Shanghai Scrap

My first visit to the USA pavilion happened a few days after it officially opened. It was a quiet evening, and the large crowds of recent weeks hadn’t yet materialized. I didn’t have to wait long in line, and after only a few minutes I was ushered into the lobby where I watched two young Americans make announcements – and joke – to a Chinese audience transfixed by their linguistic and cultural fluency. A few minutes later we were ushered into a movie theater where – just as in the lobby – a young American warmed up and joked with the crowd. The last theater was home to the true star of the show (if you ask the Chinese audience), a stocky young American, no more than twenty-three, I think, who worked the five-hundred audience members like a stand-up comedian. After the film, they rushed up to him with cameras, questions, and curiosity.

As I left the pavilion, I raved to my companion about how the young Americans I’d just seen – officially, they are members of the USA pavilion’s Student Ambassador program – are precisely who and how I would want the USA to represent itself at Expo 2010 (the Shanghai World’s Fair). Entrepreneurial. Optimistic. Well-educated. Young. Open to China and other cultures. Sense of humor. Sense of integrity.

My companion raised a brow at me and, knowing that I’d long been critical of the USA pavilion, challenged me to write something complimentary about the Student Ambassadors on Shanghai Scrap. That seemed reasonable and so – then and there -I accepted the assignment, and at the first available opportunity I asked Martin Alintuck, then the pavilion’s Communications Director (and now the President/CEO of the pavilion), if he’d be willing to help me do it. Alintuck agreed right away.

And so, without further ado, allow me introduce Shanghai Scrap’s readers to Ryan Lovdahl, 23 and Katie Sirolly, 22, two members of the first class of eighty student ambassadors selected to work at the US pavilion until mid-July (a second class of eighty ambassadors will overlap them by a week or two and serve until the end of the Expo on October 31).

Katie and Ryan are both recent University of Delaware graduates. Though University of Delaware doesn’t have a Chinese language major, it does have a foreign language requirement, and the two of them both chose Chinese. Along the way, they showed an aptitude for the language that resulted in both being selected for year-long scholarships at Beijing Language and Culture University, paid for by the Chinese government. Ryan spent two years at BLCU; Katie spent one. Afterward, both sought out additional opportunities to study, travel, and work in China. And so, in 2009, when the Student Ambassador program, was announced, both jumped at the opportunity to apply. (more…)

Late Tuesday afternoon the USA Pavilion at Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) announced that Nick Winslow, one of two founding partners of the non-profit that manages the pavilion, and its CEO and President, has resigned. He will maintain a seat on the pavilion’s board. The complete press release can be found after the page jump, below.

To note: the press release gives no reason for Winslow’s resignation. However, regular readers of this blog are aware that serious allegations have been raised about potential conflicts of interest between Winslow and the USA pavilion’s chief contractor, BRC Imagination Arts of Burbank, California; that such conflicts may, in fact, place the USA pavilion’s tax-deductible non-profit 501(c)(3) status at risk; that – on this basis and several others – at least one complaint against the USA pavilion has been filed with the Internal Revenue Service; and that, when questioned about these issues, Winslow provided me with a bizarre set of contradictory and highly legalistic answers. Are these issues the reason for Winslow’s resignation? I’ve just emailed a set of questions to a contact at the USA pavilion in hope of sussing out some answers; if I receive those answers, I’ll add them to this post (or, depending upon their usefulness/newsworthiness, write a new one). In the meantime, for those readers interested in background on the USA pavilion, recent questions surrounding Winslow, and – most important – supporting documents (including documents obtained from the IRS) regarding Winslow’s questionable professional relationships – see these posts:

• The Gun Almost Smokes Pt. II: Potential Conflicts of Interest at the USA Pavilion
• Conflicts of Interest at the USA Expo 2010 Pavilion? Nick Winslow responds legalistically
• How did the US manage to spend $61 million on an Expo 2010 pavilion? IRS filings offer some insights.

For those interested in additional information about the USA pavilion, including the murky circumstances under which it was awarded to Winslow by the Bush State Department, see Shanghai Scrap’s USA Pavilion category, and “A Sorry Spectacle,” my March 2010 piece for Foreign Policy.

