Shanghai EXPO 2010: economy, ecology and the second coming of capitalism in China

China entered global media consciousness following the Tiananmen crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the two world events that heralded the Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping Revolution', and with its spectacular economic growth it has remained central to the picture of global capitalism ever since. A Chinese native and naturalised American academic, I am constantly surprised at my hometown Shanghai's rapid and restless makeover. Taking the Shanghai EXPO 2010 as its primary focus, this article uses visual and verbal resources to convey the sense of the great Chinese transformation and to construe the historical impact of Chinese development on the world economy and ecology today. The images are invested with my own perspective in an analytical narrative that exposes the contradiction between the ecological finitude of the earth and the rapacity of a now global consumer economy. Attuned to the ideological sea changes implicit in the spectacle of a brave new world, I ask whether Shanghai EXPO 2010 has succeeded in its professed ideals of planetary preservation or merely proffered palliative proposals of socially responsible capitalism'.