Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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5. Sichuan sheng, Mianyang diqu linye ju wenjian, “Guanyu jiaqiang dui da maoxiong xiankuang guancha he dui jianzhu kaihua siwang hou de huifu qingkuang jinxing diaocha zongjie de tongzhi” [Concerning the strengthening of the observation of the present giant panda situation and the survey of advancing of the post bamboo flowering and die-off recovery], Dilin jingying 76, no. 32, March 13, 1976.
6. Yang Ruoli, Zhang Fuyun, and Luo Wenying, “1976 nian da xiongmao zainan xing siwang yuanyin de shenlun” [Probing into reasons for the 1976 catastrophic death of giant pandas], Acta Theriologica Sinica 1, no. 2 (December 1981): 128.
7. Yang, Zhang, and Luo, “1976 da xiongmao siwang yuanyin,” 128.
8. PRC, Nonglin bu [Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry], “Guanyu jiaqiang da xiongmao baohu gongzuo de jiji tongzhi” [Urgent notice concerning giant panda protection work], Nonglin 76, lin zi no. 20, March 16, 1976, 1. Qian Danning, ed., Pingwu xianzhi [Pingwu county gazetteer] (Chengdu: Sichuan kexue jishu chuban she, 1997), 505–506.
9. National and Pingwu county archival forestry documents from February to April of 1976.
10. Jiang Tingan, “Zai da xiongmao de guxiang,” 15–16; Yang, Zhang, and Luo, “1976 da xiongmao siwang yuanyin”; Zong Zhaomin, “Da xiongmao siwang yu dizhen de guanxi” [The relationship between giant panda death and earthquakes], unpublished paper, 1; Xie Zhong and Jonathan Gipps, The 2001 International Studbook for Giant Panda [sic], Ailuropoda melanoleuca (Beijing and London: Chinese Association of Zoological Gardens and Bristol Zoo Gardens, 2001), 18–20.
11. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott characterizes “high modernism” as a commitment on the part of the state to reshape nature along “rational” lines to fit perceived human needs, and a confidence that such efforts will result in continued, linear progress. Reshaping nature, according to Scott, has first required making nature “legible” within the framework of modern science.
12. Sichuan sheng, Pingge fa, 5.
13. Sichuan sheng, Pingge fa, 6.
14. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 116, 460; Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 115–120.
15. RMRB, January 1975-January 1985.
16. RMRB, August 17, 1983: 1.
17. Dong Zhiyong, “Qiangjiu ‘guobao’ da xiongmao” [Saving the ‘national treasure’ the giant panda] interview by journal reporter in, Yesheng dongwu [Chinese Wildlife] 3 (May 1984): 1.
18. Christopher S. Wren, “Bureaucracy and Blight Imperil China’s Pandas,” New York Times, July 3, 1984: C1.
19. RMRB, February 24, 1984: 3.
20. RMRB, March 16, 1984: 1. Here the term “guobao” or “national treasure” specifically refers to the giant panda. The term was coined during the Nixon visit to express to the United States that the gift of giant pandas was a gift of something precious and treasured in China.
21. Dong Zhiyong, “Qiangjiu ‘guobao’ da xiongmao,” 2.
22. Interviews conducted by Songster.
23. George B. Schaller, The Last Panda (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 202, 204–205.
24. Pan Wenshi, interview with Songster, 2001.
25. Yin Hong, “Zhongguo yesheng dongwu baohu xiehui fu zeren tan,”3; Wren, “Bureaucracy and Blight Imperil China’s Pandas”; Christopher S. Wren, “Chinese Official Denies Gift for Pandas was Sidetracked,” New York Times, October 17, 1984: A19.
26. Wren, “Bureaucracy and Blight Imperil China’s Pandas”; Wren, “Chinese Official Denies Gift.”
27. Some of the material on yeren included here is drawn from Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
28. Zhao Zhongyi, interview with Schmalzer, November 5, 2002.
29. See Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
30. Stories about Li Guohua are among the most common in Deng-era yeren literature. See, for example, Liu Minzhuang, Jiekai “yeren” zhi mi [Solving the ‘yeren’ mystery] (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1988), 164–67.
