Public interactives, soft power, and China’s future at and beyond the 2010 Shanghai World Expo

This article uses the Shanghai World Expo as a case study to examine how soft power and processes of nation branding are articulated to public interactives, defined as a range of technological devices and applications that serve as the stage for digitally mediated communication with audiences in communal spaces. We focus on three Expo pavilions—those of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China—and show how their public interactives augmented the performance of culture, the production of soft power, and a future vision at a global mega-event. We argue that public interactives not only transformed built environments into spaces for the pleasure of physically proximate audiences but also were the conduit for mediated narratives that represented contemporary understandings of a particular nation and actively produced imagined futures of that nation in a China-centric world. This article adds to prior scholarship by analyzing the use of public interactives by both host and guest nations to produce culture through spatial and temporal logics, comparing how technologically mediated narratives communicated these three nations’ soft power goals more generally as well as within bilateral relations underscored by the rise of China, and discussing the significance of these (past) future visions in the present. We thus add to understandings of the concept of soft power and the role of technology in the praxis of public diplomacy.