The delta of the Yangtze, the Bund’s Peace Hotel between the former buildings of the Yokohama Bank and the Chartered Bank of India and Australia, the Sassoon House and its legendary musicians: the Far East plays jazz… One does not define easily a megalopolis which is about action, avant-garde and adventure, but Shanghai, where East meets West, will certainly give the world, from May to October 2010, an extraordinary show.
In 1900, on a site planned around the meandrous stream of the Seine River, Paris staged one of the most memorable Expos ever, and managed to attract on the theme “A Century In Retrospect” 43 foreign states and more than 50 million visitors. The 2010 Shanghai World Expo whose spatial arrangement revolves around the flow of the Huangpu river will not only offer a perspective on a cosmopolitan, hyper-dynamic and broad-minded megalopolis but it will also project its more than 70 million visitors into the world’s future.
As in the various versions of the panoramic painting (Qingming Shang He Tu), or Along the River During the Qingming Festival, the 2010 Expo will present the diversity and the vitality of the Chinese people but it will also illustrate the new relations between China and the “global village”. The millions of Chinese who will visit the Shanghai Expo and its 200 pavilions are, to a certain extent, China’s 21st century global citizens.
The most populous country in the world is still often perceived as self-centred, its mandarins as being aloof and self-satisfied but such a persistent representation misses some fundamental features of the contemporary Chinese reality: an unprecedented level of opening-up, a thirst for a better understanding of the foreign world and a desire not only to modernize a huge and ancient country but to become a source of modernity. On the 5.2 square kilometres large Shanghai Expo site – more than two times the size of Monaco –, in the middle of a global city, these features will be fully revealed.
The common and vivid Chinese locution (jing di zhi wa), or the frog at the bottom of the well, is used to deride a mix of parochialism, narrow-mindedness and complacency. In an increasingly interconnected and interdependent global village, the expression does not apply to China. In a 2009 survey conducted by the Washington DC-based Pew Research Centre, it appears that 93% of the Chinese respondents had a good opinion of international trade. The same institute estimates that 88% of the Chinese believe that their country’s economic situation is good.
In the Chinese collective psyche, opening-up, progress and confidence reinforce each other. The conjunction of these characteristics partly explains why the visitor to Beijing, Shanghai or Chongqing is often astonished by the energy which circulates, indeed, in most Chinese megalopolis. In 2009, the Pew centre inquired about the level of satisfaction in 25 nations and the study shows that 87% of the Chinese are satisfied with the way things are going in their country. Any reflection on China’s political system, economy, business or diplomacy has to integrate this high level of confidence in sharp contrast with the general apprehension which dominates in the Western countries.
The Chinese citizens have been transformed into “global citizens”. The world community which hitherto was mainly a Western exclusive club has now 1.3 billion new active constituents open to the idea of a global order but who expect to be adequately represented in its regulatory or political bodies and equitably depicted in its mainstream media.
One can certainly find China’s new global citizens in the following segments of the Chinese society which give also an idea of the magnitude of China’s opening to the world.
Around 300 million Chinese people study or speak English. Events like the Shanghai World Expo stimulate the desire to learn the language of international exchanges.
With more than 3 million copies, (Can Kao Xiao Xi), or Reference News, is the newspaper with the largest circulation in the People’s Republic. Reference News’ readers appreciate the fact that its content is mainly made of translated articles published all around the world. More generally, from July 2008 to June 2009, translated books accounted for 20% of China’s overall book market by title output and 30% of sales.
As of September 2009, with 360 million Internet users, China ranks first in the world for the number of “netizens”. While the number of foreign students in China reached a record high of 223,499 in 2008, the number of Chinese studying abroad expanded to 200,000 in 2009. Since Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policy in 1978, almost 1.5 million Chinese chose to study abroad. In 2007, about 37 million Chinese travelled overseas. The World Tourism Organization predicts that 100 million Chinese tourists will travel abroad every year by 2020.
If more than 600,000 Chinese engineers graduate every year from institutions of higher education, one should also be aware that around 30 million Chinese are now learning piano and 10 million violins.
Tests to enter the top Chinese conservatories attract nearly 200,000 students a year. The Ukrainian virtuoso, Isaac Stern, portrayed in the 1980 documentary From Mao to Mozart anticipated China’s massive opening-up to the beauties of Western classical music. Robert Sirota, the distinguished American conductor and president of the Manhattan School of Music, believes that the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years.
The Chinese people’s intense interest for the world does not mean that they forget or reject their own tradition.
On the contrary, for most of the Chinese intellectuals or the Chinese global citizens, the opening up to foreign cultures is an invitation to the reinterpretation of China’s tradition.
In fact, China’s curiosity for the outside world is concomitant with a return to the Chinese tradition and a reflection on the idea of “Chineseness”.
The debates, reflections and exchanges along the river during the Shanghai World Expo will provide some more evidence of this metamorphosis.
By David Gosset
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