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TOPIC: Hillary Rodham Clinton visits house she helped build at Shanghai World Expo (Seattle Times 5/22/10)

Jen the Michigander

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Date: May 23, 2010

Hillary Rodham Clinton visits house she helped build at Shanghai World Expo (Seattle Times 5/22/10)	Permalink

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011931980_clintonchina23.html By all accounts, the United States would have been a no-show at the Shanghai World Expo had Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton not opened her Rolodex and raised $60 million in private cash to finance a pavilion here. So in a sense, it seemed fair that Clinton got a rousing cheer from a group of Chinese children when she visited the building on Saturday. But the house that Hillary built is unmistakably the house that corporate America paid for. After touring the pavilion — with its Citibank and Pfizer-sponsored theaters, gauzy eight-minute videos featuring representatives from Chevron, General Electric, and Johnson & Johnson, an exhibit hall emblazoned with more brand names, and a gift shop with licensed merchandise from Disney — Clinton seemed less inspired than relieved that the project was done. "It's fine," she said to a reporter asking her what she thought of the pavilion. "Can you imagine if we had not been here?" With its gunmetal-gray walls and convention-center aesthetics, the pavilion hardly stands out in a fairground studded by beguiling structures like Britain's Seed Cathedral, a cube with 60,000 sprouting transparent rods that make it look like a dandelion ready to be scattered to the winds. Still, the American organizers say the pavilion has drawn long lines and 700,000 visitors since the Expo opened May 1, which attests either to the enduring attraction of the United States or the wisdom of Woody Allen's observation that 80 percent of success is showing up. For Clinton, scratching together the money for the project was a simple matter of avoiding a diplomatic snub. The Chinese government spent $45 billion buffing up this glamorous but gritty metropolis to play host to a world's fair, and they are treating the 6-month-long event with almost the same importance they attached to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. America's participation was in jeopardy because Congress restricts the spending of public money on world's fairs, and under the Bush administration, the project had virtually no private financing. On Clinton's first visit as secretary of state last year, Chinese officials implored her to do something. "It's like a coming-out party for countries and cities," Clinton said, referring to world's fairs of the last century in Chicago and St. Louis. "There's a real historical significance to this." Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng thanked her for making sure the United States had a presence. To avoid violating federal rules, Clinton assigned most of the fundraising to two longtime Clinton fundraisers: Elizabeth Bagley and Jose Villarreal, both of whom were on hand. __________________ Nobody puts THIS baby in the corner!

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