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on October 13, 2010 @ 11:10 am
The Shanghai Expo: A catalyst for trade? Commerce? Global Knowledge? Migrant workers? Learning about China?
As a filmmaker and engineer, I find short videos that log the progress of international trade and commerce quite entertaining. When created by students who are not fettered by all the restrictions of television networks, they are additionally revealing. This compensates for what they may lack in media artistry. However, you have to pay attention.
A case in point: Mr. Wang has posted several of his short videos on the Shanghai exhibition on this site. However the video on the Saudi Arabian pavilion is posted, devoid of any words from him. That omission says more than the video did, since this clearly was not a consequence of his inability to write. Especially for a website on public diplomacy, hard truths may be better left unsaid in the interests of promoting trade and commerce.
The Kingdom’s “IMAX surround” film was thought to be highly entertaining by the local Chinese people, judging by the queues into the pavilion. The Chinese as a nation, have shown less anxiety to leave their land in search of work abroad, than for instance poor East Indians and Indonesians. To Chinese attendees at the exhibit, who have never left Shanghai, the fate of those of the world’s poor that emigrate to Saudi, desperate for work, may not be well known. Did some of the exhibit’s Chinese visitors feel inclined to apply for work in the Kingdom as a result of the exhibit? If so, were they professionals who could be well paid “ex-pats” or would they be considered illiterate migrant workers, “the lowest” on a large vertical scale?
Now that China is swiftly opening its internet borders to let the world in, faster than the Shanghai Expo ever could, do the Chinese people get a chance to read about the countries they have hosted and their labor laws? Even if they did, does the daily hurly burly of staying financially progressive take up all their energy? Was the exhibit a passing novelty to be remembered fondly or fuel for ambitions fostered by this new “window on the world.” Is the grass greener beyond that fence for many Chinese, or do they prefer home turf?
One can ask these questions, but even if one gets answers, they would probably be incomplete at best. Nonetheless, they are part of the array of questions that all western cultures need to be contemplating. Despite all the countries represented at the Shanghai Expo, the most significant one was probably the host country itself. Even without the leverage of enormous loans China currently carries for some countries, the US in particular, the Chinese answers to the questions above will be a major factor in what the world looks like, a few decades from today.
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