But some had grander hopes for the Expo – namely, that it would ‘showcase China’s soft power’... As it happened, the events that swirled around the Expo’s closing weeks showcased something quite else: Why China doesn’t have much soft power and why the West, broadly defined, still has it in spades.

As an effort to attract Chinese tourists to the US or improve America's image in China, the pavilion was an epic failure; but as a symbol of Obama's America, it wasn't bad. It's not very surprising that Shanghai Expo 2010, which just ended (coincidentally) on Halloween night, never attracted much interest in the US.

Despite the official tally of 73 million visitors, the vast majority of them mainland Chinese, the world's response to Shanghai's self-proclaimed moment in the sun has been been a gigantic, collective yawn. And no wonder.

How does Brand Oz look in China these days? Jennifer Mills went to the Shanghai Expo to see the results of Simon Crean's recent nation branding exercise.

The 2010 World Expo may be coming to a close but the ideas it has provided over the past six months are “invaluable” to tackling some of today's biggest challenges, including rapid urbanization, climate change and sustainable development, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in Shanghai on Sunday.

Over the last months Jay Wang from the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in Los Angeles, CA has done a formidable work covering the pavillions of some of the most important countries and the world and has also interviewed some of the executives in charge of them.

Earlier this week we looked at how countries have taken different tactics in their nation branding efforts at the Shanghai’s World Expo. But, how do these approaches render in real life?

More than 190 countries and 50 organizations are represented at the event, which has had at least 52 million visitors thus far. Of those 52 million, there are roughly 160 American college students working at the U.S. pavilion in the Student Ambassadors Program run by the University of Southern California. The event runs through the end of October.