31. Shang Yuchang, “Cong Zhu Feng diqu ‘xueren’ kaocha tanqi” [Talking about yeti investigations from the Mount Everest area], Huashi 3 (1979): 8; Yuan Zhenxin and Huang Wanbo, “‘Yeren’ zhi mi xiang kexue tiaozhan” [The “yeren” mystery poses a challenge to science], Huashi 1 (1979): 8; Liu Minzhuang, Jiekai ‘yeren’ zhi mi, 100; Song Youxing, Yeren de chuanshuo [Yeren legends] (Hongkong: Xianggang haiwan chubanshe, 1986), 3.
32. Wang Bo, Yeren zhi mi xin tan [New investigations of the yeren mystery] (Chongqing: Kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 1989), 115–16.
33. Zhou Guoxing, “Shennongjia ‘yeren’ kaocha” [Investigation of Shennongjia yeren], Kexue shiyan 2 (1979): 30.
34. Song Youxing, Yeren de chuanshuo, 105, 108.
35. Wang Ping and Lü Xue, “Guangxi ‘tongsu wenxue re’ diaocha ji” [An investigation of Guangxi’s “popular literature fever”], Wenyi bao 2 (1985): 40.
36. Gao Xingjian (Mabel Lee, trans.) Soul Mountain [Lingshan] (New York: Harper Collins, 2000 [1990]), 364.
37. Zhou Liangpei, Yeren ji [A yeren collection] (Beijing: Hua xia chubanshe, 1992), 97. The “tail” here is symbolic only. In legends and eyewitness accounts, yeren do not have tails.
38. Claire Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 91–125.
39. Zhou Liangpei, Yeren ji, 96–99.
40. Gao Xingjian, “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” trans. Bruno Roubicek, Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (1990 [1985]), 192, 239.
41. Gao Xingjian, “Wild Man,” 244.
42. June Teufel Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 237–47.
43. For this point, see Ralph Litzinger, Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 231.
44. Gao Xingjian, “Wild Man,” 201.
45. Zhou Liangpei, Yeren ji, 97–98.
46. Li Guohua, interview with Schmalzer, April 17, 2002; Yuan Yuhao, interview with Schmalzer, April 16, 2002; Zhang Jinxing, interview with Schmalzer, April 18, 2002; Zhang Jinxing, Zheng zuo Gudaoer, yong tan ‘yeren’ mi [Striving to be like Goodall, bravely exploring the ‘yeren’ mystery] (Beijing: Zhongguo kexue tanxian xiehui, 2002), 4.
47. Gene Poirier and Richard Greenwell, The Wildman of China (New York: Mystic Fire Video, Inc., 1990). My translation differs somewhat in style, though not in meaning, from that provided in the film.
48. Zhou Liangpei, Yeren ji, 98.
49. Interviews with Schmalzer, 2002.
50. James Scott, Seeing Like a State.
Chapter 15
Contextualizing the Visual and Virtual Realities of Expo 2010
Susan R. Fernsebner
In the months leading up to “Expo 2010 Shanghai,” the first official world’s fair to be held in China, advertisements for the event abounded. Promotional video created under the auspices of the Chinese Communist state declared the exposition a celebration of achievements in “urban civilization,” noting the theme of the event itself as “Better City, Better Life.” State promoters promised that the Expo would display the potential for a “harmonious coexistence between humans and nature in the cities of the future.”1 Meanwhile the official Expo mascot, a blue creature named “Haibao” (海宝), promoted the coming event as a fun-filled spectacle in his2 own public appearances, video, and a serial television program (Figure 15.1). A Fall 2009 edition of the official Expo Shanghai Newsletter offers similar promotional rhetoric. The lead story
notes that a city-wide tourism festival, “an entertainment extravaganza,” would take place in conjunction with Expo 2010, and attendees could purchase enticing multi-event ticket packages. Other articles in the newsletter note the Expo’s upcoming displays of Chinese jade “and its 8,000-year history” by a Taiwanese organization, as well as opportunity for all to appreciate the “grassland beauty” of Inner Mongolia that would be displayed at the fair. The same newsletter also heralds the upcoming “virtual Expo online” through which all individuals worldwide with access to the internet could tour the halls of the exposition from the comfort of their very own home.3 This array of celebratory images for Expo 2010 advertises a greater China, including politically contested territories, as well as the new position held by the People’s Republic of China on a global stage.
