Note: Recently I have been publishing, in a concentrated way, recollections from the book Theme Interpretation: You, Me and Others about the planning of the China Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai. In 2009, I wrote a sketch about the planning of the China Pavilion film. Looking back today, my feelings at that time may not have been completely accurate, but the factual recollections are true. I am sharing them here.
Ji Lude
August 7, 2018
Looking Back Through the Years exhibition item, photographed by Xiang Xinrong.
Lu Chuan's film The Journey, image from the internet.
Zheng Dasheng's film Harmonious China.
Seeing the Difficulties of China Pavilion Planning Through Film Script Discussions
Ji Lude
Written on October 6, 2009
A
The National Day and Mid-Autumn holiday lasted eight days. Many people traveled, but I had to stay home and think about the story of the China National Pavilion. Until it was written, it always felt like something unfinished in my mind, and I could not feel at ease doing anything else.
At the beginning of the year, Bureau leaders asked our department to write stories introducing the various themed projects of the Expo. This sounds easy. After all, it is just writing, but in practice it is very difficult, because writing stories needs a foundation. To put it nicely, writing means giving literary form to a visual exhibition, pointing out its reasoning and background, and helping visitors understand the exhibition content more deeply. To put it less nicely, it means packaging, decorating and covering up certain defects in the exhibition.
But even packaging requires a foundation. If Zhang San draws a horse and it looks somewhat like one and somewhat unlike one, or even like a white cloud, I can say it is a galloping horse. If you look closely and then close your eyes and imagine according to my description, a horse appears in your mind. That is writing a story. But if Zhang San draws something that looks like a deer, then aside from Zhao Gao, no one can say it is a horse.
Taking a step back, if Zhang San subjectively did want to draw a horse, no matter how unlike a horse the result may be, I should still try to explain it as a horse. But if Zhang San subjectively intended to draw a deer, how can I explain it in the direction of a horse?
This is the problem I now face. What exactly is the China National Pavilion displaying? Is it a standing horse, a horse galloping like a cloud, or a deer? This has not been determined. Even the guiding ideas for some projects have changed, and the motives behind display planning have changed. How can this story be written?
B
I first came into contact with the World Expo in 1999. At that time I saw introductory materials saying that since the People's Republic of China first officially participated in a World Expo in 1982, China Pavilions at successive expos had been well received, and some had even been rated as five-star pavilions. Strangely, when we saw World Expos with our own eyes, the situation was very different. The China Pavilions at Expo 2000 Hannover, Expo 2005 Aichi and Expo 2008 Zaragoza were all far from ideal.
In June 2004, Wu Yi expressed clear dissatisfaction with the Hannover China Pavilion at an Organizing Committee meeting. She said the China Pavilion at next year's Japan Expo had to be done well, and if it was like Hannover again she would not go. Unfortunately, when next year came, the China Pavilion still was not done well. In 2005, Wu Yi again had to express dissatisfaction at the Organizing Committee, saying that history was too heavy and reality too thin. This made the China Pavilion project a major difficulty.
In September 2005, I accompanied Zhou Yupeng, then Vice Mayor and Director of the Expo Bureau, to Beijing. Xu Shaoshi, Deputy Secretary-General of the State Council, chaired a meeting to study the division of exhibition planning work for the Expo. Zhou Yupeng asked whether the China Pavilion could be handled by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and the Theme Pavilion by Shanghai. Gao Yan, then Vice Chair of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said tactfully that whoever handled the China Pavilion would be criticized, so perhaps it would be better not to divide the work and to do it together.
In this way, from 2005 to now, the China Pavilion has been like the Bermuda Triangle, and the Expo Bureau has been trapped inside it.
The process from 2005 to now should be described in detail later. Overall, on the surface, the past few years seemed calm and proceeded step by step. Perhaps this is our universal solution to social problems: when the time comes, pull up a large backdrop and somehow get through it.
I write down this feeling today because I just attended a municipal leadership meeting on the film script for the China National Pavilion.
