From July until November in 2010, which totals up to almost four months, I was employed as a “student ambassador” at the United States Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. My job responsibilities consisted mostly of introducing the various parts of the Pavilion to Chinese guests (in Chinese of course). Naturally this gave me a lot of time to interact with them and talk to them about their views on the Expo, other countries including the US, and their very own native China. When not working, I would explore the other pavilions both for my own interest and to see how Chinese guests responded to the presentations made by the other countries.
First and foremost, I think we have to consider what exactly a “World Expo” looks like in practice. Before I arrived I had this image in my head of people all over the world coming together, interacting, and learning about other cultures. But the reality did not turn out as I had expected. By my own rough estimate based on personal observation, I’d say that the number of foreign visitors was no more than five percent, meaning that the vast majority of those who attended the Expo were individuals born in China. Not that this is necessarily a problem, mind you, but it does affect the general atmosphere of the event. Add to that the fact that, in many of the pavilions for lessdeveloped countries, due to language barriers, most if not all of the individuals that interact with the guests were themselves native Chinese, one must ask oneself, to what extent were the Chinese guests truly being shown the world? Were they only being shown a world created by public relations firms and marketed specifically to them?
And what impression did the Chinese give the foreigners? My own experiences with the Chinese guests were overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately, however, people tend to best remember the negative, and lots of commentators, both Chinese and foreign, have criticized Expo guests for certain behaviors such as yelling, queue-jumping, and so on. I have to admit that one thing that saddened me was that sometimes visitors seemed more interested in reaching the gift shop than in learning about a faraway place. But, once again, I do want to stress that this was a minority.
I think what’s telling about such happenings, however infrequent they may be, is that we need to broaden our understanding of what the “World”part of the World Expo really means. For many guests who came from the hinterlands of China, they were not only experiencing Indonesia or Brazil for the first time, they were also experiencing a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis like Shanghai. That is to say, Shanghai was as much a part of the Expo as anything within the official Expo grounds. Not only would a non-local Chinese visitor potentially experience a new, more global, lifestyle within the city, but they may even run into some of the city’s many foreign expatriates under far less artificial circumstances than within the Expo gates! Shanghai itself is very much a World Expo every day of every year, not just for six months in 2010.
That said, I think the greatest irony of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo was its theme of “Better City, Better Life.” While I recognize that this is not a literal translation of the theme as it’s written in Chinese, namely, “城市让生活更美好” (“Cities Make Life Better”), the English version especially connotes a sense that the individuals throughout the world (including China) who do not happen to live in urban environments are left out of the Expo’s central conversation. For a country where it is still case that the majority of people live in rural environments—although population trends indicate that this may change in the near future—China needs to acknowledge their participation is a crucial part of making the humanistic goals of the Expo a reality and, moreover, continuing China on its path towards becoming a prosperous nation. Only by individuals experiencing all walks of life can we truly claim to have experienced the world.
(Author: PHD of the University of California Berkeley)