3. US pavilion uncertainty
& T r% Q! K6 C& u National pavilions are like student exhibits at a science fair. At the expo, they say a lot about a country's economic prowess. China's towering pavilion certainly makes a statement. More than 200 countries and groups have one – but the US may be a no-show. The State Department won't fund a pavilion; it hasn't for any recent expo. A private group is cleared to host one, but it will be hard to raise funds in this recession. America's absence would be too bad – especially given how much our first fairs meant to some US cities.
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4 t% ^0 X$ [+ a+ v1 k* s* S. k 4. Ties to the Beijing Olympics6 E, E7 [. Y+ W% V/ T
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The cutesy "Fuwa" Olympic mascots have their companion in "Haibao," the expo's Gumby-like symbol. Haibao's lead designer explained that the character's blueness "symbolizes many things: the earth, dreams, the oceans, life, future, and technology." Shanghai 2010 is being touted as an "Economic Olympics." And there's an expo educational drive going on that mirrors, on a more local scale, the Olympic one of a few years back. So schoolchildren in Shanghai are learning that one sign of America's rise to global power in the late 1800s was that it became the first non-European country to host world's fairs, and one sign of China's lowly status was that it was viewed as too backward to hold such events.
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5. The Olympic-expo combo6 d) |& O/ o0 b; X+ [; `( C
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China's use of back-to-back mega-events calls to mind what regional rival Japan did successfully a few decades ago amid its economic ascent. Japan's first Olympics (Tokyo in 1964) and its first world's fair (Osaka in 1970) imprinted a new image of the nation as a thoroughly modern country, light years removed from the exotic land whose pavilions at old fairs were, like China's, showcases for quaint objects, not state-of-the-art technologies. This is just the sort of two-part rebranding move that China's leaders began in Beijing last August and hope to carry forward in Shanghai a year from now. |
发表于 2012-8-14 23:21:39