C
The film is on the highest level of the China National Pavilion. It is the first exhibition item visitors see after walking through the preface hall and is the core exhibition item of the entire pavilion. The raising of visitors' spirits and the sense of awe must be completed here, and the concept of the National Pavilion must be expressed here in concentrated form.
After the overall display structure of the pavilion was determined at the end of 2008, it was decided that this eight-minute film would be shot by Lu Chuan. The young director, described as both talented and handsome, carried the confidence of the success of City of Life and Death while promoting his new film everywhere and beginning the creation of the Expo film. Perhaps because he spent too much time promoting the new film and pursuing awards, Lu Chuan only intermittently produced his ideas for the Expo film by the summer of this year. They were not yet a complete literary script, but nearly one hundred PowerPoint slides, consisting of sketches plus textual explanations.
The whole film was divided into three parts: convergence, construction and dreams. The first part, convergence, had more than 40 slides, mostly showing how people gathered from all directions, how heaven and earth were opened and mountains and seas were moved, and how wilderness turned into places where crowds gathered. The director probably wanted to use this symbolic method to express the tenacious vitality of the Chinese nation. But after reading the script presentation, writer Chen Danyan commented that it was Genesis created by an atheist.
On September 10, the Expo Bureau reported the China National Pavilion display design plan, including Lu Chuan's film concept, to municipal leaders. Participants included the municipal Party secretary, who was also a Politburo member, the mayor, the full-time deputy Party secretary, the executive vice mayor, the publicity chief and the secretary-general of the municipal Party committee. So many leaders gathered together amounted to Shanghai's highest decision-making body for cultural projects. At the meeting, the leaders were dissatisfied with Lu Chuan's film concept and decided that while Lu Chuan revised it, the Municipal Publicity Department would organize another team to propose a separate film concept.
This morning, October 6, before Lu Chuan had completed the new revision, Shanghai's highest decision-making body for cultural projects met again to hear reports on two proposals from Zheng Dasheng and others at Shanghai Film Studio and three proposals from Gan Chao and others at Shanghai Media Group.
To be fair, Shanghai Film Studio and Shanghai Media Group are professional film and television institutions after all. The proposals they produced in just over three weeks looked quite presentable. First, all had relatively clear main lines running throughout, such as spring, summer, autumn and winter; the love story of an urban girl and a rural young man; and a hundred scenes of city life. Second, all grasped the human element, integrating city and life into human experience and emotion. Some stories were quite human. Third, the methods of expression were creative, such as emphasizing the coordination of music and visual plot, using distinctive Chinese paper-cutting as a unified symbol, and showing many aspects of life through the perspective of running figures. Because they were professional institutions, these requirements for the Expo China Pavilion film were easily understood and implemented; otherwise, the Expo Bureau would have had to emphasize them repeatedly.
D
But it is worth noting that the five proposals had one thing in common: what they reflected was basically the development achievements of contemporary large and medium-sized Chinese cities. This conflicted with our positioning for the film.
The main display line of the China National Pavilion was that contemporary China was at the height of urbanization, with hundreds of millions of farmers either migrating into cities or transforming locally into urban residents. This created huge opportunities for China's modernization and also posed enormous challenges for social governance. Drawing on the millennia-old concepts of people-oriented governance and harmonious development, the Chinese government and people were overcoming challenges and moving toward a modern and powerful country.
According to this requirement, the film should show the profound impact of urbanization on Chinese society and use the process of change to highlight the value of Chinese wisdom. Lu Chuan's version overemphasized China's material accumulation efforts in moving from an agricultural civilization to urbanization and the self-improving spirit of facing natural challenges, while paying insufficient attention to the changes in the inner lives of people in contemporary Chinese society and to the social changes behind those inner changes.
