Shanghai crowds endure waits, hot sun, to view Day 1 offerings at World Expo

Crowds endure waits as Shanghai’s Expo opens

SHANGHAI — Hundreds of thousands of visitors waited for hours in the baking sun Saturday on the opening day of the Shanghai World Expo 2010, showcasing China’s rise as a modern industrial power.

Fewer people than expected showed up, but it wasn’t clear why. About 350,000 tickets had been sold for Day 1, but officials said about 200,000 people attended.

Tempers sometimes flared in the long lines and the tedious wait for security checks, but the head of the Expo’s coordinating committee said there were no major problems. “We need to adopt new policies to deal with higher temperatures as the weather changes,” Hong Hao told reporters at the end of the day.

“It’s well worth the wait because the opening day is special,” said Cai Xiu, a Shanghai office worker standing in line outside the fanciful pink bubble-like Japan pavilion, where the wait to enter stretched to four hours.

“There’s no need to go abroad because the world has come to Shanghai,” Cai said.

Like the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the World Expo is showcasing China’s growing economic and geopolitical sway, both to the world and its own public.

“Everything starts at the World Expo, and all things come together at the Expo site,” Jia Qinglin, the ruling Communist Party’s No. 4 ranking leader, told dignitaries Saturday, following a gala fireworks show Friday night.

Over its six-month run, the Expo is expected to draw 70 million people to pavilions designed around the sustainability theme of “Better City, Better Life.”

China is splashing out 28.6 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) on the Expo itself, and many billions more on improvements such as public transit for this city of 20 million people.

The event involves massive security, though commercial-minded Shanghai has kept measures low-key compared with the lockdown imposed for the Beijing Olympics, when tourist visas were canceled and the capital was cleared of migrant workers.

Inside the Expo site, one enterprising man, seeing a niche market among visitors overcome by the scale of the event, was selling a self-published 10 yuan ($1.50) guide offering suggestions on best ways to see pavilions, dine and get around the 5.3 square kilometer (2 square mile) site.

“You can see it’s a huge area, and it’s so easy to waste time without a good guide,” the man, who identified himself only as Mr. Ji.

China’s hall, with its massive vermillion roof in the form of an upside-down pyramid, evokes power and grandeur, while Holland’s invited whimsy, with brightly colored panels and plastic sheep statues.

Many exhibits display environmental technologies: Japan’s has a lavender covering embedded with solar cells, while Brazil’s was finished in recyclable wood strips. Many have roof gardens, in contrast with the huge expanses of asphalt and concrete at the pedestrian level.

Iceland’s pavilion was among the more modest, its space halved and its budget cut even more, to $2 million, because of the financial crisis that struck last year. Private industry funded it rather than the government.

Organizers never considered pulling out, given China’s importance and the need to “find new opportunities at a time when other opportunities are drying up,” said Hreinn Palsson, Iceland’s consul general in Shanghai and its Expo commissioner general.

“This is of course an expo on a scale like no other,” Palsson said.

The U.S. pavilion, which got no government funding, also struggled to raise financing but succeeded in the end with the help of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who won over many of its sponsors.

“First of all, the U.S.-China relationship is so important, but also, and sometimes people forget this, China is bringing 200 countries together so that in many ways you can say that the world’s going to be here for six months,” said Martin Alintuck, the USA Pavilion’s director of communications.

Associated Press researcher Ji Chen contributed to this report.