[UPDATED 6-10: This morning Will Clem of the South China Morning Post has a good story about the Winslow resignation and the questions that still revolve around Winslow and the USA pavilion, here (subscriber only). So far, and to its considerable discredit, the US media in Shanghai appear uninterested in covering the USA pavilion - on this issue, or any other.]

I’ll have more to say about this major development if and when I receive additional information on it. After the page jump, today’s carefully worded press release from the USA Pavilion. (more…)

[A brief note: this week is going to be the final week of the All Expo, All of the Time theme that's taken over Shanghai Scrap. We have non-Expo posts planned for next week, and we're going to like doing them. But, for this week at least, a few loose ends to tie up before moving back into prior and new beats. Of course, Expo won't be leaving our thoughts entirely - we have some items that we'd still like to explore over there - but I think a solid month of exclusive Expo blogging is quite enough. Anyway, back to the Expo blogging.]

Loose end #1. Potential conflicts of interest at the USA pavilion, and a response from the pavilion’s president. [fair warning: this is going to get long and technical; for US pavilion wonks, only.] (more…)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stopped by the USA pavilion at Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) this morning and, according to numerous media outlets (among them, the New York Times and the Washington Post), had this to say when asked her opinion about the USA pavilion which she was instrumental in building/saving: “It’s fine.”

Not great. Not spectacular. Not even good. Just plain old “fine.”

To be clear: responsibility for the uninspiring design and programming of the USA pavilion does not belong to Clinton, but rather to Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc, a non-profit organization designated to design, build, and fund the pavilion by the Bush State Department (with the steadfast, key, and ongoing support of the leadership of the US Consulate in Shanghai). For those members of the media looking for additional details – including names named – on how the United States ended up with what the Washington Post’s John Pomfret suggests “resembles more a convention center in a medium-size American city than a showcase for the United States,” I direct you over to this helpful ‘Reporter’s Guide to the USA Pavilion‘ and “A Sorry Spectacle,” my March 2010 summation of the situation at Foreign Policy magazine. Further information can be found under this blog’s Expo 2010 – USA Pavilion category.

[Addendum: Both the New York Times and the Washington Post quote Frank Lavin, Chair of the USA Pavilion's Steering Committee, in their reportage from the Clinton visit. This is unfortunate. In June 2009, at a point when the USA pavilion non-profit was nearly broke, Lavin - a former ambassador to Singapore under George W. Bush - publicly claimed that the US Congress had adopted a resolution in favor of his non-profit organization's effort to build a pavilion at Expo 2010. However, Congress did no such thing, and Lavin's statement was quickly retracted - though without apology to the pavilion's donors, much less, Congress (Shanghai Scrap's coverage of this disreputable moment in USA pavilion history, here). In the wake of his lie, Lavin disappeared from public view. Many - including me - hoped that - in the interest of his and the pavilion's dignity - he wouldn't reappear. Too bad that he did.]

For more than a year, the USA pavilion at Expo 2010 has been shrouded in inexplicable secrecy. To this day, for example, the State Department won’t reveal the process by which Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc [SE 2010] – the non-profit it authorized to design, fund, build and manage the US pavilion – was selected; who and how a Canadian architect was chosen to design the US pavilion; or, for that matter, release a detailed budget on how SE 2010 was spending its $61 million in tax-deductible contributions. Unfortunately, the first two questions are still mysteries: the State Department, SE 2010, and the US Consulate in Shanghai have been obstinate in their refusal to answer questions on these matters. However, the last question – a detailed budget – received a partial answer last week when I published a cost estimate that SE 2010 had filed with the IRS in June 2009.

Readers will recall that the IRS documents indicated that SE 2010, Inc was spending US$23 million for the three short films that are featured in the USA pavilion (a sum that exceeds the cost of 4 of the ten Academy Award nominees for Best Picture). No surprise, the producer of the three films – BRC Imagination Arts of Burbank, California – is, according to the June 2009 IRS documents, the pavilion’s top-paid contractor [click to enlarge].

In the above document, BRC is promised US$10 million for Production Design/Fabrication; according to individuals associated with two other national pavilions, that $10 million most likely folds into the $23 million for “show construction & installation” in the cost sheet. In any case, no other contractor is listed in the IRS filing; BRC is the largest. (more…)

As regular readers know, for more than a year I’ve asked the USA pavilion at Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) and the State Department to provide me with a precise accounting of how they’re spending the US$61 million that they’ve raised from private corporations in the name of the United States of America. And, for more than a year, I’ve been met with either a) silence, or b) “we can’t do anything unless the pavilion’s board of directors approves it.” Even if the latter answer is sincere (and I’m pretty sure it’s not), the fact that several of the board members refuse to return my calls doesn’t bode well for my request.

