A remodeled city awaits Shanghai's visitors this summer. As always, tourists will crowd the famous Bund and enjoy the classic architecture erected by the International Settlement's foreign powers during an earlier day of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Recently, Shanghai's city planners have undertaken a major project in remodeling the urban landscape that surrounds the Bund, with its old Hong Kong and Shanghai banks, Custom House, and grand hotels built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, planners have effectively transformed this waterfront symbol of China's former semicolonial status into a breezy park, sightseeing plaza, and high-end shopping district, all rolled into one. The classic architecture of the treaty port era has become the backdrop for a new day's consumerism, perfectly suited to the Chinese state's own celebration of the successes of a reform economy.

Even more fantastic scenes can be found this summer just south of the Bund at the celebrated grounds of Expo 2010, which runs from May through October of this year. China's state officials and expo organizers have rigorously promoted this international event as evidence of China's technological innovation and, almost synonymously, of technocratic enlightenment. In articulating a twenty-first-century vision of “Better City, Better Life” as the central theme at the exposition grounds, organizers have showcased urban modernization and an environmentally friendly model of sustainable development—one that is neither purely state socialist nor free market, but that advertises a vision of success for the twenty-first century. Echoing the slogan of “One World, One Dream” presented at Beijing's 2008 Olympic Games, promoters of Expo 2010 tout this latest event as a “gala of world civilization” that also provides “an opportunity for China to see the world and the world to see China.”Footnote ¹ A new day, the event seems to suggest, has begun.

As it happens, the drama and celebration of Expo 2010 coincide with the hundredth anniversary of China's first national exposition. In 1910, under the auspices of the ruling Qing dynasty (1644–1911), state officials and commercial elites cosponsored the Nanyang Exhibition for the Promotion of Industry (Nanyang quanye hui), held in the city of Nanjing during a hot summer season.Footnote ² The organizers of the Nanjing expo initially conceived of the event as a national exhibition, but, after direct external pressure, also allowed representatives of other nations to present their own exhibits. Today's centennial (1910–2010), like most anniversaries, elicits immediate comparisons. What are the similarities and differences in the social meanings of these grand events? How do their specific missions and the states that promoted them compare? In what ways might these events provide insights into their respective moments in history?

The late Qing officials who promoted the 1910 exposition were very much invested in strengthening China through domestic reforms that would bring about national “wealth and power” (fuqiang) without threatening the authority vested in the Qing state.Footnote ³ Confronted by the challenges of industrial capitalism and imperialist incursions, Qing officials and their expo managers sought to organize a spectacle that would educate and mobilize a domestic audience in the pursuit of this state-led project. Today, as both Western and Chinese media note China's apparent “arrival” as a significant power in a global economy, Expo 2010 might be viewed as the culmination of ambitions articulated at the Nanjing exposition. A closer look into the details of these events presents a more complex story, however—one that may reveal the intricacies of a narrative of global development.

Working within a “New Policies” project of state renovation in the first decade of the twentieth century, China's 1910 exposition organizers hoped their spectacle might mobilize a Chinese citizenry in a national cause of economic development, particularly toward the development of light industry for global commodity markets. In many respects, this turn-of-the-century vision was seen as a more effective successor to the nineteenth-century “self-strengthening” movement, dominant between the 1870s and early 1890s, which embraced new industrial technologies in the construction of shipyards and arsenals for national defense. Exposition organizers in 1910 broadened the concept of national defense in their embrace of a more fundamental ambition for national mobilization. In an age of high imperialism, they stressed China's need to strengthen its forces of commodity production—particularly in the mobilization of human and entrepreneurial resources—as a means of competing with foreign commercial powers in a global market. Organizers invoked a competition between nation-states, one in which not only armies but also economic interests contended. A global “commercial war,” as they noted, was under way.

Organized by cooperating state and commercial elites, the 1910 Nanjing event was a precursor to China's current-day bureaucratic capitalism, in which state and market actors actively collaborate. The 1910 event was funded through joint merchant-official sponsorship, with members of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce holding important seats on the exposition's board of directors. Its leading advocate was a high-ranking Qing official named Duanfang. An imperial bannerman and provincial governor-general, Duanfang strongly supported efforts at economic development as well the creation of new public institutions, such as modern schools, industrial institutes, and museums. The event's daily managers included Chen Qi and Xiang Ruikun, two veteran observers of expositions abroad who had trained in new-model military and commercial institutions. As they promoted, organized, and managed the 1910 expo, these late Qing elites and state officials demonstrated a shared activism in their desire to mobilize new economic and social resources for the purpose of national strength and, as they noted, national survival in age of imperialism.

