It’s a Small World After All? Simulating the Future World Order at the Shanghai Expo

In: Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China

This book chapter asks what visions of the world came together at the Shanghai Expo, how they were formed, and what role the Chinese authorities played in framing the event. Based on qualitative interviews and multi-media data collected at the Expo site in July 2010, the chapter analyzes the Expo site and compares the contents and communication strategies of two key pavilions: the China Pavilion and the US Pavilion.

The construction of discourses at the Shanghai Expo takes place within overlapping institutional frameworks, between a large number of diverse actors, who are each subject to multiple constraints that ultimately define what can and cannot be communicated at in the pavilions of this mega-event.

The chapter shows how these institutional constraints collapse much of the political discourse into a narrative that to some extent re-enforces the political ideals of the Chinese authorities, but that the various actors nevertheless present different visions of the world’s future and of world politics that at times challenge the worldview that the Chinese government is trying to foster.

However, contrary to claims that an overwhelming multi-media event like the Expo leaves no room for creative resistance to the dominant discourse, this study suggests that the discourse was ultimately indeed as fragmented and fragile as the work of discourse theorist Michel Foucault suggests, and that this was the outcome of the complicated ways in which a multitude of actors with diverging interests produced discourse at the mega-event.

This research for this book chapter was made possible through generous funding by the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).

How to reference this article

Schneider, Florian (2014), ‘It’s a small world after all? Simulating the future world order at the Shanghai Expo’. In Cao, Qing, Tian, Hailong & Chilton, Paul (Eds.), Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 97-120.