Crux
18th May 2010, 06:37
China’s World Expo reveals more than intended
Saturday, 8 May 2010.
Shanghai’s bombastic trade fair and the earthquake in impoverished Qinghai confirm the saying “rich country, poor people”
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info
The World Expo opened in Shanghai last week to the snap, crackle and pop of the over 100,000 fireworks. This pyrotechnic display alone was the most costly the world has seen. Everything about this trade fair has ‘biggest’, ‘most spectacular’, ‘most expensive’, stamped all over it. It is by far the costliest World Expo ever staged; the final bill will probably dwarf even that for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the site of which is largely a ghost town today. The Shanghai government has announced it spent the equivalent of US$4.2 billion on the Expo. But including the vast sums ploughed into infrastructure and other related expenditures over the preceding six years, the cost is more than US$95 billion, greater than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh or Vietnam. That makes this the most expensive event in history.
Based on the tepid public interest shown in the first week, however, the Shanghai World Expo is destined to become one of history’s most spectacular flops. The opening ceremony attended by president Hu Jintao and 20 national leaders, boasting fountains, lasers and models posing as ethnic minorities, has been panned by critics. One newspaper described it as “shockingly boring”. Netizens have vented their anger over how much money has been wasted. There are 260m people in China lacking access to safe drinking water. There is a crying need for government subsidies to healthcare, which is now out of reach for many Chinese. Every hour a child is born with syphilis in China, a disease that was virtually wiped out 50 years ago, but has made a comeback with the onset of mass industrial migration and poor provision of contraceptives and sex education.
Many commentators have contrasted the millions of yuan put to flame on the trade fair’s opening night with the desperate plight of survivors in Qinghai province following the massive 7.1-magnitude earthquake on 14 April. “The fireworks of the World Expo does not light up the debris of Yushu,” read one online posting.
Now, the Expo bosses are under pressure to explain why visitor numbers in the first week are barely a fraction of original projections. The Expo opened on 1 May at the start of a four-day public holiday. In order to fill the Expo an extra day was added for the people of Shanghai to what is a three-day break in the rest of the country. But instead, one in six of Shanghai’s 20m population took advantage of the holiday to leave the city and escape the Expo hype and bustle!
During the four-day holiday period a total of 711,000 people visited the Expo, fewer than half the expected number. And the trend is downwards, with only 85,600 arriving on Wednesday, just one-fifth of the projected daily figure. The organisers have said they expect 70 million to attend the event, but 380,000 people need to pass through the turnstiles every day in order to reach this. The 70 million target has not just been plucked from the air – the Chinese regime wants to break the previous record attendance of 64.2 million set by the Osaka Expo (Japan) in 1972. Given the importance of ‘keeping face’ in China’s political set up, if visitor numbers don’t improve by themselves, the regime may well begin dragooning people into Expo, starting with government employees and military personnel.
Blinded by hubris the organisers seem to have missed the point that the Expo concept itself is long past its sell-by date. No major city has hosted this event during the last three decades as the names of previous host cities – Spokane, Aichi, Knoxville and Daejeon – indicate (no offence intended). For the Chinese government to pour such huge funding into what is nowadays a non-event in global terms was an act of folly. That Shanghai has attracted more ambitious and expensive exhibits from around the world is mainly because these governments don’t want to upset the Chinese regime and damage their increasingly crucial economic relationships.
Poor planning at the huge (5.3 square km) Expo site has also drawn strong criticism. There have been numerous complaints about the lack of shaded areas and toilets. There are almost no canopies to protect visitors who must stand in long queues. On the second day, when temperatures hit a not unusual 30° Celsius, the ambulances were called out 82 times! To make matters worse, long-stemmed umbrellas have been banned from the Expo site on security grounds.
Internet postings have slammed the high cost of tickets and food. At 140 yuan, an Expo ticket costs the equivalent of a week’s wages for many migrant workers. There is a political backlash against the Expo for being “extravagant and disorganised” – a bit like the government. The online community have begun calling the Expo the “SB show”, based on the insult “shabi”, which means “bloody idiot” in Northern China and is usually hurled around football stadiums. In standard Chinese the word for Expo is “shibo” – also “SB” for short.