As the Nanjing exposition opened in June 1910, exposition managers celebrated its new architectures of display, including the grand halls that merged Chinese and Western styles, and particularly the many goods that they housed. Exposition judges evaluated a host of everyday products and innovations, commending the finest examples. Educational awards were similarly granted to many trade and vocational schools, the same kinds of institutes that Duanfang promoted, for their exhibition of improved items intended for sale in global and domestic markets. Through the spectacle of these very displays and the tours of ticket-holding visitors, exposition managers hoped to mobilize the Chinese people as a disciplined, productive force loyal to the Qing state and its vision of national economic development. Organizers promoted the event as one that would help unite state officials and private merchants in the same mission, bringing economic elites together in cooperation with political leaders while also encouraging an industrious workforce among its spectators.

The vision of exposition managers in 1910 also encompassed the problems of a growing urban–rural gap and uneven development in China. In their advocacy of the exposition, they highlighted this troubling divide as one that was directly tied to commercial development and the mobilization of national resources, human and material, for economic growth. Organizers noted the ways in which China's rural villages were falling behind their urban neighbors even as China's cities relied, as ever, on rural production. They urged that urban development, particularly in the form of technological innovation, be brought to the countryside. While advocating recognition of this issue in exposition circulars and speeches, they also endorsed efforts by local elites in the rural communities surrounding Nanjing to bring village groups to the exposition for an education in the new methods and scientific inputs available for production. Newspaper coverage from the time indicates that at least one group made this journey and was much celebrated.

In short, exposition organizers in 1910 saw their task as one of developing China's industries through a mobilization of a national workforce, entrepreneurial talents, and the country's material resources. Working as agents of the state in staging this spectacle of everyday goods at the exposition fairgrounds, they sought to train a domestic audience in loyalty to both the Qing state and its project of economic nationalism. The ultimate goal was the achievement of China's national “wealth and power” by increasing efforts at improved commodity production and competition in world markets.

In many respects, Expo 2010 would seem to symbolize the realization of that project, though the century between the two expo events was a tumultuous one. During the Republican era (1912–49) that followed the fall of the Qing dynasty, China suffered the continued collapse of state authority and the rise of a so-called warlord period (1917–27). State-building challenges persisted amid the Nanjing decade (1928–37) and the devastation of both the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and a renewed civil war (1946–49). The founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, however, marked a new moment. With national unity restored, China's Communist leaders embarked on the construction of a socialist state and the introduction of a planned economy. Despite a lasting Sino-Soviet split that developed within the first decade of the PRC, Chinese leaders also pursued a Stalinist model of industrialization under the direct management of a strong bureaucratic state. The Communist party-state succeeded in its effort to increase national strength through the construction of a strong base in heavy industry (not to mention an atomic bomb) during this Maoist era. The immiseration of the countryside persisted, however, amid Communist leaders' own debates over management of a rural economy. These differences were tragic in their consequences, as seen in the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and in the sequel political conflict of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

The Communist state did survive these political challenges, however, and embraced new (and neglected) strategies for building a strong Chinese economy amid a reform period that began in 1978. China's leaders returned to the utilization of foreign capital as a source of development, yet now, unlike the late nineteenth century, a strong party-state was in place to control the process. By the late 1990s, China had become a leading global producer of export commodities, particularly in textiles, garments, and small-scale manufactures, as the state mobilized new sources of capital and reintroduced markets to the economy. China's success in export-led development in the 1990s was crowned by its much-noted accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. As an event awarded to China by the Bureau of International Expositions just one year later, Expo 2010 is in many ways a product of this economic success. China's party-state has rebuilt the nation as a “workshop to the world,” and now, amid the current downturn in the global economy, as one of the world's leaders in capital accumulation.

Yet if Expo 2010 marks the culmination of a century's competition for wealth and power, it also suggests that this dominant model of export-led development, so recently achieved, is unsustainable. In 2010, we find that the means that a past century's nation-state pursued as a path to “wealth and power” are now at their technical limits. As Expo 2010 suggests, the new game for the twenty-first century is not simply export-led development based on “first-world” consumption and its implicitly global division of labor. Instead, the challenge would now seem to be finding a means to bring the standards of living associated with “development” to a truly global population in an environmentally sustainable manner. The Soviet and American models of development that were so strong in the mid-twentieth century now appear unsustainable because of ecological limits. Global disparities of wealth and power, meanwhile, are matched by similar economic disparities within China. These disparities are evident in an increasing urban–rural gap and particularly in the side effects of the growing pace of urbanization that has accompanied recent economic reform. The figures in this regard are telling. In 2005, China witnessed an urbanization rate of roughly 43 percent. By 2020, China anticipates that its urban areas will be home to 60 percent of its population, with an additional 100 million to 200 million rural residents joining an urban workforce.Footnote ⁴ Finding a means to both mobilize and conserve resources is an essential goal for the Chinese party-state.

Exposition organizers have embraced these concerns in the event's thematic focus on eco-friendly solutions. In keeping with this aim, the exposition offers an “Urban Best Practices Area” for displays of cutting-edge technologies and approaches linked to the themes of livability and sustainability in urbanization, the protection and proper maintenance of historical sites and heritage capital, and innovations in the technologies of a built environment. Here, Expo 2010 brings leading examples from around the world to Shanghai for collective study and celebration. The PRC state has utilized the full event, meanwhile, to advertise its own efforts to confront problems of urbanization, environmental degradation, and the social stratifications that accompany development.

