EDITORIAL: Shanghai's expo

The Shanghai World Expo 2010 opened Saturday.

It is the largest expo ever, with more than 240 countries, regions and international organizations participating. It expects the largest number of visitors ever at 70 million, surpassing about 64 million that visited the 1970 Osaka Expo, hugely popular for its moon rock display.

China has achieved rapid economic development through reform and openness policies initiated in the late 1970s, turning itself into the world's factory, and then into the world's market. This year, China is most likely to surpass Japan to become the world's second largest economy.

The Shanghai expo is a reminder of the country's magnetic allure. North Korea is participating for the first time ever. There is also a Taiwan pavilion for the first time since the Osaka expo. Many countries that have no diplomatic relations with China are also making an appearance.

China's national flag is flapping everywhere in Shanghai. There was a call for better public manners, and people stopped hanging their washing out to dry or going out in their pajamas.

President Hu Jintao and other top Chinese leaders regard the Shanghai expo as an opportunity to "display the Chinese people's 5,000 years of glorious civilization and the success of the past three decades of reform and openness policies."

The expo is dubbed "the first hosted by a developing country," and so we understand how China wants to take this opportunity, as they did with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to impress the world.

However, it seems rather odd if China, which now wields a substantial say in the international community commensurate with its economic power, considers the expo merely as an opportunity to realize its dreams as if it were a small developing country making its debut on the world stage.

Today, China is already irreversibly intertwined with the rest of the world. The future of the world is closely connected with the future of the Chinese people. We believe that the significance of holding the expo in China, a major world power, ought to be not about self-advertisement or national prestige, but about deepening understanding among countries.

We wish China would stick to holding up the expo's theme of "Better City, Better Life," and the environmental protection that befits that theme, instead of trying to stress its international clout.

The Japan pavilion is a dome covered with solar energy collection batteries integrated in the double-layer membrane, which makes use of Japanese traditional practices such as uchimizu--sprinkling water on the ground to cool and ventilate the air.

The Swiss pavilion uses biodegradable soy fiber. The participating countries are competing in better ways to be friendly to the environment. Learning from each other in that context is most meaningful.

This is the first time this many Chinese will come in contact with foreign things and foreign people. We hope they will see what the rest of the world is doing to achieve a "better life," and their motivating philosophy. An expo should be not just a place to see and show things, but should also be a place for people to mingle.

Shanghai was occupied by Japan during the Sino-Japanese War. Before the war, there was a Japanese enclave there with a population of up to 100,000 residents. Now that Shanghai has become one of the world's major economic centers, roughly 50,000 Japanese, many of them corporate expatriates, live there.

Shanghai has deep ties with Japan. About one million Japanese are expected to visit the expo. The Japanese pavilion is also getting good reviews.

The expo provides a great opportunity for Japan and China to achieve deeper mutual understanding.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 1