Clinton Sees U.S. Pavilion at China Expo

nytimes.com
By all accounts, the United States would have been a no-show at the Shanghai Expo had Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton not opened her Rolodex and raised about $60 million in private cash to finance a pavilion here. So it seemed fair that Mrs. Clinton got a rousing cheer from a group of Chinese children when she visited the building on Saturday.
But the house that Hillary built is unmistakably the house that corporate America paid for.
After touring the pavilion — with its Citibank- and Pfizer-sponsored theaters, gauzy eight-minute videos featuring representatives from Chevron, General Electric, and Johnson & Johnson, environmentally friendly features sponsored by Alcoa, and a gift shop with licensed merchandise from Disney — Mrs. Clinton seemed less inspired than relieved that the project was done.
“It’s fine,” she said to a reporter asking her what she thought of the pavilion. “Can you imagine if we had not been here?”
With its gunmetal-gray walls and convention-center aesthetics, the pavilion hardly stands out in a fairground studded by beguiling structures like Britain’s Seed Cathedral, a cube with 60,000 sprouting transparent rods that make it look like a dandelion ready to be scattered to the winds.
Still, the American organizers say the pavilion has drawn long lines and 700,000 visitors since the Expo opened May 1, which attests either to the enduring attraction of the United States or the wisdom of Woody Allen’s observation that 80 percent of success is showing up.
For Mrs. Clinton, scratching together the money for the project was a simple matter of avoiding a diplomatic snub. The Chinese government spent $45 billion buffing up this glamorous but gritty metropolis to play host to a world’s fair, and it is treating the six-month-long event with almost the same importance it attached to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
America’s participation was in jeopardy because Congress restricts the spending of public money on world’s fairs, and under the Bush administration, the project had virtually no private financing. On Mrs. Clinton’s first visit as secretary of state last year, Chinese officials implored her to do something.
“It’s like a coming-out party for countries and cities,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to world’s fairs of the last century in Chicago and St. Louis. “There’s a real historical significance to this.”
To avoid violating federal rules, Mrs. Clinton assigned most of the one-on-one fund-raising to two longtime Clinton fund-raisers: Elizabeth F. Bagley and Jose H. Villarreal, both of whom were on hand.As she walked in this morning, Mrs. Clinton greeted Indra K. Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, and senior executives from Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric, each of which kicked in $5 million. She met major sponsors again at a dinner on Saturday night.Mrs. Clinton also toured China’s pavilion, a monumental deep-red building with a traditional Chinese inverted roof. “It would have to be very big to fit all the provinces of China in it,” she told Shanghai’s mayor, Han Zheng, who thanked her for making sure the United States had a presence.
Nearly 200 countries are represented at the Expo, which stretches along both banks of the Huangpu River. Two countries branded as rogue nations, Iran and North Korea, are conveniently located next to each other.
Among the North Korean attractions is a video of a rocket launching intercut with pictures of children in a classroom.Iran has gathered examples of its technology, including a primitive satellite and a stuffed goat, which was identified as the country’s first cloned goat. “Only a few countries such as the U.S., U.K., Canada, and China have a cloned goat in their list of achievements,” a placard said.Neither country made any mention of its nuclear program, which in both cases is fueling tension with their neighbors and the United States. But then, the U.S.A. Pavilion does not mention the American political system, the Constitution or the founding fathers.Instead, visitors are treated to a video of Americans struggling to speak Chinese, testimonials about sustainable energy, water conservation, and family values — each presented by a corporate sponsor with interest in those areas — followed by a video about a young girl planting a garden in a garbage-strewn lot. At one point, the seats shake and the audience is sprayed with mist.The highlight at the pavilion is 70 student ambassadors, drawn from universities around the United States, who speak fluent Mandarin, and entertain the long lines of visitors.
Franklin L. Lavin, a former American ambassador to Singapore who is the chairman of the pavilion’s steering committee, said the organizers stayed clear of messages about free speech or democratic institutions in favor of the simple virtues of civic-mindedness.
“We wanted to talk about what works in American society, not what doesn’t work in other societies,” Mr. Lavin said.