Indeed, Expo 2010 has allowed the state to herald China's position as a rising world leader in the innovative management of these truly global challenges. The 1910 and 2010 events share a similarity in their organizers' emphases on the pursuit of national strength and the attachment of this project to the maintenance of a strong incumbent state. Yet “development” has been transposed in important ways today. Organizers of the 1910 Nanjing event embraced an ambition for the development of local industries as a means to preserve a threatened nation through the revitalization of a domestic economy. In Expo 2010, the focus also highlights China's domestic challenges, yet it seems that the solutions to China's internal problems, particularly that of sustainable urbanization, may now help solve the world's own dilemmas of development.

While Expo 2010 may be seen as a celebration of the rising success of a non-Western developmental state, its spectacle also obscures underlying complications within that very same model. On one hand, if the 1910 Qing state was burdened by the economic domination of foreign interests as well as the problem of competing actors seeking to represent state interests (a burden that would contribute directly to a revolution led by provincial elites the following year), the PRC party-state is not. China is now home to a strong central state that, even as it cooperates with new economic elites, has at the same time effectively co-opted them. Commercial elites and their institutions are dependent on a state that has emerged, as Alvin So has noted, as a power in capital accumulation, while at the same time maintaining an authoritarian control over civil society.Footnote ⁵ Bureaucratic capitalism has brought a new kind of cooperation between the state and commercial elites; however, it has also seen the return of a troubling practice, namely, corruption.

We find ready evidence of this problem amid the much-advertised project of building an ideal city on an undeveloped site not far from Shanghai known as Chongming Island. In the years preceding Expo 2010, local and state officials heralded the mission of a new-style “green” development as they publicized the project together with Expo 2010 as linked manifestations of a new urban future. Indeed, Chongming Island was heralded as the coming site of an “eco-city” for the world. Working in partnership with Arup, a London firm of engineering consultants, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Company (SIIC) advertised plans to build this city, dubbed Dongtan. Corporations and politicians, including Chinese president Hu Jintao and British prime minister Tony Blair, heralded the planned city as a model for environmentally responsible growth in the twenty-first century. Dongtan was to offer an example in its new technologies of waste management and recycling, organic farms, low-carbon emissions, and “green” forms of energy production. Published estimates suggested that Dongtan would be home to a community of as many as 50,000 residents just in time for the start of Expo 2010. Dongtan and Chongming Island were to offer a (literally) concrete example of China's achievements and leadership in the realm of environmentally progressive urbanization.

Despite its grand endorsements, however, the project came to a halt amid its links to one of China's major corruption cases in recent years. Shanghai mayor Chen Liangyu, a leading proponent of both the Chongming project and Expo 2010, was removed from office in September 2006 on charges of bribery and extortion. Two years later, Chen was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. This case and the politics that surround it offer a further reminder of the ways in which the state, in China as elsewhere, possesses its own divides. Amid the unraveling of the corruption case, the SIIC allowed planning permissions for its own project to lapse, and the “eco-city” was delayed indefinitely, except perhaps as a now-noted example of promotional excess. The Chongming Island case also reveals, it would seem, the complications accompanying the bureaucratic capitalism that lies at the center of China's project for economic reform and state stability.

While overlapping interests and rising corruption among business and state actors have driven cases such as that of Chongming Island, other fundamental challenges for the PRC state remain. As China's innovators and their state sponsors herald an embrace of sustainable development at the Expo 2010 event, they are also engaged in the complexities of managing the shift of a national population into a new economy. The acute stresses of economic disparity within Chinese society today both complicate and motivate the state's ongoing effort to herald a “harmonious society” amid the fanfare for today's exposition. Chinese citizens are voicing rising concerns about the increasing costs of daily basics, including housing, food, education, and health care, as social services have diminished amid market reforms, particularly since the 1990s. Similarly, many have protested unequal access to land, both in rural and urban areas, as local bureaucrats and their entrepreneurial allies have engaged in lucrative development deals of their own. Chinese citizens have also called for attention to the urgent environmental problems that have accompanied continued industrialization on the broadest scale in China. It is no accident that state officials have chosen the mastery of green technologies and the promise of a verdant future as one of the central themes for the exposition. Historically, expositions have offered a utopian spirit in their design. China's own event may be more about articulating a vision of the future rather than guaranteeing the capacity of the state to achieve it.

The challenges of economic disparity, development, and environmental sustainability are, of course, global dilemmas. If Expo 2010 promotes a soon-to-be realized potential in emergent technologies of socioeconomic and environmental management, the coming years will bear witness to the complex reality of that same promise. Those who solve the problems faced by China today—including exponential rates of urbanization and the rising appetites of a consuming middle class—will be the new holders of wealth and power in a shifting world economy. In this sense, it appears that China has not merely “arrived,” but stands at the fore in confronting the shared dilemmas of a new global century.