Shanghai is the richest city in China and already had the best infrastructure, but has been given even more. The Shanghai subway system has more than doubled in size in one year, with five of its 12 lines opening in the last six months. This can mean tangible benefits for ordinary citizens by offering cheap, more energy efficient travel. But as always in China there is a downside due to a lack of coordination and the ham-fisted, bureaucratic and corrupt management of public projects. The furious construction boom across China, fuelled by unprecedented levels of bank credit, has led to soaring raw material and construction costs as well as supply bottlenecks. This has inflated the cost and affected the quality of big infrastructure projects, with ordinary working people picking up the tab. The Expo site itself was the scene of a mad dash to meet the deadline with some exhibits still not ready. The same is true of Shanghai’s glistening new metro system. “There are only a certain number of companies building underground carriages and they are all straining to meet to demand. All the cities are racing to build metro networks,” an unnamed government source told the South China Morning Post (3 May). “It would have been better to extend the metro gradually. That way we could done things more efficiently and implemented a single integrated system. Unfortunately, the time frame for the upgrade did not allow us that luxury,” he said.
The result, according to this insider, has been a drop in quality and technical dislocation with different companies providing different standards, gauges, and designs: “We have had to source from whichever companies have been able to meet part of our demand at any given time. But the rail systems they use are different from one another. The trains are different sizes and can’t be switched from line to line. What’s more, the engineers have been trained differently for each system, so we can’t easily move staff from one team to another.”
Rather than one metro system, in other words, Shanghai now boasts several!
The Expo-driven construction boom has fuelled economic growth and produced impressive GDP figures, all of which helps Shanghai’s leaders coax even more international companies to invest in the city. But for the majority of inhabitants this boom has brought few benefits if any. Like the rest of the country, Shanghai is in the grip of an extreme property bubble, with apartments priced out of the reach of 80 percent of people according to government figures. The average price per square metre of property in core Shanghai is now about 58 percent of its equivalent in Manhattan, New York, compared with only 24 percent a year ago.
Many are accusing the city government of using the Expo to drive up land prices. Shanghai clinched the deal to host the Expo in 2002, under the leadership of disgraced former Communist Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, who was jailed for corruption. In the Sanlin district where the Expo is situated, property prices have rocketed by an average 24 percent annually since 2003. This compares with a 17 percent rise across Shanghai as a whole. Property analysts are predicting the government will eventually sell the Expo site as prime real estate for around 1 trillion yuan.
These policies favour the fat cats and speculators but at the expense of the vast majority, including middle-class Chinese. Nine-tenths of China’s population have largely missed out on the much-hyped economic “miracle”. This is reflected in the yawning wealth gap – only 20 countries have a more unequal distribution of income than China, and most of these are in Latin America or Africa. Guofu minqiong is a common expression in China, meaning “rich country, poor people”.
The most recent Forbes list charting the fortunes of the elite found that the net worth of China’s 400 richest people leaped 81 percent in one year. China now has 79 dollar billionaires, up from 24 a year earlier, which is more than Germany, India or Russia. Meanwhile, figures presented at this year’s National People’s Congress show that 23.4 percent of wage earners have had no pay increase for five years.
The extreme poverty in much of rural China is illustrated by the earthquake on 14 April, which claimed at least 2,220 lives with over 12,000 injured. In the Yushu region of Qinghai where the quake struck, Tibetans are the dominant ethnic group accounting for 97 percent of the population. Most housing was of a simple wooden and earth-walled construction that disintegrated instantly in the quake. Ninety percent of Yushu’s houses collapsed. Despite a history of earthquakes, the region has experienced 53 with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater since 2001; there was very little quakeproof infrastructure or buildings in the area betraying a lack of government investment. There is not a single factory producing modern building materials in Yushu. But as the rich get richer under the Chinese regime’s blatantly capitalist economic policies, the gulf between rich and poor regions has become extreme. Per capita GDP in Shanghai is 14 times higher than in Qinghai.
The Chinese dictatorship, which has lost the strong social base it once enjoyed as a consequence of a world-changing revolution, has become increasingly dependent upon media extravaganzas like the World Expo, just as ancient Rome needed its circuses. Last year it was the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the state. Beijing’s central districts were cleared of ordinary citizens and residents along the parade route were ordered for ‘security’ reasons not to step out onto their balconies as 200,000 handpicked regime supporters cheered the military parade. Prior to that we saw the spectacle of the Olympics, which also served as the Chinese regime’s unofficial ‘coming out’ party as a global power.
Breaking with a tradition set by the first World Fair in 1851 in London, in which the city rather than the nation is in focus, the Shanghai event has been renamed ‘China Expo’ by the government. This spectacle is therefore part propaganda – an opportunity for the ruling party to flaunt its “bling-bling” on the national and world stage. It is also an opening for rampant profiteering and bubble economics in the real estate sector, with the potential for gigantic kickbacks to a city government that controls the land auctions.
As reactions to the Expo show, however, a growing number of people are no longer taken in. Massive social discontent is building up that will at some point erupt. This movement, when it happens, will outclass all the fireworks displays of the one-party state.