The author wishes to thank Michael G. Chang, Joshua Goldstein, and Sigrid Schmalzer for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Figure 15.1 Haibao, mascot of Expo 2010, welcomes visitors to the Pavilion of the Future. Haibao’s gender has been debated, though the consensus seems to be that Haibao is male. One official introduction categorizes Haibao as being of “a boyish character.” His hobbies are listed as “taking baths and dancing” while his favorite beverage is “coffee-tea,” said to help him maintain his energy for greeting exposition visitors. His height, in the same quick-facts introduction, is listed as “can be as high as he wants.” From: Personal collection of Susan Fernsebner.
The content of this publicity, moreover, is intricately linked to the evolving methods of its propagation. These methods include a potent mix of new and long-existent media, including print, television, digital media and internet venues, and through these channels an overlap with state propaganda itself. Indeed, in Expo 2010’s imagery we find a grand-scale example of the Chinese Communist state’s adoption of corporate methods of advertising, particularly in the realm of visual culture, and the state’s own appropriation of popular culture and entertainment.4 As such, Expo 2010 provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which the Chinese state and its corporate partners have set forth publicity as a more subtle form of propaganda, and to investigate a related phenomenon, namely the relationship between state and popular images in Chinese social, cultural, and political discourse.
The Chinese state mobilized publicity for Expo 2010 as a symbol of China’s twenty-first-century modernization. Much of this publicity was aimed directly at a Chinese domestic audience and shared not only via television and print periodicals, but also through the realm of “new media,” including websites, popular video pages, and social networking venues. Indeed, these venues were celebrated by the fair’s promoters, who heralded Expo 2010 as the first fully online world’s fair. Yet ironically, even as the state utilized the internet to promote Expo 2010 and its own political message of “harmonious development,” the emergence of digital media itself also placed the ability to disseminate alternative images into the hands of millions of Chinese “netizens” (individuals using the internet) to share their own commentary and critique.5 While the Chinese state seeks to mobilize and control a public discourse, ordinary people have mobilized similar tools to offer alternative presentations. Returning to a point made in this volume’s introduction, if the state seeks to “see” and control a citizenry, an examination of Expo 2010 and the new media accompanying it reveals that seeing is indeed a “two-way street.”
This chapter will explore the complexities of Expo 2010 and its broader social and political context through visual traces of the fair itself. These traces include images and video created by the event’s state and corporate sponsors as well as other images and scenes from diverse sites that summer. Indeed, there were—and still are—multiple realms for experiencing Expo 2010: not just the Expo fairgrounds and pavilion architecture, but also the surrounding city in which it was located, Shanghai. The three main sections that follow will offer historical background for the event and its conception, a close analysis of the visual evidence (including an online video game and a feature video drama) from two popular Expo pavilions, and finally a look at alternate images of the event, its impact on local communities, and its implications for the analysis of state-society relationships in China today.
Expo 2010, Market Reforms, and Visions of a New Global Order
Shanghai’s Expo 2010, like the Beijing Olympics of 2008 (Figure 15.2, website), served as a sign of China’s arrival in the twenty-first century. Expo promoters celebrated the event not only as China’s first official world’s fair but also as a sign of China’s new position in a global economy. The Expo advertised claims to Chinese technological innovation as well as twenty-first-century concerns for matching economic development with proclaimed aspirations of environmental sustainability. The joint bureaucratic and private sector sponsorship of the event parallels a similar partnership in engineering a Chinese economy, one in which an authoritarian state plays a dominantrole in guiding developmental planning and strategic investment while corporate interests have capitalized upon related market reforms, particularly since the late-1990s.6 Indeed, amid the past decade’s economic boom in China, the categories of state and society, consumption and identity often appear blended. The Chinese Communist Party, through its state apparatus and corporate sponsorship, has utilized an ever-expanding realm of visual spectacle to tie Chinese identity to new products, technologies, and Nationalist celebration.
