Olympics-style blowout rejected for Expo opening
Frugal-minded Shanghai has ruled out an 'Olympics-grade' opening ceremony for the launch of the World Expo, due to take place two months from today.
The city has rejected plans for a massive opening extravaganza featuring performances spanning the Huangpu River, which had the potential to be 'possibly no less spectacular than the Beijing Olympics' ceremony, the Shanghai Morning Post reported yesterday.
The move is partly to keep the budget under control but also due to a directive from Yu Zhengsheng , the city's Communist Party chief, not to run any 'unnecessary projects' to ensure the six-month event goes off without a hitch.
The newspaper said plans for the opening were being kept under wraps but were understood to be based on the principles of 'simple and passionate'.
The Expo's budget is already estimated to be twice that of the Olympics and has involved a massive drive to upgrade the city's transport network and other infrastructure.
Work is going on all over Shanghai in a frantic last-minute push to get everything finished in time, but progress has not been as swift as expected, and a number of major projects have fallen behind schedule.
Expo director Hong Hao admitted to the city's official English-language paper, the Shanghai Daily, in late January that almost one in five of the 100-odd self-built national pavilions would not be ready in time for the opening.
Elsewhere in the city, other projects are also dragging on longer than originally planned, and cracks are beginning to show in some efforts related to the city's facelift.
On the Bund, the iconic strip of colonial buildings running along the riverfront, tourists are greeted with a chaotic panorama of construction work blocking the view of the water.
The huge renovation project - which includes a 3.3-kilometre tunnel to take most of the traffic underground and a complete revamp of the promenade walkway - was originally intended to be finished by the end of last year. City officials now hope to have it completed by the end of this month, but no firm opening date has been announced.
Even some of the projects that have been completed are showing premature wear-and-tear. Red-brick pavements laid throughout the city's French Concession last year are starting to crumble and come apart.
There are also signs of Expo fatigue among residents. On Wulumuqi Road, someone has put stickers of cartoon yellow sunglasses over the eyes of every Expo logo and Haibao - the event's misshapen blue mascot - along a 100-metre stretch of hoarding concealing a huge plot of demolished buildings.
Such hoardings - and the urban destruction they are meant to conceal - are a common sight in the city, but the defacing of Haibao is not.
