I’ve been travelling in China as announced, dear readers. Now I’m in Chendu. It’s in Sichuan, just at the bottom of Himalai. Here you can practice the traditional panda hugging. The Chinese love Pandas like Brits do their pets… at the expense of children.
I spent the last week in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It’s not my first time in China but it’s always a shocking experience. Our world is small, slow and old in comparison. Have you ever tried China?
The Expo in Shanghai prefigures a new world order. The world has been displayed to Chinese peasants and the new middle class visiting from all over the country. The visitors come to see what happens in the rest of the world, working their way through hundreds of pavillions – and queeuing for hours every time. The best of every country is shown like in a thematic park .
China pavillion towers at the centre as a gigantic red up-side-down pyramid: centre of the world, beacon of humanity, and conjunction with heaven.
By the end hundreds of millions of Chinese people will have visited the exhibition – and a few hundred thousand Westerners.
However the Expo doesn’t have much to do with other fairs and festivals that I’ve been like the Biennial of Arts in Venice. It looks more like Disneyland or Vegas. It’s an endless sequence of cheap products and tacky entertainment. Africa is stereotyped as pristine nature or happy semi-naked people singing and dancing despite their miserable poverty, while the Carribean is just a tourist resort.
It’s an endless show for people and the media. It takes two weeks weeks to visit it all.
The Empires loved expos as they have always been an opportunity to display power to their own people and the rest of the world. The Brits invented the Expo in 1851 . France built the Eiffel Tower for the Expo in 1898. Hitler and Stalin competed for the medal of the best pavillion in 1937.
This time it’s China’s turn. Actually it started with the Olympics in 2008, followed by 50th Anniversary of the Revolution last year, and ends with the Expo. It’s the end of the beginning of the Chinese Century.
Europe looks like such a small place from here. There is no chance to compete. It’s better to change strategy inspired by history. Greeks stopped the Persian Empire but were conquered by the Romans. However, they were too smart just to let them win over. The Roman legions occupied Greece but Greek culture conquered the Empire. Greece survived and thrived over the century thanks to the Roman Empire.
Europe can’t win but can make themselves indespensible to the Chinese. The latter do not have a clue about clothing, they spit everywhere and kids pee in the middle of street. Europeans can teach them.
They look bewildered when they see someone who doesn’t look Chinse, and take a picture. Without mentioning I finally understood the privilege of models – it’s great! – I realized that a black person is like a film star in China. I travel with Darren who has Jamaican roots. People can’t stop staring at him as though they have seen Lady Gaga. Europeans can educate them.
The Expo looks like Dysneyland and the Chinese are kids: simple people with little culture. At least 700 million farmers still live in villages. Since I like addressing my fellows this is the first suggestion. We could start providing a cultural awareness package for children at school.
Even more important is the role that civil society could play guiding people. Unfortunately thre is a crying need to build the capacity of domestic NGOs. This has been confirmed in all my meetings. Voila’ my second suggestion, especially for the EU, is the establishment of a European fund for civil society to support cooperation between European and Chinese NGOs and build capacity for the latter. A third way to bridge EU and China beyond politics and business.
As Tim, a business guy based in Shanghai, confirmed: “We can’t work on Human Rights, Democracy, and Tibet , but I don’t see any problem in strenghtening Chinese civil society. It would be better for the country and what is good for the country is fine with government”.
Then my idea of the fund will end up in my wish list for the High Representative Catherine Ashton. Count on it!
