Hey, I finally figured out where I’d seen the Chinese pavilion before – in Japan! That’s right, it’s a low-rent copy of something done better by the Japanese. Who would ever have guessed it? But there’s one thing that the Chinese certainly did not copy in their quest for Expo excellence, and that’s Gumbi, I mean Spongebob Squarepants, sorry I meant Haibao. Yup, Haibao, that lovable blue inflatable thing that tells us how to live our lives.

Seriously, never mind who came up with the idea of copying a plasticine man from 1953, never mind how much money has been wasted spent erecting thousands of the damn things everywhere, and never mind how recockulous the whole thing is. I’ve a much better thing to worry about, and that’s to do with the Expo Theme Song: Every big propaganda event must have a theme song, hopefully starring Jackie Chan and a few other washed up Communist supporters. It seems such a song was indeed created early this year, but then some no-good Japanese by the name of Maya Okamoto stole it from the Good People of China back in 1997. People from all walks of life are calling for a boycott of Japanese products (again), but the lads over at Expo HQ didn’t waste time complaining – no sir! They got right down to brass tacks and created a new and improved Expo Theme Song, starring Gumbi Haibao and a whole slew of new washed up Communist supporters. It’s a cracker, I’m sure you’ll agree, and those catchy lyrics will have your toes tapping like little tapping things.

Haibao, I think you’ll find, has finally found his destiny.

Haibao, bringing you a better city and a better life. It’s his name-Show, after all.

One of my researchers turned up an interesting fact the other day, and I thought to share it with you. You see folks, for the last year or so there have been these funny pictures turning up on the sides of buildings and in magazines and pretty much everywhere else you care to look, but nobody has had the faintest idea what they were supposed to be. Imagine my surprise when I was informed that they are in fact the Expo Logo! All this time, and I never knew!

The thing is, even now that I know what they are, I still haven’t the faintest idea what they are supposed to represent. I mean to say, how does something looking like a few used condoms flapping in the breeze represent a so-called ‘Expo’? Curious to find out whether the problem was with me, my team and I hit the streets of Shanghai. We stopped at random nearly four hundred people in the streets, pretending to be journalists, and asked them what they thought the thing was supposed to represent. The results of our polling show that people in general do seem to have a good grasp on what this ‘Expo’ thing is all about:

97% of the Chinese people we asked said that it looked like the fumes rising from the surface of the nearby Huangpu River. This is perhaps reasonable – after all the word “Huangpu” translates roughly as ‘Stench” in Chinese, and it is the only river I know of that you can walk across without getting your feet wet (although these days there’s every chance you will receive chemical burns).

94% of the foreign people we asked said that it looked like the ghosts of murdered Laowai’s rising from their shallow graves. Again, given that most of the parks in Shanghai are actually shallow graves for the thousands of foreigners who were murdered when the Communists took over, and that their bones regularly appear after heavy rains, this makes a lot of sense.

The official explanation is that it represents the Chinese ‘family’, looking down upon the rest of the world from a position of superiority. Actually, that’s a rough translation, the actual words read more like “condescending to look down upon the world like Gods”.

Anyway. make up your own mind. Here it is:

So there you have it, whiz-kids. Expo, a better city and a better life perhaps, but a crappier logo for sure.

I received an email over the weekend from a reader, asking me for my thoughts on the upcoming Expo. My first thought was: “What Expo?”. Well, my crack team of researchers here at MLHQ got busy and imagine my surprise when they discovered that China is holding a so-called ‘Expo’ in May! It was quite a shock, I can tell you! To start with, not one of us had heard a thing about it, and we honestly wondered whether this was an elaborate April Fool’s joke of some sort. I mean to say, normally with these big propaganda events, the entire thing is thrust in your face like a big face-thrusting thing, but this little number slipped by, completely under the radar. Mind you, it turns out we weren’t the only ones to miss it – even the United States didn’t know anything about it until just a few weeks ago, when one of their chappies in the State Department overheard a conversation at the Chinese Embassy.

Well folks, we got busy finding out what this ‘Expo’ thing is all about, and have put together a short series of posts for you, designed to give you the essential facts.

To start with, the general theme of this ‘Expo’ is “Better City, Better Life”. And it certainly represents a Better Life for some twelve and a half thousand citizens who have been forcefully relocated to a Better City far out in the countryside, in order to make way for the various pavilions. The Chinese pavilion is, of course, going to be the most magnificent structure in the history of buildings, as it is an enormous red pyramid standing 5,000 feet high (one foot for every year of glorious history, I’m told).

However, at a Press Conference held this morning, the coolie in charge of construction admitted that he had been looking at the blueprints upside down, with the result that the entire thing is now perched precariously on it’s point. “However,” he went on to say, “the pyramid is as safe as any other building in Chinese history, so you don’t need to worry about it.” And, upside down or no, we here at MLHQ are all convinced that the pyramid is way better than anything else within fifty yards of it. Here’s what it looks like:

Expo 2010: Better City, Better Life. But just not for anyone we know. So, to all you crazy kids out there in interweb land, stay tuned for the next instalment of Eye on Expo, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.