On Being Neither Here nor There

Like the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo will impress the world as a fresh sign of China's rise. The size and variety of the show will be reported globally not only as consecrating the city's renaissance since Deng Xiaoping gave it the green light for revival in the early 1990s, but also as further proof that the world's third largest economy is capable of doing things that the West finds it difficult to match. Time magazine has already started the process with a long article celebrating the fact that the people of Shanghai "know their city is back on top, where it belongs."