Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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Visualizing the Future: Images from the Oil Pavilion and GM-SAIC
One of the most popular draws at Expo 2010 was the vibrantly lit “Oil Pavilion.” (Figure 15.4, website) China’s three largest oil corporations, all state-owned, erected this Oil Pavilion as a 3,600-square-meter cube with LED screens covering its exterior walls.11 The shimmering lights of the building changed color as Expo visitors passed by, offering a particularly effervescent scene in the evening hours, while short videos were also presented on an exterior screen.12 “Oil Baby” (shiyou baobao 石油宝宝), a sugary cartoon figure with a head that appeared as a golden drop of oil, served as its mascot host, both in person and online (Figure 15.5).13
Inside the hall, visitors toured displays intended to advertise the ways in which oil contributed to the production of staple items and consumer needs, including clothing, food, housing, transportation, and objects of everyday amusement. Designers framed industrial production via objects of consumption and glitz: race cars, snazzy interior decor, and fashion. Moving through these displays, visitors subsequently could enjoy the Oil Pavilion’s own “4-D” theater and its special effects while watching a film that portrayed oil’s apparent contribution to humanity’s “wonderful future”. A final display zone offered murals, images, and dioramic displays of oil production as well asthe theme of a “green” environmental future presented as a product of the fine engineering of these oil companies. Before leaving, visitors would also pass by a wall solely dedicated to displaying the three corporate logos and then, finally, a locale at which visitors might record their own impressions of the pavilion and its theme, namely “Oil: Extending City Dreams.”
Just as the Oil Pavilion advertised the apparently essential value of oil to a comfortable and environmentally conscious future, its online displays offered additional avenues for visitors to explore the same message. Furthermore, the online venue for the Oil Pavilion, like its 4-D theater, sought to draw visitors into the drama of the display itself. There they would be participants in the consumption of a smoothly dictated understanding of the Chinese oil industry as compatible with an environmentally sound future for the planet and as an object of pride for the nation.
In addition to offering visitors a virtual tour of the pavilion itself, the Oil Pavilion also presented its own video game for online visitors to play.14 Here, visitor-players would inhabit the mascot persona of Oil Baby in an attraction designed to both amuse and educate. The game begins with little Oil Baby waking up inside a house, which is visible in cross-section, alongside a television set, air conditioner, overhead lamp, sink, door, and windows. The house, labeled “HOME,” sits before a hillside crowned with green foliage as well as a “MARKET” and unlabeled power plant. Three garbage cans with varied symbols for recycling and waste disposal stand outside on a grassy slope, not far from a blue river connected to the floor of the home by a pipe. Skies are blue and bright clouds float by. Players can utilize a panel in the upper left hand corner of the screen to control the Oil Baby character, turning appliances on and off, opening windows and shades, and managing (or mismanaging) trash. Gauges on the lower right of the screen indicate the state of the environment as well as energy supplies and their use toward exhaustion (Figure 15.5). Controlling Oil Baby, players must maneuver through a series of decisions and actions over a fixed period of time, determining which appliances to use in the course of the day and which vehicles (e.g., car versus bicycle) to utilize in running to the market. Oil Baby can stay inside with the television on and play video games, or head outside to catch butterflies. Oil Baby also has the challenge of sorting different items for recycling after enjoying a midday meal, the latter stage offering its own options in size ranging from a modest dinner or large meal all the way up to a near-banquet. Depending upon a player’s decisions, Oil Baby might survive happily until the end of the game or, quite easily, might fall into either of two failing outcomes. As Oil Baby, players may mistakenly overuse the allotted energy, leaving themselves gasping for breath and falling unconscious on the floor of the “HOME.” Or, even more dramatically, Oil Baby can leave the environment wasted through misuse, with the trees on the hill falling barren, the grass and stream outside turning to dry stone, and, just after a puff of smoke billows from the recycling cans, the entire mountain above Oil Baby’s “HOME” collapsing upon the poor creature. Oil Baby’s world, if not correctly managed, literally falls apart. The disaster, of course, remains a cartoon, and Oil Baby’s planet can be returned to its original pristine status with a simple reset of the game. The endeavor is largely one of amusement rather than substantive education.15
Figure 15.5 The Oil Baby online game from Expo 2010’s Oil Pavilion. Controls for home appliances are at the upper left, while recycling cans, and meters for consumption and conservancy are at the fore and right. The clean blue river, green lawn, and foliage indicate Oil Baby is carefully conserving at the moment, though important energy decisions await. From: http://www.cnpc.com.cn/syg/ssize/index.html [accessed 20 August 2011].
Amusement at the virtual Expo, as in its land-based original, was linked not only to a supposed education about living responsibly, but also directly to consumption, and through consumption, to identity itself. If the Oil Pavilion’s designers worked to draw the individual viewer into a digital frame through cartoon gameplay, the General Motors-Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (GM-SAIC) took the process a step further, reinventing the human individual as the very object advertised in its own 3-D film. Here, this joint state-private corporation celebrated the automobile simultaneously as consumer object and as source of social identification, one tied to a vision of the Chinese nation as a new global power for progress and enlightenment.
