| Volume 7, Number 3, July 2010 |
2010 Shanghai Expo
The Path to “Better City, Better Life”
by 魏楚雄 George Wei |
World’s Fair of 1893
Faces of Modernization in the Contact Zone
by 大井雄纪 Yuki Ooi |
I. Shanghai World Expo:
A Dream for One Hundred Years
As the spectacular grand opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is still quite vivid in the mind of people, another big event is taking place again in China now: the 2010 Shanghai Expo. These top events, in addition to World Cup, are usually considered by most westerners as international affairs for culture, entertainment, science and technology. To Chinese, however, they are of great political significance. The selection of the cities for the two events has been done with implicit purposes. Beijing was chosen as the physical competition ground for the 2008 Olympic Games to historically symbolize that Beijing, the capital of both Imperial China and Communist China, is no longer a location from where foreign powers can impose unequal and humiliating treaties on the “East Asian sick man”. Shanghai has been selected as the site for the 2010 World Expo to show that the old course of the Western advance into China, which started...
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AT the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, many changes were taking place in China. At that time, the government of the Qing dynasty was struggling to modernise the nation in order to survive, while Chinese people on American soil were also struggling with modernisation. Chinese who lived in the United States maintained transnational relations with their homeland and cared about this relationship, but at the same time they had begun to settle into American society. Because of their experiences living in a Western country, it can be assumed that their idea of modernization was influenced by the United States and thus was somewhat different from that of those Chinese who remained in their homeland.
This chapter will focus on what this modernization meant, not to people in China, but to the overseas Chinese living in the United States. There are two issues we shall explore in this chapter. One is how the new identity of Chinese residents in the US as Chinese became evident in the....
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| Issue 7.3 |
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Make a Better City Life
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