I knew going into the Shanghai Expo that I would probably hate it.  No one—neither the critics who stayed at home nor the people who had actually went—said anything remotely positive to me about it.  They complained about the lines, the heat, and, most of all, the sheer number of people.  Now having been there, I can safely say that they were telling the truth.

But I don’t want to spend these lines complaining—far from it.  For me, the Shanghai Expo raises many questions about the face of modern China and its citizens.  My posts in the following days will investigate the conundrums that arise when half a million people a day from 200 countries, but mostly China, decide to congregate in an area just over five square kilometers.

—

The first day was bad.  Not unbearable, but not nearly enticing enough to make me want to go back.  Throughout the day, one question kept running through my mind: what is the purpose of this Expo?

I came home and looked for a mission statement but was unable to find any coherent statement of purpose from the official site.  I was left to wonder.

CULTURAL EXCHANGE?

The Expo is a grand gathering of over 200 countries and organizations, each with their own culture or interests.  Looking at the interminable lines of people queuing to visit the pavilion of a country they had probably never heard of, I joked to my mother that to enter a country’s pavilion one should have to be able to locate that country on a map to which she replied that the purpose of the Expo was to give people the chance to understand the countries that they didn’t know and had never been to.

Fair enough.  The Expo is a great opportunity for the majority of Chinese who might never have the chance to travel abroad to explore and learn about the myriad other countries with whom they share the world.  But at times, the Expo seems more like a mad scramble for passport stamps and pictures of impractical architecture than any sort of cross-cultural understanding.  Indeed, in the Russian pavilion hundreds of flashbulbs captured the Pandoran landscape that scaled the walls but I didn’t see a single person listen to or watch the videos explaining Russia’s technological developments.

At the end of my first day, I watched a performance at the World Expo Cultural Center, which is arguably the most impressive building on the grounds, resembling the alien spaceship from Independence Day.  The purpose of the show was ostensibly to showcase the world’s musical culture and included everything from Riverdance to flamenco to folk songs about the Communist Party but all the performers were Chinese.  A few songs were performed in foreign languages—a Japanese ballad and an aria from Turandot—but the rest seemed like Chinese interpretations of foreign culture, which was interesting and informative in its own way.  We are all familiar with Western interpretations of Chinese culture, from Enter the Dragon to Rush Hour to Kung-Fu Panda, but seeing the Chinese interpret other cultures was a rare delight.

There was a quartet that played “famous” songs from every country.  The choice from the Americas?  Kenny G’s “Going Home.”  Granted, it is a fairly common song in China, especially when a store is trying to get people to leave.  Another was a Bollywood number that to me, who has only seen two Bollywood movies and Slumdog Millionaire, seemed pretty on the mark.  There were two African numbers, one vaguely Egyptian and the other sub-Saharan.  In the latter, a group of men wearing skintight black shirts and leggings stomped out with spears.  For some reason the music in both African numbers began with chanting and drumming but ended with a techno beat.  In the end it was hard to know if I was watching a burlesque show or a harmless attempt to encapsulate culture.  Even more I wondered what most Chinese would take away from this and if they would realize that this show, and the Expo in general, was just an approximation of a country’s culture.

COMMON HUMANITY?

Maybe the Expo isn’t about understanding countries, but rather appreciating the diversity of human beings.  In the opening video of the USA pavilion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton celebrates what she calls “core American values,” which apparently include, “diversity, innovation, and optimism.”  (I will not go into detail about the USA pavilion; it will be singled out for especial ridicule in a later post.)  I can stand by that.  The world is composed of many different cultures and traditions but in the end we are, for better or worse, human.

Because each pavilion employs workers from its own country, there are literally people from all over the world at the Shanghai Expo.  On the one hand it is heartening to see Chinese people taking pictures of people of different races, tacitly taking an interest in the world’s diversity; perhaps some of the visitors have never met anyone from many of the countries represented at the Expo.  But taking pictures of someone because of their race or nationality or skin color can be horribly demeaning for the subject.  It’s one thing to take a picture with someone as a gesture of bonding, and quite another to take someone’s picture because they are an oddity.  Fellow blogger Abby Fitzgibbon, who has been to the Expo twice against her will, confided that she saw one African volunteer plead with visitors to stop taking her picture.

At moments, far from unifying mankind, the Expo is distinctly dehumanizing.  In the morning as I was walking along one of the elevated walkways that criss-cross the Expo, I looked down to see a line for a pavilion.  People were packed into three rows, cordoned off by metal railings.  As the gates were opened, the people flooded into another holding pen, pushing and trampling each other.  While the Expo serves to bring many different kinds of people together, the sheer number of them leads the mind to abstraction.

DICKWAVING?

If there was ever an original purpose to the World’s Fair, the original name for these expos, then it was to showcase technological and cultural superiority.  The first World’s Fair, held in London in 1851, was a testament to the British Empire’s wealth and glory.  Perhaps in this sense the 2010 Shanghai Expo is a worthy successor.  Following shortly on the heels of the Olympics, this Expo is a symbol of Shanghai’s, and by extension, China’s greatness.  Superlatives are everywhere: the largest Expo site with the most countries represented; the most expensive and expected to be the most visited.

Case in point: the China pavilion.  Costing 1.5 billion Yuan ($220 million) and built on a base which is already taller than most of the other pavilions, the China pavilion towers far above all other comers.  It is a pity only a fraction of the people who make the pilgrimage to the Expo will be able to see the inside.  Tickets are either alotted to tour groups or distributed at 9AM, when people rush in to snag the limited tickets given out each morning.

The other original aim of the expo, displaying technology from around the world, has been largely jettisoned.  Apart from the Japan pavilion and a few others, newfangled gadgets are nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps anticipating the number of visitors, most countries decided not to allow visitors to handle objects, as anything that 70 million people touch is likely to break.  In this age, and especially in China, new technology doesn’t remain new for long; fake iPads came on the market about a week after the official release.  Perhaps if Apple or Sony had their own pavilion there would be some interesting toys but with copyrights and patents, anything that can be displayed by a country is either outdated or a state secret.

—

So dickwaving it is.  The expo is part popularity contest, part beauty pageant, and, with all the interests and money involved, part political primary.  It’s hard not to wonder what the nearly $50 billion that went into making the expo could have meant for China, not to mention what other countries could have done with the money for their individual pavilions.  But that’s not fair for me to say.  If there is an intended audience for this Expo, I’m not it.  Comically large IMAX screens and Bolivian folk bands do not move me.  I have heard of all of these countries and, with the exception of North Korea, could go there if I wanted to.  I wonder what it would be like if I were a child or a villager.  Maybe my mom was right.  Maybe this expo is just an opportunity to see new things, not necessarily to understand them.  It’s a chance to realize that there’s a big world out there.  It’s a chance to learn or be reminded of common human principles: diversity, hope, wonder, and perhaps most of all, patience.