The film, “2030, Xing!” follows the stories of three pairs of people, carried by their cars, through a dramatic and joyous day.16 As the film starts, an omniscient voiceover tells viewers that “twenty years in the future, cars not only shorten the distance between us, they also shorten the distance between our hearts.” Viewers then follow three pairs of people amid their own vehicular and personal travels. These pairs include a “world famous” musician concerned for his grown daughter, who is blind; a husband and his extremely pregnant wife (who will go into labor while on a walk and be rescued by a computer-controlled vehicle in which she will safely give birth); and finally an estranged couple whose reunion serves as the culmination of the film. These stories overlap through quick cuts as the audience follows alongside and from within 3-D flying vehicles. Visual effects and slick editing weave the characters’ dramas through scenic views of an imagined future city, a realm that has perfectly blue skies, clean beaches, and ocean waves; the city here is a place where highways and high-rise architecture stand within an immaculate environment (in unmistakable contrast to the currently alarmingly polluted conditions of many of China’s cities, Figure 15.6, website). Corporate promotion is woven throughout, including dramatic plugs not only for GM-SAIC’s vehicles but also its OnStar subsidiary.17 In the final scenes all three pairs of human characters are reunited thanks to their GM-SAIC vehicles, including the estranged boyfriend and girlfriend who share a loving moment on a beach alongside their respective automobiles. As the music and credits conclude, we are treated to one final shot of the girlfriend’s car joyfully spinning around the boyfriend’s, the human drivers nowhere to be seen. Anthropomorphized hot rods have taken the humans’ place in their own affectionate partnership as simple residents of a perfect Chinese and global future, their attendant pollution and usage of limited natural resources conveniently forgotten in this fictive presentation of cars as pleasant stand-ins for their human drivers.
These two very popular pavilions and their media presentations garnered a broad audience during and after the Expo. We might ask, however, what this corporate-sponsored and state-sanctioned imagery obscures as it seeks to represent China’s soon-to-be-realized future. These images, like many sanctioned by the state at Expo 2010, conflate individual desire and personal fu
lfillment with conformity in the name of a greater China. They suggest that the profitable development of Chinese oil and automobile industries will bring Chinese individuals a personally fulfilling future (a premise familiar in the United States as “what’s good for General Motors is good for America”). They accomplish this by repeatedly conflating consumer and object, such that drivers become cars, and the natural resource we call “oil” becomes a cuddly animated icon that players inhabit in a role-playing video game. How do the lived experiences of Chinese people differ from the picture presented within this frame of state-corporate ideology? How did audiences respond to these images or even manipulate them to produce alternative depictions? To further our analysis of visual culture and new media related to Expo 2010, we must place these promotional images in context, juxtaposing them with alternative scenes also found in the broader stream of mass media, digital and otherwise.
Alternate Frames: Urban Development, Inequalities, and Dislocations
Almost immediately following Expo 2010’s grand opening on the first of May, alternate images of the Expo appeared. One example can be found amid concerns about crowds, lines, and ticket availability in the event’s opening weeks.18 While Expo visitors waited unhappily in hours-long queues in oppressive summer heat, internet users in Hong Kong began to share their own images as spoofs of the fair. Tweaking illustrations from favorite electronic games, cinema, and advertising, they presented epic scenes of fantasy heroes fighting their way to the Expo’s celebrated China Pavilion while grasping the much-sought “reserved ticket” for entrance there.19 Satirical images portrayed a buxom female warrior waving streams of said tickets before the viewer (and wearing the tickets as well) and heroic figures from Chinese history and literature, such as General Zhang Fei, with reserve tickets flying from their robes and armor (Figure 15.7). Far from serving as an enlightened arena for comfortable progress and social harmony, the exposition was satirized (not entirely inaccurately) as a scene for contests of endurance and access.
Figure 15.7 Satirical image of the heroic Zhang Fei competing for reserve tickets for Expo 2010. From: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20100505_1.htm [accessed 31 August 2011].
These satirical images of Expo 2010 were part of a wave of visual and textual material shared across China via social networking sites, video and blogging pages, and traditional news outlets. As we explore this rich field of digital traces and their broader context, we also gain a view of the gap between state-endorsed images advertised in Expo 2010’s productions and China’s current realities. Indeed, while images such as that presented in the GM-SAIC video offer a view to a pristine future that is supposedly just within reach, life in China today is significantly more complex. During the decade leading to Expo 2010, Chinese citizens witnessed the rising costs of basic necessities, including food, housing, education, and health care as social services diminished and inflation rose with new market reforms. Common people also encountered new problems as their old homes and neighborhoods were demolished in the name of urban development. Expo 2010 served not only as a venue for state promotion, but also unintentionally as a staging ground for economic and social dislocation.
