SHANGHAI — General Motors expects three million people to visit its pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. The chance to lure customers in what has become G.M.’s largest market this year makes being there worthwhile, even as companies such as Google face difficulties operating in China.
The exhibition “is going to be the biggest expo ever,” said Karin Zhang, a spokeswoman in Shanghai for General Motors. “It will bring huge benefits for the company.”
Companies including G.M. and Siemens, along with 192 nations ranging from Saudi Arabia to France, are coming to the Expo. G.M. was the first corporation to commit to building a pavilion, and Siemens has signed up as a “global partner” for the event, which will open May 1.
The Saudis are spending 1.1 billion renminbi, about $161 million, to erect a pavilion shaped liked a half moon suspended on pylons. Japan’s “Purple Silkworm Island” will cost ¥13 billion, about $138 million. France has budgeted €50 million, or $67.5 million, for its “Sensual City.”
The foreign spending hints of China’s imperial past, said Richard Baum, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, which ruled from the 14th to early 20th centuries, required other courts to pay tribute with gifts for the right to trade with the Middle Kingdom.
China would “dominate tributary states by intimidating their rulers with awesome symbols of imperial potency and grandeur,” Mr. Baum said. “In some ways, the over-the-top expenditures on Shanghai Expo are redolent of the lavish tributes” foreigners paid the emperors.
The system began to erode two centuries ago as rising powers like Britain, France and the United States started exacting trade and territorial concessions. Now China is reclaiming a dominant role in the world economy.
It has leapfrogged the United States as the biggest trading partner of Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore. Last year it became the world’s biggest exporter. G.M. is the largest overseas automaker in China, selling 230,048 vehicles in March, more than the 188,546 it sold in the United States. So nations and companies are seizing the opportunity to make an impression at the Expo, even as some encounter setbacks in China.
Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, last month redirected users of its China-based Web browser to a Hong Kong site after it said in January that its network had been hacked from within China. Four executives of the mining company Rio Tinto were sentenced in a Shanghai court to as many as 14 years in jail on March 29 after being convicted of bribery and stealing commercial secrets.
U.S. businesses say they are constrained by new regulations that may restrict market access, according to a recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
Shanghai is spending 28.6 billion renminbi on the exposition, which is expected to draw an estimated 70 million visitors, most of them from within China, by Oct. 31. Government officials have made it clear that the success of the event — a descendent of world fairs popular in the 19th and 20th centuries — is a top national priority, much like the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
“Expo diplomacy is one of the focal points of Chinese diplomacy this year,” Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in Beijing on March 7.
Vice Premier Wang Qishan showed the degree of involvement for top leaders when he urged stepped-up work in a “race against time,” according to a report from Xinhua, the official news agency, on March 23.
About 100 foreign dignitaries are expected to attend. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton already toured the U.S. site in November. Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain last month visited the U.K. pavilion, whose protruding acrylic rods resemble a dandelion.
Germany’s exhibit focuses on urban life. France’s trumpets French culture. Japan’s features intelligent robots, some of which play the violin.
Xu Wei, an Expo spokesman, says nations are drawn to the event by the potential to show off their country to millions of potential tourists. G.M., along with Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, and other businesses can advertise to affluent Chinese attendees.
G.M.’s exhibit will showcase urban transportation in 2030. The company agreed to participate in 2006, three years before its 2009 bankruptcy, said Ms. Zhang, declining to provide the cost.
In addition to illustrating the pull of China’s rising economic and political clout, the fair is a means for Chinese leaders to bolster their domestic authority, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“All nations understand that if they don’t go, they will miss an opportunity,” he said. Their attendance also “gives us face,” or enhances China’s reputation, while supporting what Mr. Shen calls the government’s core interest: “The survival of the Communist Party.”
The Expo reinforces the party’s hold on power because it is expected to foster growth, perpetuating a tacit bargain China’s people have made with the government to “yield their demand for political rights” as long as the economy expands and China’s image is burnished, Mr. Shen said.
“This is for domestic consumption more than anything else,” said Robert Ross, a professor of political science specializing in Chinese politics at Boston College in Massachusetts. “This will be spun as ‘the world is coming to China to praise China.’ What better symbol for China’s domestic masses of the greatness of their leaders?”
Bloomberg News
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