Mega-events such as the Olympics and international expositions have long been understood as staging platforms upon which host countries offer displays of nation-state splendor. This article examines representations at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, a largely state-and corporatefunded mega-event, to consider contemporary China's particular narrative of the nation as it emerges as a global power in the 21st century. Through an analysis of Expo films, displays, and architecture, this article argues that the Shanghai Expo offered a model for the future that linked future progress to past glory, wedding traditional Chinese practices and belief systems to contemporary economic growth and technological advancement. While recognizing that the representations at the Expo were largely aspirational, the article demonstrates that studying such idealized forms of national identity can reveal much about China's attempts to position itself as a prototype for global futures.Paris Hilton is no stranger to media. Yet when she visited Shanghai in 2007 for the MTV Style Gala, she received attention not for her sartorial splendor or byzantine personal relationships but, surprisingly, for her commentary on urban development in China: 'Shanghai looks like the future' she apparently 'gushed' multiple times (Tan, 2007). Three years later, Shanghai itself proclaimed this vision of the future to the international

This article offers an ethnographic examination of representations and perceptions of the Chinese state as manifest through Confucius Institutes in the United States. Confucius Institutes are Chinese language and culture programs that are funded and staffed by the Chinese government. Confucius Institutes are a constituent part of China's soft power policy efforts to communicate to the world that its cultural tradition stresses harmony and that its rise to power will be a peaceful and globally responsible process. Through analyzing parent and student perceptions of “the state” through their experiences with Confucius Institute teachers and pedagogical materials, it is possible to contextualize and problematize the means through which Cold War rhetoric is recast and recirculated in the contemporary “post‐Cold War” historical moment, thus interrogating assumptions about essentialized Chinese difference. This research reveals how understandings of a newly empowered China cast the nation as a threat to U.S. economic and political power in a manner that negates China's soft power efforts, dislocating policy intention and effect. At the same time, this research suggests that as Confucius Institute teachers distance themselves from perceptions of an authoritarian state, parents and students begin to disaggregate perceptions of a monolithic Chinese state in a manner that reinforces the state's soft power goals.

In contemporary China, compulsive collecting has become a method of accumulating both fiscal reward and cultural capital. In this article, I consider how the collecting practices of Mao‐badge aficionados provide insight into the debates over value and subjectivity in contemporary, late‐socialist China. By viewing Mao badges as fetishes, I accentuate the uneasy tensions between various theories of the fetish and call into question the theoretical divide between the postulated ahistorical, “private” fetish and its “public” commodity counterpart, suggesting that private, psychological drama is intimately linked to public commodity exchange. My analysis reveals how objects mediate the conflicts of meaning between different historical eras and play a central role in negotiating identities and subjectivities.

This article examines how Chinese intellectuals experienced the 2008 Beijing Olympics, arguing that the games were a key site for the construction and analysis of two forms of spectacle-the commodity spectacle and the collective spectacle. Considering the case studies of Olympic architecture and traditional Chinese products (laozihao), it suggests that "culture," debated and defined within the context of the Olympics, emerged as a mechanism through which the commodity spectacle was, albeit perhaps paradoxically, used to produce moments of national collectivity for intellectuals in contemporary China. This research also suggests that although this collective form represents a classic Marxist commodity fetish, labeling the resultant form of that community "inauthentic" because of its commodity nature, represents a theoretical fetishization of the theory of the spectacle itself. [

This article explores the reappropriation of iconic photographs, examining what happens when the iconic "Tank Man" image is modified and repurposed to new political ends. It argues that such reappropriations push viewers to read against the grain of ontological security because the ubiquity of the originals motivates the questioning of taken-for-granted meaning in new contexts. In this case, the 21st-century reappropriated Tank Man images speak less about the absence of political liberalism and democracy in China that were encapsulated in the original Tank Man image and more about their absence in the contemporary United States. At the same time, they also reflect changing global hierarchies in which the United States no longer automatically occupies a position of power relative to China. As such, reappropriations of iconic photographs have the potential to mobilize collective memory and political imaginations to new ends. [appropriation, China, icon, photography, Tank Man, Tiananmen]