So, rather than bang my head against the pavilion wall, I’ve decided to take a look at what the Internal Revenue Service has on Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc (that’s the name of the non-profit corporation that funds and manages the USA pavilion). And lo and behold, there, amidst a very interesting filing that I’ll touch upon in coming days, we find a June 29, 2009 document helpfully named “USA Pavilion Summary Cost Sheet.” Click the thumbnail document below to expand it.

It’s important to keep in mind that the numbers in this document were made a few weeks before the pavilion ground-breaking, and so they may have changed in the intervening months (then again, many of the numbers conform to what I and others have heard around town). Still, in the interest of accuracy and fairness, yesterday I forwarded a copy of the Cost Sheet to Martin Alintuck, spokesman for the USA pavilion, offering Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc the opportunity to comment upon, update, or correct any of the figures. Alintuck has not responded.

Meanwhile, over the weekend I shared the Cost Sheet with two individuals associated in similar ways with Expo 2010, and they were kind enough to provide me with their thoughts on it. (more…)

Over the last two days I’ve received a sudden and unusually large number of emails and phone calls related to the USA pavilion at Expo 2010. Combined with the growing number of negative and caustic reviews of the structure, I’m sensing that more than a few people are looking for an explanation as to how the United States managed to build a pavilion that commentators at Huffington Post have compared to – among other things – “a supply storage shed,” “a temporary NASA administrative building, circa 1970,” and “a combination Bose Sound System/Air Purifier.” I’m going to use this post as a brief guide for reporters and anyone else interested in finding out more about how this happened, as well as a brief guide to what questions still need to be answered and who might be able to answer them.

But first – if you’re looking for a quick route to understanding how the US arrived at its current pavilion, let me humbly suggest “A Sorry Spectacle,” my March 8, 2010 piece for Foreign Policy. In it, I give a concise chronology of events, the key players, issues, and documents. Additional source documents showing the total lack of qualifications of the team selected to manage the US pavilion can be found on my blog, here. What that article and those documents won’t tell you is how a Canadian architect was chosen to design the US pavilion, much less who was responsible for signing off on the  selection. Alas, the State Department refuses to answer questions on that subject. So, what follows, after the jump, is a rough chronology of the early stages of the US pavilion – the period when the design and selection would have been finalizes – with additional links to relevant documents and stories, on the evolution of the US pavilion to help reporters get their bearings, and perhaps provide some leads along the way. (more…)

Another observation from my day-long visit to the Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) soft opening: if you like American fast food, you’re in luck. KFC. Papa John’s. Burger King. Mister Donut. Starbucks (let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?). They’re all there. And so are some of the usual Chinese suspects, too. Makes sense, of course. After all, who’s up for fine dining after spending three hours in line to see a five-minute promotional clip about the wonders of – I dunno – Andorran tourism? And so it should surprise nobody at all – not even me – that the USA’s Expo 2010 pavilion offers its visitors the following meal choices (click to enlarge – please):

Not exactly something for everyone, but certainly something for anyone who doesn’t feel like walking over to the nearby Papa John’s or Burger King. At an optimistic minimum, the menu should provide a good lesson in the forces (forces like USA pavilion sponsor Yum, Inc., owner and pusher of KFC and Pizza Hut) that Michelle Obama has to overcome in her high-profile campaign against childhood obesity. Presumably, if and when she and the kids visit, they’ll pack a picnic.

After a year of kvetching and moaning about the USA pavilion for Expo 2010 (World’s Fair), this afternoon Shanghai Scrap finally had the opportunity to go inside the nearly complete pavilion, and have a look at how – precisely – the US will be representing itself to China, and the world, beginning May 1. Regular readers will recall this recent post that included images of the pavilion’s exterior, designed by Canadian Clive Grout. With that post, I encouraged readers to compare the US design with those of other countries (such as those featured in this very nice Shanghaiist post by my friend Christine Tan). Alas, very few pavilions have opened their doors to the press (or anyone else) yet,  so, dear readers, you’ll have to evaluate them out of context.