In the months leading up to the event, even as Expo publicity was promising a “Better City, Better Life,” demolition of neighborhoods for the construction of the Expo 2010 fairgrounds inspired public protest. In February 2010, local Shanghai residents, including many who lived in neighborhoods that would be reconstructed as the Expo site, protested forced eviction from their homes. These residents sought financial compensation while also critiquing what they believed to be the collusion of officials and developers in profiteering.20 Such protests have become increasingly common in China in recent years, particularly with now-famous images of “nail-houses” (solitary homes defended by their occupants even as their neighborhoods are bulldozed around them for redevelopment) proliferating in the mainstream press and on the internet (Figure 15.8, see website).21 Older neighborhoods in the Pudong area—the same territory east of the Huangpu River where a broad portion of Expo construction took place—were rapidly torn down in broad stretches as Expo buildings (temporary in their own right), new skyscrapers, condominiums, and shopping centers were rapidly constructed. The process was, and is still in many areas, a complex one.22 Half-torn sections of older neighborhoods might survive, temporarily, and coexist with the construction. The city itself, as the Expo’s diverse messages attest, is a rapidly changing environment; but while Expo 2010’s official images focused solely upon the bright prospects of urban renovation, the attendant realities of the changing city as a site for social dislocation lay, literally, just underneath or beside these images and structures (Figure 15.9).
As the built environment of the Chinese city has been reinvented during the decade leading up to Expo 2010, so too has the visual media environment, with the proliferation of new venues enabling the expression of diverse viewpoints of a broader citizenry, both Chinese and global. Many Chinese people have begun to use blogging and online video sites to disseminate opinions, images, and homemade videos as a means to share their own perspectives and critiques, as well as to debate in a public discourse that transcends (even if only momentarily) state management. The satirical deployment of images on the internet in China is far from confined to the topic of Expo 2010. The dramatic fire at the newly constructed China Central Television (CCTV) complex in Beijing in 2009 was quickly followed by several “mashup” images that went viral as netizens merged pictures of a burning high-rise with those of attacking monsters and spaceships (Figure 15.10, see website).23 Similarly, the July 2011 high-speed train crash in Wenzhou prompted graphic imagery and direct critique of state failures, much of which appeared (and then in many cases disappeared) from online video sites such as Youku and Tudou, as well as the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo.24 The use of new media by today’s netizens parallels earlier and ongoing forms of popular commentary, such as those seen in Xiaowei Zheng’s study of the stories and visual artifacts shared by the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).25 While subject to state control and active censorship, digital media offers a live stream for real-time negotiation of concerns among Chinese citizens, state leaders, and a broad range of institutions subject to state influence, including corporations, official news agencies and journals, and educational institutions. These sites also provide scholars with a valuable range of sources to juxtapose with the officially sanctioned imagery.
Figure 15.9 A scene from Shanghai’s Pudong district amid demolition of older city neighborhoods in 2009. The freshly painted wall advertises next year’s coming Expo 2010 and its slogan, which was officially translated into English as “Better City, Better Life.” From: Personal collection of Susan Fernsebner.
An exploration of the imagery associated with Expo 2010 reveals the complexities of what the state is seeking to show and what it is seeking to hide. Juxtaposition of the official and unofficial images that surround Expo 2010 in turn suggests a highly complex relationship between state and society. As both the state and its critics adopt cutting-edge methods in new media, this relationship is being constantly renegotiated within the realm of media-promoted consumption and representation. Although the state has joined forces with corporate interests to harness the power of mass media, individuals are also using new technologies of communication to present their own images of China to a mass market, as it were, of citizens. Visual media—new and old, sanctioned and unsanctioned—thus serve diverse social and political actors in their efforts to articulate a Chinese identity and in their struggles over the appropriate roles of state and society in defining China’s future.
Notes
1. “Gala of World Civilization: World Expo 2010 Shanghai China” video presented at the official Expo 2010 Shanghai China website. http://en.expo2010.cn/documents/hqxcp.htm [accessed 9 September 2011]. For CCTV (China Central Television, a state-managed broadcast network) coverage of Expo 2010, including the opening ceremony, see the videos ava
ilable at: http://www.cctv.com/english/special/expo/live/index.shtml [accessed 20 December, 2013].
2. See “Haibao Revealed in a Cartoon Series,” in the Shanghai Daily and its exposition supplement, “Expo Insight” (7 September 2009). http://en.expo2010.cn/pdf/insight/0907.pdf [accessed 17 September 2011].
3. Expo Shanghai Newsletter, no. 32 (17 September 2009). http://en.expo2010.cn/pdf/newsletter/32.pdf [accessed 9 September 2011]. The basketball event also received significant television news coverage; see for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnjX6QhZ6xo [accessed 20 December 2013] .
4. For an exploration of this broader process, see Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), particularly “CCPTM & Adcult PRC,” 235–254.
5. In July, 2011, the China internet Network Information Center (CINIC) reported the number of Chinese Internet users as having reached 485 million. See CINIC, “Zhongguo hulian wangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao,” http://www.cnnic.net.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/hlwtjbg/201206/t20120612_26719.htm (accessed 20 December 2013).
6. For a discussion of state dominance amid economic development and market reform see Alvin So, “Rethinking the Chinese Developmental Miracle,” in Ho-fung Hung, ed., China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), 50–64.
7. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 128. China’s current population is over 1.3 billion people.