Expo 2010, as presented by its organizers, symbolized the changing nature of a global economy and China’s rising power as a nation that would lead the world through technological innovation and an enlightened approach to global problems. In promoting the event, organizers of Expo 2010 broadcast new concerns for sustainability and environmental preservation in concert with the growing demand to bring the standards of living associated with “development” to the broadest population. Indeed, China itself has come to represent these inherently global challenges. Despite its success in both industry and, increasingly, higher-end technical and consumer production, the People’s Republic is home to obvious economic disparities, particularly between urban and rural sectors, and faces increasing challenges of a rapid urbanization that has accompanied economic reform. In 2005, China witnessed an urbanization rate of roughly 43 percent. Looking ahead, China’s urban areas are projected to be home to 60 percent of its population, with an additional 100–200 million rural residents moving to cities by the year 2020.7
Exposition organizers and state officials, speaking to these issues, promoted urban and sustainable development as one of the event’s main themes and advertised it as one of the event’s two unique “innovations” as a world’s fair. This theme was supposedly crystallized in the “Urban Best Practices Area” that would stand among the Expo’s many halls as a celebrated arena for exhibition of different global cities’ own projects in creating a better “quality of urban life” for their citizens. Here, Expo 2010 organizers envisioned an international stage for comparing diverse achievements in technological development and environmental sustainability. The outcome during the run of the Expo itself was indeed diverse. In many cases, other advertised attractions seemed to supplant the original theme focus for the Urban Best Practices Area. While different cities offered exhibits on water management, recycling, and open improvements in communication technologies for urban spaces, many (including some of the same exhibitors) also highlighted tourist attractions. Video displays offered a preview of the sights one might enjoy upon visiting a locale while performers and artisans arrived to share local culture through music and the arts. Many city exhibit centers also offered opportunities to win prizes, with football (a.k.a. soccer) souvenirs offered by city display centers such as Liverpool and Madrid earning particular attention.8 Tourism and consumption often were brought to the fore while displays of technology and new approaches to urban issues served as a background to advertised tourist attractions.
Expo 2010’s organizers also heralded a second “innovation�
�� and “achievement” in their staging of the event, namely the always-available “Online Expo.” (Figure 15.3, website) Here, designers offered the Expo itself as an object of mass consumption, ever-ready for the eager individual who wished to possess his or her own entry ticket. Advertised via video preview and, even a year after the event itself, still available via the World Wide Web, the Online Expo offered access to a virtual expo fairground. Its designers framed this online tour as an experience of the fair that would allow viewers to escape the trouble of crowds, queuing, and travel in the muggy Shanghai summer.A preview advertised the Online Expo as an “everlasting virtual exhibition that prolongs and spreads the legacy of the world expo” and as a means by which the “excitement will be with you anywhere, anytime!”9 The Online Expo thus supposedly defied both space and time via its twenty-four-hour availability to anyone with access to the World Wide Web.
While many who toured the physical site of the Expo that summer complained of the long lines for entrance to popular pavilions—where wait times routinely exceeded five hours—the Online Expo pavilions promised instant gratification. In many respects, this promise echoed the official Expo theme of a “Better City, Better Life.” Like the ideal future city that the fair advertised, the Online Expo would supposedly allow an individual to experience every moment in full comfort. A virtual guide would “accompany users” as they toured digital, 3-D spaces at the fair while ensuring that their online visit was “meaningful and entertaining.”10 The promise of easy consumption, celebrated in terms of “excitement” and instant availability, served as a dominant theme. Online Expo presentations included concerns for enlightened approaches to creating that “Better Life,” while at the same time folding these into the flash (literally, in their programming) of media for the individual-as-consumer. At the same time, the online message set forth a very specific vision of development itself. A survey of two Online Expo pavilions and the visual presentations they offered reveals a conflation of corporate and bureaucratic messages intended to entertain, instruct, and promote loyalty to their sponsors, both the Communist state and its capitalist agents. At the same time, they also show a progression in which consumer identification with the advertised object equates to loyalty to the nation itself.