Heritage in Asia: Converging forces, conflicting values (original) (raw)
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Space for the Future: Exhibiting China in the World at Expo 2010
China Information, 2012
China’s modernization and rise is commonly understood as a key factor that will shape future world order. This article examines narratives at Expo 2010 Shanghai China as an instance of the local constitution of this future world. Such imaginations of China and/in the world actively create the future, through assumptions about time and space that structure the possible imaginations of China, the World, and their interrelation. This article examines how the technological and conceptual innovations that play out at the Expo draw on two common cosmologies, the ‘unit-based’ cosmology of the international state system and a Chinese ‘holistic’ imaginary of tianxia (all-under-heaven). It shows how these two cosmologies order universal/particular, time/space, and self/other through Beijing’s ‘harmonious world’ policy. It argues that the two cosmologies are not mutually exclusive, but are deployed at the Expo in ways that reinforce one another by ordering spatial difference through teleological time. The effect is a story of China and the World where others are not different; they are just behind. This is a problem because the reduction of spatial difference to place in a historical queue makes it difficult to imagine plural futures, as opposed to The Future already inscribed in the story.
Taking Baudrillard to the fair: Exhibiting China in the world at Expo 2010
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2012
Scholars have recently paid increasing attention to China’s “mega events” as a form of image management striving to influence future world order. In this article, the author examines China’s recent world fair, Expo 2010 Shanghai China, and argues that we need to move beyond the reading of mega events as simple representation and ideology and read it also as simulation and simulacra. Reading the Chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can provide different ways of relating “the West” to its “other country” China. The author examines this relation through asking what it means to be the fair: Where is the world fair? When is the world fair? Who is the world fair? Reading the world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the fair’s notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable.
Better City, Better Life? Urban Modernity at the Shanghai Expo
2020
This paper examines exhibits at the Shanghai Expo and the urban improvement schemes undertaken for the Shanghai Expo for what they reveal about the ideals for and exper iences o f u rban modern i ty in contemporary China. Rather than focus on the experiences and perceptions of a global audience, this paper examines how the Expo sought to speak to a domestic audience about state legitimacy through its messaging about urban citizenship and urban modernity. It argues that the manner in which the Expo promoted certain forms of sustainability and the domestic audience’s experiences with Shanghai urban improvements revealed tensions in the nation’s development model and excluded sectors of the population from participation.
The Shanghai Expo as a Sacred Space
Senri ethnological studies, 2013
World expositions (expos) have a history of 150 years, dating back to the London Expo of 1851. They have been subjected to study from every angle in various fields of research, including historical science, architectural history, art history, history of technology, social science, ethnology, information science, and the study of civilization. The modern Olympics, held first in 1896 in Athens and every four years since, are similar to world expos. Permanent theme parks such as Disneyland, which first opened in 1955 in Anaheim, Los Angeles, also have something in common with expos. Studying all three would thus make a valuable comparative research project. Now, why discuss expos in this IFBA international forum devoted to "enterprise and sacred space"? It is immediately obvious that expos have played a leading role in priming economies and acting as springboards for economic growth. Most expos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries signaled technological progress and economic growth, and even in the eco-friendly twenty-first century, their basic character remains unchanged. It is also obvious that the engines of economic growth are nations and enterprises, to whom expos have offered opportunities to exhibit briskness (or false presence). In this space they compete, vying for prestige. Selected athletes compete with one another at the Olympics; at expos, featured architects and designers do the same. Athletes who win medals may land advertising deals, while architects and designers who win reputations earn greater prestige. Winners in both cases increase their prospects in future business ventures. Expos surpass the Olympics in terms of business, however. At expos, enterprises demonstrate products and leverage technology in construction and exhibition, hoping to leverage their experience there in future business opportunities. Nations aiming at economic prosperity then increase investment activities, so that expos create unmatched levels of cooperation (collusion?) between nations and businesses. As case studies in business research, then, expos provide far richer material than the Olympics do. Still, it would be unwise to conclude that expos are devoted exclusively to business. Participation in expos itself has political significance for nations, and national events occurring at the sites are not exclusively preoccupied with diplomatic and ceremonial functions. Mainly on days designated as National Days, important dignitaries visit pavilions to experience various aspects of the relevant country's culture.