Saturday, 8 May 2010.
Shanghai’s bombastic trade fair and the earthquake in impoverished Qinghai confirm the saying “rich country, poor people”
Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info
The World Expo opened in Shanghai last week to the snap, crackle and pop of the over 100,000 fireworks. This pyrotechnic display alone was the most costly the world has seen. Everything about this trade fair has ‘biggest’, ‘most spectacular’, ‘most expensive’, stamped all over it. It is by far the costliest World Expo ever staged; the final bill will probably dwarf even that for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the site of which is largely a ghost town today. The Shanghai government has announced it spent the equivalent of US$4.2 billion on the Expo. But including the vast sums ploughed into infrastructure and other related expenditures over the preceding six years, the cost is more than US$95 billion, greater than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh or Vietnam. That makes this the most expensive event in history.
Based on the tepid public interest shown in the first week, however, the Shanghai World Expo is destined to become one of history’s most spectacular flops. The opening ceremony attended by president Hu Jintao and 20 national leaders, boasting fountains, lasers and models posing as ethnic minorities, has been panned by critics. One newspaper described it as “shockingly boring”. Netizens have vented their anger over how much money has been wasted. There are 260m people in China lacking access to safe drinking water. There is a crying need for government subsidies to healthcare, which is now out of reach for many Chinese. Every hour a child is born with syphilis in China, a disease that was virtually wiped out 50 years ago, but has made a comeback with the onset of mass industrial migration and poor provision of contraceptives and sex education.
Many commentators have contrasted the millions of yuan put to flame on the trade fair’s opening night with the desperate plight of survivors in Qinghai province following the massive 7.1-magnitude earthquake on 14 April. “The fireworks of the World Expo does not light up the debris of Yushu,” read one online posting.
Now, the Expo bosses are under pressure to explain why visitor numbers in the first week are barely a fraction of original projections. The Expo opened on 1 May at the start of a four-day public holiday. In order to fill the Expo an extra day was added for the people of Shanghai to what is a three-day break in the rest of the country. But instead, one in six of Shanghai’s 20m population took advantage of the holiday to leave the city and escape the Expo hype and bustle!
During the four-day holiday period a total of 711,000 people visited the Expo, fewer than half the expected number. And the trend is downwards, with only 85,600 arriving on Wednesday, just one-fifth of the projected daily figure. The organisers have said they expect 70 million to attend the event, but 380,000 people need to pass through the turnstiles every day in order to reach this. The 70 million target has not just been plucked from the air – the Chinese regime wants to break the previous record attendance of 64.2 million set by the Osaka Expo (Japan) in 1972. Given the importance of ‘keeping face’ in China’s political set up, if visitor numbers don’t improve by themselves, the regime may well begin dragooning people into Expo, starting with government employees and military personnel.
Blinded by hubris the organisers seem to have missed the point that the Expo concept itself is long past its sell-by date. No major city has hosted this event during the last three decades as the names of previous host cities – Spokane, Aichi, Knoxville and Daejeon – indicate (no offence intended). For the Chinese government to pour such huge funding into what is nowadays a non-event in global terms was an act of folly. That Shanghai has attracted more ambitious and expensive exhibits from around the world is mainly because these governments don’t want to upset the Chinese regime and damage their increasingly crucial economic relationships.
Poor planning at the huge (5.3 square km) Expo site has also drawn strong criticism. There have been numerous complaints about the lack of shaded areas and toilets. There are almost no canopies to protect visitors who must stand in long queues. On the second day, when temperatures hit a not unusual 30° Celsius, the ambulances were called out 82 times! To make matters worse, long-stemmed umbrellas have been banned from the Expo site on security grounds.
Internet postings have slammed the high cost of tickets and food. At 140 yuan, an Expo ticket costs the equivalent of a week’s wages for many migrant workers. There is a political backlash against the Expo for being “extravagant and disorganised” – a bit like the government. The online community have begun calling the Expo the “SB show”, based on the insult “shabi”, which means “bloody idiot” in Northern China and is usually hurled around football stadiums. In standard Chinese the word for Expo is “shibo” – also “SB” for short.
