U.S. Social Networking Pavilion at the Shanghai’s World Expo?
A provocative question was posed at DigiCha in the title of a blog post a few days back: Will Google, Facebook and Twitter Please Join as Sponsors of the USA Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010
What better message could the USA send to the world than to have the three standard bearers of 21st century American innovation, creativity and opportunity–Google, Facebook and Twitter–as prime sponsors of America’s presence in Shanghai?
In this age of the much-ballyhooed decline of ‘America’ – a claim, by the way, that I am not ready to concede, despite the obvious uplift and glee this brings to so many throughout the world – what better way to establish the benchmark for an American Brand than to highlight how these three companies are making us rethink how we live in this world, and who now top the growing list of international sites that are being officially blocked by the Chinese government.
As Made in China continues to take it on the chin, the most recent dangerous product warning prompted this “Important Notice” from the U.S. Citizen Service office at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing three days ago (January 15, 2010): Warden Message Regarding Cadmium in Children’s Jewelry.
Since 2004, the CPSC [Consumer Product Safety Commission] has conducted recalls of more than 180 million pieces of metal jewelry because they contained a hazardous amount of lead. Recent reports indicate that producers of children’s jewelry in China are using potentially dangerous levels of the heavy metal cadmium, a known carcinogen, as a substitute. In response to these reports, Chairman Tenenbaum states that the CPSC has opened a formal investigation into the dangers of children’s metal jewelry manufactured in China.
The CPSC warns that swallowing, sucking on or chewing a metal charm or necklace could result in exposure to lead, cadmium or other heavy metals, which are known to be toxic at certain levels of exposure. CPSC further warns caregivers to protect young children from possibly being exposed to lead, cadmium or any other hazardous heavy metal by removing any items that may contain the offending metals.
Despite the long and seemingly unending line of product safety disasters (dog food, milk, drywall and now toxic children’s jewelry, to name just a few – which FYI have also been problems for Chinese consumers) there is a steady drumbeat of support accompanied by frenetic cheerleading by seemingly intelligent people – who I would think should know better – who have already conceded the next 90 years (or, at the very least, the next 40) of the century to the Chinese economic juggernaut. For the moment I will avoid laying out why I see it much differently, as many people who have been here for a long time do. But I cannot help but suggest you do a Google search on “china ant tribe” – the growing number of marginalized college degree holders who have been ghettoized at the fringe of many large Chinese cities as they desperately search for futures by working jobs that are mostly low-paying, if they can find jobs at all. From China’s ‘Ant Tribe’: Between Dreams and Reality:
“They are like ants: clever, weak and living in groups,” says Lian Si, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs of Peking University, who has studied the phenomenon. For two years, Lian led a team of more than 100 graduate students to follow the groups in university towns like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Xi’an.
In his book ‘Ant Tribe’, published in September 2009, Lian estimates the total population of the ‘ant community’ in major cities at one million across China, with about 100,000 found in Beijing alone.
Most of the ‘ant tribe’ are from poor rural families and take temporary and low-paying jobs as insurance agents, electronic product sales representatives and waiters. Some are either unemployed or underemployed.
Lian, also an associate professor at the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics, predicts that an increasingly challenging job market will see the ant tribe growing further in number.
It is fair to say that these folks are not on the “team,” though this is only one of the groups of the growing disenfranchised who are being left behind by China’s much-touted command economy.
As much is being made of China as the next sun to blaze across the 21st C. sky, the fact is that China as a brand is taking a public relations beating, and even more now as they have come to believe the wagging pundits singing of future glories (while often, I might add, making good money in the process of doing it).
I’d propose that beyond merely sponsoring the USA Pavilion, that there should also be displays of their products, complete with live, interactive exhibits showing how they are changing the face of the world, rather than parceling it up into digital cantons. What better way for America, and a host of other democratically governed countries, to inform through example the openness of information. How would China respond to this sort of “taking it to the World Expo” with information that is blocked in China? Would China prevent their citizens from entering any country’s pavilion that was displaying and promoting content that the government officially blocks? Will it be a World Expo or an expo of a world with Chinese characteristics, a “One World, Two Systems” sham? Do Barack, Hillary and State have the stomach and knees for an information confrontation in Shanghai? It would be nice to believe that they do. It just might be the restorative act that the U.S. so desperately needs: a public stand against the new world’s information brute. It would be consistent with Obama’s “non-censorship” stand that he took in Shanghai. And, yes, I am already beating myself up for trying, after all these years, to remain somewhat optimistic. Apologies.
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For more on Google and internet freedom see Rebecca MacKinnons’s Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet