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Better city, better life? The ethics of branding the model city at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo

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Abstract

This article discusses the domestic dimensions of the Shanghai World Expo, its use within Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and the ethical questions it poses as a place-branding spectacle. As a public relations set piece we find that the Shanghai World Expo remains tied to an ideological narrative that is concerned ultimately not with Shanghai itself but rather with the continuing political legitimacy of the CCP. The Shanghai Expo is therefore less of a place-branding exercise than it is an exercise in the continuous rebranding of the party. The branding of host city Shanghai as the exemplary ‘harmonious city’ is further problematized by the fact that it has received international criticism for not faithfully modelling the ideals embedded within its ‘better city, better life’ theme. Considering this problematic through the prism of the Chinese ‘model locality’, it can be argued that the experience created by the virtual environment of the Expo site has an exemplary effect in which the model locality becomes an agent of change. Rather than possessing ontological value as a reflection of what the Shanghai of today is, the Expo site possesses normative value in its suggestion of what the Shanghai – indeed the China – of the future is aiming to become. In this way, the branding significance of the Expo for Shanghai is aspirational in that it tells a story of and attaches an identity to an imagined future.

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Notes

  1. For further reading on the importance of exemplary models in pre-modern and contemporary China, see Bakken (2000).

  2. Yuezhi Zhao notes that a survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences indicated that China's urban population possessed a strong sense of social conflict, including 79.1 per cent feeling conflict between capital and labour, 78.1 per cent feeling conflict between ordinary people and officials, and 75.8 per cent feeling conflict between rich and poor (Zhao, 2008, pp. 9–10). Various reports suggest that the number of public demonstrations in China has grown significantly in recent years, and estimates range in the several tens of thousands.

  3. Barmé (1999, pp. 235–236) writes that the Party increasingly represents itself ‘through a statist-corporate voice that offers basic definitions of group morality and ethics, consensus, coherence and community in ways more familiar to us from international corporate advertising practice than Maoist hyperpropaganda’.

  4. In the case of Confucius, the Party had traditionally labeled the philosopher an enemy of the state. In previous decades, linking a public figure to Confucius was a form of severe denunciation.

  5. Other milestones on contemporary China's timeline of optimism include the return of Hong Kong to mainland China in 1997, China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 1999, and China's first manned space mission in 2008.

  6. A large poster located in one of the main check-in halls of Hongqiao International Airport in September 2010 promoted an activity relating to a song featuring employee behavioral standards.

  7. The branding significance of the ‘street’ finds more recent parallels in the significance of the term tiandi (, literally ‘world’), with Hong Kong company Shui On's Shanghai Xintiandi (literally ‘New world’) commercial/retail district, built in 2001/2002 sparking renewed interest in this term.

  8. The 846-m long Qianmen Commercial Street redevelopment is adjacent to the southern end of Tiananmen Square, Beijing's geographic, political and symbolic heart. It shares Beijing's central north–south axis with the city's key landmarks, including Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong's mausoleum, the Forbidden City, the Bell and Clock Towers and, most recently, the 2008 Olympics’ Water Cube and Birds Nest Stadium.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Andrea Insch and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on the article.

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  1. Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, 2109, NSW, Australia

    Nicholas Dynon

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Dynon, N. Better city, better life? The ethics of branding the model city at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Place Brand Public Dipl 7, 185–196 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pb.2011.21

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