as the great imperial powers of Britain and France in the 19th century and the United States in the early 20th century.
China is updating the concept for this century with the six-month event, which kicked off on May 1st. Here on the banks of the Huangpu river in Shanghai, 190 countries; 30 Chinese regions plus Hong Kong and Taiwan; 48 international organisations; five large thematic pavilions and 18 corporate pavilions are cheerfully ensconced and ready to welcome 70 million visitors who can thrill to the theme: “Better city, better life”.
Well, we all need better cities, and I’m sure most of us can do with a better life. But with €3.5 billion – double the outlay for the Beijing Olympics – being spent on hosting the Expo, is it really still necessary in this day and age, when most people do their meeting and greeting online, and big international events are being superseded by smaller, boutique conferences and trade fairs that cater to specific needs and wants?
The World Fair is a concept that had its heyday in the giddy, expansionary years of the late 19th century, when it gave us the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace in London, or the progress-obsessed years of the 1950s.
However, since then the Expo has flagged somewhat. No disrespect to Hanover or Aichi, but the Expos staged in the two cities were not terribly memorable.
Well, the Chinese certainly have no doubts about the importance of the Expo. Still basking in the glow of the (largely) positive coverage of the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, they see the Expo as the latest showcase for the positive aspects of China’s remarkable rise in the last 30 years.
"The most important economic function of the Expo will be to provide the city of Shanghai with a superb branding opportunity. The Expo will ensure that Shanghai receives a vast amount of positive media abroad, serving as a marketing campaign for the city and promoting it as both a tourist destination and a place of business," commentator Hou Shiren wrote in the Global Times.
This piece also quoted a Dutch government study which said the Netherlands pavilion at the 2000 World Expo in Hanover cost the country €35 million, yet generated more than 10 times that amount in revenue for the economy, by promoting the tourism industry and other industries.
Visitor numbers have not been as high as expected, but the organisational behemoth that is China’s ruling Communist Party has not yet been mobilised to make sure that the Shanghai World Expo will be a success.
Just like China revolutionised the world’s biggest sporting spectacle, so too has it succeeded in breathing fresh life into the Expo.
The country has a long association with the event – a Qing dynasty businessman, Xu Rongcun, showed silk at the first World Expo in London in 1851. The People’s Republic of China exhibited some terracotta warriors from Xi’an and bricks from the Great Wall of China at its debut Expo outing in 1982.
In 1993 China was admitted as the 46th member country of the Bureau of International Exhibitions (BIE), the group which runs the Expo.
Watching the queues stretching around the various pavilions in Shanghai, no one seems bothered by the relevance of the Expo, as this is about something else – a demonstration of national pride in a country’s achievements.
And city authorities expect Shanghai’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to grow by about 6.5 percentage points as a result of the event.
There are grumbles however. Local media says that once you factor in the infrastructure spend and other measures to modernise and upgrade China’s financial centre, the Chinese have spent €47 billion.
For Shanghai’s organisers, it’s more about taking the opportunity to use the Expo infrastructure, creating the world’s longest metro system, two new airport terminals, radically refitting the historic Bund waterfront and constructing an intricate web of new roads, parks and bridges across the city.
It’s a software upgrade too, as well as a hardware overhaul. People are being ordered not to walk the streets in their pyjamas, to stop spitting and to be nice to visitors. The question is if you build the Field of Dreams, will they come? And in China you just know they will, for this is fast becoming the global powerhouse you need to be associated with.
