Shanghai Shangri-La?

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Americans long ago consigned world’s fairs to the toy box of history. Once celebrated as showcases of world cultures and windows into the future, these grand expositions lost their glamour sometime during the Johnson administration. Like Space Food Sticks and Jonny Quest, they are fondly remembered — at least by those over 50 — but a bit ridiculous: all that ethnocentricism, naive internationalism, and technological good cheer. The last one to warrant much attention was Montreal’s Expo ’67, from which the now-defunct baseball team took its name. (Sorry, Seville ’92.) Our cynical culture is done with world’s fairs.

Not so for Shanghai, where Expo 2010 opened on May 1 and runs through October. In its first two months, the Shanghai Expo attracted more than 20 million visitors, mostly from China itself. Spanning more than 1,300 acres on both sides of the Huangpu River, the fair is an ubiquitous presence throughout the city. Public gardens reproduce the logo in white flowers, subway-car TVs broadcast upbeat interviews with exhibitors and tourists, huge LED screens on downtown buildings play promotional videos, and street vendors hawk knockoffs of its squat, blue, Gumby-like mascot. Visiting Shanghai in May, I quickly discovered that the Chinese authorities haven’t lost their zeal for propaganda. They’ve just changed their colors from revolutionary red to Expo green.

Taking place in a society that is both authoritarian and rapidly developing, the Shanghai Expo highlights the double-edged allure of world’s fairs, which are both deceptive and inspiring. The Expo’s cheery boosterism and sanitized reality match Lawrence R. Samuel’s description of the 1964 New York World’s Fair in The End of the Innocence:  a “protective cocoon” where “foreign nations sang in harmony, corporations existed to produce things that made life better, and, most important, the future looked brighter than ever.” Like all glamorous objects, the ’64 fair was an illusion. Yet its optimistic spirit, and those of other fondly remembered world’s fairs, fostered attitudes that often did produce real progress. “For the tens of millions of kids who went,” writes Samuel, who was one of them, the fair “planted a seed of the possibility to achieve great things.”

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans lost their fondness for world’s fairs because we became pessimistic and disillusioned about progress. If so, the naïve enthusiasms on display in Shanghai suggest that the future belongs to the Chinese. But the real story is more complicated. In part, world’s fairs were simply victims of the prosperity they prophesied. The more affluent, well-traveled, and media-saturated the audience, the harder it is to impress. World’s fairs are designed for people from homogeneous cultures who are still impressed by electricity and foreigners. In 2010, that means the Chinese.

A world’s fair is a chance to see the cultures and people of other lands — to “smell, touch, and taste far-off places,” promised a pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. A Shanghai writer observes that for older locals and migrants from the countryside, “the Expo is–and may well remain–the closest that they will ever get to seeing the world.”

The second draw is cool stuff: the celebration of recent material advances and a glimpse of those to come. In the words of those who organized the Century of Progress world’s fair in Chicago in 1933, expos try to “tear away the veil that shrouds the future.” Over the years, world’s fairs have introduced visitors to such new technologies as neon lights, x-ray machines, nylon, television, and various robots, not to mention ice cream cones and Belgian waffles.

They’ve also reminded visitors how far living standards have risen. In its famous 1964 Carousel of Progress (later relocated to Disneyland), General Electric depicted vignettes of American homes from the 1880s, before electric conveniences, concluding with a gadget-filled contemporary Christmas. In Shanghai, the Chinese and Irish pavilions make the same point with the same basic technique, walking visitors through Chinese living rooms from 1978 to 2008 and Irish kitchens from rural farmhouse to luxurious urban home. The scenes may show the past, but they portend a better future — what the Carousel of Progress song called a “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” For Chinese fairgoers, as for earlier generations of Americans, the gee-whiz enthusiasm that cynics dismiss as naiveté is actually a rational response to recent experience.

Compared to the much-derided commercialism of U.S. world’s fairs, the Shanghai exposition actually suffers from a paucity of consumer pleasures, instead emphasizing national pavilions. Segregated on the less-popular western side of the Huangpu, even the corporate pavilions tend toward state-directed infrastructure. Here the Expo betrays another reason Americans gave up on world’s fairs. Their vision of progress started to seem both socially obnoxious and empirically false.

Twentieth-century expositions increasingly embodied fashionable ideas of social planning. They came to stand for a controlled and predictable version of progress: the dream of a civilization built from scratch, designed — or at least rearranged — according to an expert ideal of order. Or as the Century of Progress motto put it, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

General Motors’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair turned this idea into a seductive and memorable experience, as visitors soared over a miniature world of superhighways and high-rise, self-contained cities. “No matter what I had heard about the Futurama,” recalls the protagonist of E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, “nothing compared with seeing it for myself: all the small moving parts, all the lights and shadows, the animation, as if I were looking at the largest most complicated toy ever made! . . . It was a toy that any child in the world would want to own. You could play with it forever.” The Futurama was enticing because visitors never considered what it might feel like to be someone else’s toy.

That vision did give America interstate highways and a trip to the moon. But it also sparked a backlash. In the 1960s, the New Left and the Goldwater Right, hippies and hackers, personal liberation movements and historic preservationists all rebelled against the tyranny of expertise. Within a few years, Robert Moses, the New York infrastructure and planning czar who ran the 1964 World’s Fair, had gone from city-building hero to neighborhood-wrecking villain. (In Shanghai, the government displaced some 18,000 households to clear the land for the Expo site, Moses-style; the official account portrays the relocations as a move to a “sweet and fresh” new life, while others disagree.) With its mix of do-it-yourself technophilia, hippie experimentation, and environmental consciousness, the best-selling Whole Earth Catalog captured the Zeitgeist and won the 1972 National Book Award.

Twentieth-century world’s fairs had encouraged visitors to equate progress and technological optimism with the Galbraithian vision of stable, heavily bureaucratic, industrial quasi-monopolies — the corporate version of nation states — working with government to determine the future. All the rage in the first half of the 20th century, this technocratic theory of progress became not only less popular but much less believable in the second half. It’s no accident that China’s vignettes of rising living standards start with liberalization in 1978, not the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Whether one considers the spread of Japanese manufacturing practices, the generation upon generation of Silicon Valley startups, the fresh-food revolution that migrated east from Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, or the logistical innovations of Walmart, the creative destruction of the late 20th century showed that the old experts, public and private, didn’t know as much about either technological possibility or consumer desires as they’d imagined. Progress was far from over, but it would be more disruptive and surprising than any world’s fair exhibit could depict.

Ma Bell is gone and Picturephones, introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, are still as mythical as flying cars, but when I was in China I video-chatted with my husband every day — for free.

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style. She is writing a book on glamour for The Free Press and edits a group blog at DeepGlamour.net.