Shanghai is the richest city in China and already had the best infrastructure, but has been given even more. The Shanghai subway system has more than doubled in size in one year, with five of its 12 lines opening in the last six months. This can mean tangible benefits for ordinary citizens by offering cheap, more energy efficient travel. But as always in China there is a downside due to a lack of coordination and the ham-fisted, bureaucratic and corrupt management of public projects. The furious construction boom across China, fuelled by unprecedented levels of bank credit, has led to soaring raw material and construction costs as well as supply bottlenecks. This has inflated the cost and affected the quality of big infrastructure projects, with ordinary working people picking up the tab. The Expo site itself was the scene of a mad dash to meet the deadline with some exhibits still not ready. The same is true of Shanghai’s glistening new metro system. “There are only a certain number of companies building underground carriages and they are all straining to meet to demand. All the cities are racing to build metro networks,” an unnamed government source told the South China Morning Post (3 May). “It would have been better to extend the metro gradually. That way we could done things more efficiently and implemented a single integrated system. Unfortunately, the time frame for the upgrade did not allow us that luxury,” he said.
The result, according to this insider, has been a drop in quality and technical dislocation with different companies providing different standards, gauges, and designs: “We have had to source from whichever companies have been able to meet part of our demand at any given time. But the rail systems they use are different from one another. The trains are different sizes and can’t be switched from line to line. What’s more, the engineers have been trained differently for each system, so we can’t easily move staff from one team to another.”
Rather than one metro system, in other words, Shanghai now boasts several!
The Expo-driven construction boom has fuelled economic growth and produced impressive GDP figures, all of which helps Shanghai’s leaders coax even more international companies to invest in the city. But for the majority of inhabitants this boom has brought few benefits if any. Like the rest of the country, Shanghai is in the grip of an extreme property bubble, with apartments priced out of the reach of 80 percent of people according to government figures. The average price per square metre of property in core Shanghai is now about 58 percent of its equivalent in Manhattan, New York, compared with only 24 percent a year ago.
Many are accusing the city government of using the Expo to drive up land prices. Shanghai clinched the deal to host the Expo in 2002, under the leadership of disgraced former Communist Party Secretary Chen Liangyu, who was jailed for corruption. In the Sanlin district where the Expo is situated, property prices have rocketed by an average 24 percent annually since 2003. This compares with a 17 percent rise across Shanghai as a whole. Property analysts are predicting the government will eventually sell the Expo site as prime real estate for around 1 trillion yuan.
These policies favour the fat cats and speculators but at the expense of the vast majority, including middle-class Chinese. Nine-tenths of China’s population have largely missed out on the much-hyped economic “miracle”. This is reflected in the yawning wealth gap – only 20 countries have a more unequal distribution of income than China, and most of these are in Latin America or Africa. Guofu minqiong is a common expression in China, meaning “rich country, poor people”.
The most recent Forbes list charting the fortunes of the elite found that the net worth of China’s 400 richest people leaped 81 percent in one year. China now has 79 dollar billionaires, up from 24 a year earlier, which is more than Germany, India or Russia. Meanwhile, figures presented at this year’s National People’s Congress show that 23.4 percent of wage earners have had no pay increase for five years.
The extreme poverty in much of rural China is illustrated by the earthquake on 14 April, which claimed at least 2,220 lives with over 12,000 injured. In the Yushu region of Qinghai where the quake struck, Tibetans are the dominant ethnic group accounting for 97 percent of the population. Most housing was of a simple wooden and earth-walled construction that disintegrated instantly in the quake. Ninety percent of Yushu’s houses collapsed. Despite a history of earthquakes, the region has experienced 53 with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater since 2001; there was very little quakeproof infrastructure or buildings in the area betraying a lack of government investment. There is not a single factory producing modern building materials in Yushu. But as the rich get richer under the Chinese regime’s blatantly capitalist economic policies, the gulf between rich and poor regions has become extreme. Per capita GDP in Shanghai is 14 times higher than in Qinghai.
The Chinese dictatorship, which has lost the strong social base it once enjoyed as a consequence of a world-changing revolution, has become increasingly dependent upon media extravaganzas like the World Expo, just as ancient Rome needed its circuses. Last year it was the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the state. Beijing’s central districts were cleared of ordinary citizens and residents along the parade route were ordered for ‘security’ reasons not to step out onto their balconies as 200,000 handpicked regime supporters cheered the military parade. Prior to that we saw the spectacle of the Olympics, which also served as the Chinese regime’s unofficial ‘coming out’ party as a global power.
Breaking with a tradition set by the first World Fair in 1851 in London, in which the city rather than the nation is in focus, the Shanghai event has been renamed ‘China Expo’ by the government. This spectacle is therefore part propaganda – an opportunity for the ruling party to flaunt its “bling-bling” on the national and world stage. It is also an opening for rampant profiteering and bubble economics in the real estate sector, with the potential for gigantic kickbacks to a city government that controls the land auctions.
As reactions to the Expo show, however, a growing number of people are no longer taken in. Massive social discontent is building up that will at some point erupt. This movement, when it happens, will outclass all the fireworks displays of the one-party state.