The five proposals on October 6 seemed to move to the other extreme. If Lu Chuan's version emphasized the foundation of urbanization, these five proposals emphasized the results of urbanization. They stressed the splendid achievements of today's Chinese cities, especially metropolises that serve as China's windows, giving an impression of flowers blooming everywhere, dazzling brilliance and cities that were already very good. As Mao Zhuchen said, it was like eating five cream cakes in one morning. Vice Mayor Yang Xiong suggested that the selection of images should have historical depth and should not simply pursue beauty. This should be understood as an indirect criticism. Whether one emphasizes the foundation or the result, if neither pays attention to the process of urbanization itself, how can we express urban development, and where can visitors experience Chinese wisdom?
Even more noteworthy was that the five proposals shared the same content positioning, and the planning teams were designing the film for the Expo without communicating with the Expo organizers or coming to understand the filming requirements. It was therefore quite possible that they had already received instructions, or at least hints, on film content positioning from a higher level.
One fact further strengthened this suspicion. At the meeting, the top leader called on Deputy Director Chen Jianxin to speak. After affirming the strengths of these proposals, Chen said that according to the display requirements of the China Pavilion, it would be best to emphasize how urbanization had changed China, with the focus on process rather than result. The leader interrupted Chen and said that Lu Chuan's film was probably your idea, wasn't it? The hardships of the process are not our theme; everyone already knows those joys and sorrows. A film should give people hope. In the final summary, the leader said that all five proposals were qualified, while the previous one was not and was worrying because it might cause criticism.
The result of the meeting was beyond doubt. Everyone chose one from the five qualified proposals and continued to deepen and refine it. On October 9, Lu Chuan would report his new proposal, but his thinking followed the Expo Bureau's line. Even if he made great effort and the new version was bright, it probably would not work.
This discussion shook me considerably. If the core exhibition item of the China National Pavilion was not to emphasize the process of urban development but to focus on displaying today's glorious achievements, then our planning guidance since 2005 had been taking a detour. To borrow Vice Mayor Yang's words, this line of thought might have been pulled in the wrong direction. The top leader was someone at a high level, and his opinion could not have been groundless. Perhaps we had truly been mistaken.
E
Besides the issue of the guiding line, the planning system over the past few years was not very clear. Even when it became clear, it was not fixed and kept changing. This may have been the more fundamental reason for the detours. I will not discuss everything, but only the chief planner determined this year.
The chief planner for the China National Pavilion was Pan Gongkai, president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but the word chief had to be greatly discounted. First, he was not responsible for the architectural form, which had already been determined before display planning, even though the building's form was an important part of the exhibition. Second, he was not responsible for the core exhibition item, the film on the top level, which was to be shot by Lu Chuan. Third, he was not responsible for the exhibition design on the lowest level, the 33-meter level, because leaders clearly said that this part would be done by Shanghai itself, meaning the Expo Bureau would be responsible for planning and design. Fourth, he was not responsible for the 300-meter children's painting corridor from the top level to the middle level, which was led by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League.
One can imagine how difficult it was to carry out chief planning under such a division of labor.
Still, even if the film were ultimately shot by Lu Chuan, President Pan would at least have some right to speak and make suggestions despite not being directly responsible, because Lu Chuan was shooting under the guidance of the Expo Bureau. Now a new institution had been assigned to shoot the film, and when forming its ideas, it did not come to understand the main display line of the China National Pavilion. It seems that under the new system, the Expo Bureau's function is simply to pay.
Since 2005, I have remained on the edge of this vortex. I was neither pulled into the vortex nor allowed to leave it. I do not know whether this is good or bad. But it has created conditions for me to record history at close range, and I have a responsibility to write as honestly as possible, providing material for future generations who study this period of history.
Postscript
After the report in October 2009, Lu Chuan again revised the film's main line and content structure. Through the story of a farmer from western China coming to work in the coastal region and the growth and changes of four generations of one family, the film told the story of China's self-improving urbanization process over more than 30 years of reform and opening-up, as well as the construction enthusiasm of the Chinese people and their expectations for the future. Lu Chuan's film was named The Journey. The previously determined film directed by Zheng Dasheng was named Harmonious China. The two short films were shown alternately in the China National Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai, and both achieved great success.
The conclusion is that the road is tortuous, but victory is beyond doubt.