The Futurities and Utopias of the Shanghai World Exposition

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Expo 2010 Theme Pavilions

The Shanghai World Exposition, hailed by the PRC’s official news media as ‘the largest ever Expo in history’, was far more than a theme park. It was a large-scale attempt at political communication. This paper examines this communication process, which the Chinese government initiated as a core part of its public relations strategy for the 21st century. It analyses multi-media data collected at the Expo site in July 2010 to answer the questions: what futurist and utopian visions did the five themed pavilions present to visitors of the Expo, and what relevance might these visions have to our understanding of how media events like world fairs construct political discourse?

To answer this question, the paper engages with recent research on the Expo and reviews theoretical concerns about the general power of media events to manipulate audiences. It then provides an analysis that shows how the themed exhibits provide diverse interpretations of modernity and utopian futures. These visions at times collide with the worldview that the Chinese government is trying to foster, and which is communicated throughout much of the event. Yet this is not to say that the institutional constraints and the general set-up of the Expo collapse the entire event into a monolithic discourse that re-enforce the political ideals of the Chinese authorities, or that the participants and visitors of the event are successfully co-opted into an overarching narrative of capitalist modernity. In fact, the Shanghai World Exposition offers opportunities of utopian thought that demonstrably escape control.

The research for this project was made possible with the generous financial support of the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies and the NWO project Beyond Utopia, run by Chris Goto-Jones from 2010 to 2014.

How to reference this article

Schneider, Florian (2013), ‘The Futurities and Utopias of the Shanghai World Exposition – A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Expo 2010 Theme Pavilions‘. Asiascape Occasional Papers, 7, 1-17.