Haibao, Shanghai World Expo and the Branding of Nations

In the biggest World Expo yet, Shanghai and China have pulled out all the stops to make another global post-Olympic splash. In this regard they have succeeded… the waterfront of Shanghai’s Huangpu River has been transformed in just a few years. The Bund has a rival (albeit it temporary) for attention as millions of mostly Chinese crowd into this large Epcot like environment in search of “Better City, Better Life”… the Expo theme.

You can’t go anywhere near China without running into ads for this extravaganza or seeing a Haibao figure (looks a bit like a blue Gumby and represents the color water) on a poster or on television (my favorite is the larger than life “Mexican Haibao” I saw in a downtown Shanghai park)… Expo advertisements like Haibaos are everywhere in China and Asia although if you live in the US or Europe it’s rare to see anything. At this point I’ve seen a short ad on CNN’s airport channel in DC and on Bloomberg’s Asia News on cable… and that was late at night.

On the other hand, if you happen to be anywhere near Shanghai, say in Nanjing or Beijing, it’s worth a trip to visit the site and you still have over four months to make it… the “world’s fair” lasts six months and it’s just started.

But what’s the purpose? Clearly this is another opportunity for China to take the spotlight on the world stage. The Expo is huge… not just in scale but in participation and the lines to get into the pavilions are very very long (when I was there the wait for the Saudi pavilion was 8 hours!). Unfortunately, Expo is not widely known outside of China and Asia and the demographics of the attendees reflects the regional character of this event. At the same time it has a global imprint and impact as almost every nation has a presence (Pavilion) at the site and China made it clear how important it was for every nation to be there.

It’s “public diplomacy” at work… originally a chance to show off the latest in technology and architecture (there are some really cool pavilions!) it’s now mostly an exercise in national pride, showmanship and “nation branding” at work.

Interestingly, the U.S. was almost a noshow… if not for the last minute intervention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton we would have been most prominently and embarrassingly absent. Since it’s illegal for the US to use public money in this endeavor, corporate donors had to be convinced to step up. This was harder than you might imagine since many of what we think of as US companies (McDonald’s, Coke, Starbucks, KFC, etc.) are really global companies and had already signed on as major Expo sponsors… they were already committed to the Expo and not to supporting a US presence.

Despite what you think of these things, the US needed to be at this Expo. As US Commissioner General for the Expo, Jose Villarreal noted in a conversation to a group I was in… “The US Expo Pavilion will see more Chinese visitors in the next six months than our Embassy and all our consulates in China will during the next 30 years. This is the chance of a lifetime to influence a huge number of people”. It was also vitally important for the Chinese… a U.S. noshow would have been a huge snub and this is not the sort of thing we needed for diplomacy of any sort… public or private.

The wait for entry into the US Pavilion can be as long as 4 hours… see what you can do to get into the VIP line (any VIP line)! Yes, it’s always seemed a bit odd to me that in a country with a recent history like China that there seems to always be a VIP line, or lane, or room, or tables… for high party officials, VIPs, etc… one of the country’s apparent contradictions. I could go on for a while, pointing out other interesting tidbits… for example, I’m trying not to read anything into the fact that while the US Pavilion is near to one of the major entry points, the Iranian and North Korean pavilions are all the way at the other pole of the Expo site… China directly in the middle! I’m sure a lot of thought was put into this placement, for this is the country of Feng Shui.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back in September, I just hope the lines are shorter… I don’t normally qualify for the VIP entrances.

For a view on the US effort at Expo take a look at Jian Wang's comments at:
http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/a_little_good_news_from_the_us_pavilion/