Planning Perspectives, 2020
Urban developments steered by major events have a long history. Already from the second half of the nineteenth century, World Expositions were mobilized as opportunities for urban upgrading. This article highlights the spatial effects of three Chinese major expositions on their host cities in the early twentieth century (1906–1929). It will in particular highlight the impact on urban development and planning, such as the construction of modern public complexes, the promotion of new urban districts, and the catalysis of structural urban transitions. Considering the significant historical, political, and social analogies, we argue in this article that expositions were adopted under the influence of foreign examples as a model of planning interventions to prompt the modernization of the host cities in China. However, while there was an important transfer of spatial concepts and models, we contend that Chinese authorities played a leading role in importing and exploiting these expositions as strategic instruments. They did so by actively and consciously mobilizing multiple urban actors such as social elites, but also civil society leaders and merchants. This article based on archival research on three expositions, provides novel insights into the urban history of the host cities during the exposition period.
Urban Planning and Mega-Event Projects: Lessons from Expo 2010, Shanghai
An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning, 2018
With the capitalist transformation from Fordist-Keynesianism to neoliberalism, megaevents such as Olympic Games and World Exposition have increasingly been incorporated into urban development plan to boost urban renewal. Seeking the role of mega-event in urban transformation and its related effects have practical significance as mega-event movements have become a worldwide phenomenon. Although the profile of world fairs is reduced and does not have the international impacts that they used to have, Shanghai Expo 2010, the first Expo ever held in a developing country is pinned hope on as the "Turn to Save the World Expo" and is unusually ambitious to bring opportunities in urban transformation. While much attention has been paid to how mega-events can be used in tourism development in previous literature, this research links mega-event to urban development. Specifically, it reviews planning history before Expo 2010, addresses how a mega-event is integrated into city's overall transformation strategy and what possible challenges a megaevent strategy may encounter related to the ultimate goal of urban transformation. It finds that political added value of mega-events empowers Shanghai to advance its urban agenda and the role of urban planner is vital to deliver a sustainable mega-event.
Sustainable World Expo? The Governing Function of Spectacle in Shanghai and Beyond
Theory, Culture & Society, 2018
This paper explores the Shanghai 2010 World Expo to show how spectacle serves a governing function of the Chinese developmental state. I introduce soil exegesis as a method to excavate sedimented power relations of spectacle, undergirding the expo’s presentation. This approach investigates how spectacle is a state-territorializing project and pedagogical venture that relies on and denies the state socialist-era’s waste, to produce a ‘new nature’ and perform socio-technical management of crisis and crowds. Dynamic rearrangement of soil quality and composition facilitated the urban redevelopment zone of sustainable futures, while interactive-technocratic environments inserted visitor bodies into expo surveillance systems and infrastructure without reference to the embedded political ecology of the mass event within Shanghai and beyond. The article concludes by considering ethical legacies of the event and the ways ‘sustainable spectacle’ operates through waste administration and environmental performance that ‘greenwash’ the socialist past and obstruct other governing arrangements.
Cultural Diplomacy, Cosmopolitanism and Global Hierarchy at the Shanghai Expo
In 2010, the city of Shanghai hosted the largest and most spectacular World’s Fair ever. Shanghai Expo attracted a staggering 73 million visitors, around 98% of whom were domestic Chinese, and involved the participation of 190 countries. As a forum of “virtual tourism,” the event is significant given the rapid and long-term growth in outbound Chinese tourism. This article pursues a closer reading of how “the world” was performed and exhibited to these visitors. Oriented by two theoretical considerations—the spatial configuration of the expo site and its cosmopolitan imagination—the article considers how the format of the Expo revealed and declared certain elements of the global, while simultaneously effacing and squeezing out others. The Expo is thus interpreted as an important mechanism in the creation of a new national citizenry in China and as part of the ceremonialization of a global polity of a “family of nations.”
Unequal cities of spectacle and mega-events in China
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2012
This paper revisits China's recent experiences of hosting three international mega-events: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. While maintaining a critical political economic perspective, this paper builds upon the literature of viewing mega-events as societal spectacles and puts forward the proposition that these mega-events in China are promoted to facilitate capital accumulation and ensure socio-political stability for the nation's further accumulation. The rhetoric of a ‘Harmonious Society’ as well as patriotic slogans are used as key languages of spectacles in order to create a sense of unity through the consumption of spectacles, and pacify social and political discontents rising out of economic inequalities, religious and ethnic tensions, and urban–rural divide. The experiences of hosting mega-events, however, have shown that the creation of a ‘unified’, ‘harmonious’ society of spectacle is built on displacing problems rather than solving them.