I’m going to keep my comments to a minimum here. For now, my critique will be limited to saying that my prior assessment of the USA pavilion – that it looks like a movie theater – appears factual. That is to say, the USA pavilion is, in fact, a movie theater. Or, rather, a series of movie theaters. The films and videos that will be shown on these screens will constitute the pavilion’s programming. For various reasons (mostly, maintaining an element of surprise), the films weren’t shown to the media today. So, in some sense, it’s a bit unfair to judge the pavilion on the basis of its empty theaters. Then again, that’s what we have, so let’s get to it [all images enlarge with a click].

Above, the lobby of the pavilion (filled with media). On the far wall, the three large rectangles will hold screens showing a video in which Americans – celebrities (Kobe Bryant, for example) and regular folk (a Maine fisherman, we were told) – welcome visitors to the pavilion in Chinese. (more…)

Over the next two days, representatives of the USA pavilion for Expo 2010 (ie, the 2010 World’s Fair) will be rolling-out the USA’s building and programming for the event, to open May 1. Tomorrow, Tuesday, media will have the opportunity to interview members of BRC Imagination Arts, the company that produced the “4-D” film to be shown inside of the pavilion. And on Wednesday, the pavilion and the film will be presented to invited media at noon. In addition, Commissioner General Jose Villarreal will submit to a Q & A. I have been invited to attend the Wednesday event, and I plan to report on it at Shanghai Scrap, and elsewhere, in the hours following. This post, I hope, will be of use to the other reporters who will join me on Wednesday, and precede me tomorrow.

As regular readers know, for the last year I’ve written extensively about the travails of the USA pavilion at Expo 2010, beginning with this March 2009 piece in the Atlantic, through more than a dozen blog posts, and a March 2010 piece in Foreign Policy. At the heart of my reporting and critique has been this: the individuals whom the US State Department entrusted – in the words of the Department itself – to “design, instruct, install, and manage a U.S. Government pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World’s Fair and to raise all funding required for the project” – were chosen in a no-bid non-competitive process that wasn’t open to the public, and which resulted in a woefully un-qualified USA pavilion team that has, over the last two years, caused diplomatic tensions with China, failed at its chartered tasks and – most significantly – built a sub-standard pavilion that won’t necessarily embarrass the United States, but certainly won’t show it in its best light, either.

Alas, the State Department, the Commerce Department, and the individuals associated with Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc., the non-profit serving as the State Department’s designated pavilion, have been reluctant to answer questions about the selection process and have, at various points, lied about it. Nonetheless, perseverance pays off, and last month the State Department, at the request of a concerned citizen, and with the encouragement of Jose Villarreal, the pavilion’s Commissioner General, released several previously secret documents which illuminate previously murky aspects of the USA pavilion selection process. I’m going to use this post to set the context for these documents, present excerpts from them, draw some conclusions, and then – at the end – post them for the use of anyone interested in how the USA wound up with the pavilion that’s going to be presented to the media tomorrow and Wednesday.

So let’s get to it.

(more…)

On March 8 Foreign Policy published “A Sorry Spectacle,” my reported essay on the serious problems, allegations, and questions, that have plagued the USA pavilion for Expo 2010 since the 2006 “request for proposal” [RFP] to build, design, and fund-raise the structure was issued in 2006. Yesterday, April 2, the Commissioner General of the USA pavilion, Jose Villarreal, offered what he characterizes as a “defense” of the USA pavilion effort in FP. I’ll get to his response in a moment. But first, the allegations, as outlined in my piece, are as follows:

1. The State Department’s original RFP set the bar for building a pavilion so high that no reasonable bidder could be awarded the pavilion.
2. After the failure of the RFP, the pavilion was awarded to two politically-connected individuals, Nicholas Winslow and Ellen Eliasoph, one of whom – Eliasoph – is related to a high-ranking Commerce Department official with oversight of China trade issues, in a non-competitive, no-bid process that was announced to the public only after its completion.
3. When Eliasoph and Winslow were asked about the basis upon which they were awarded the pavilion, they gave contradictory answers [ie, someone isn't telling the truth]
4. USA pavilion Commissioner General Villarreal, who had nothing to do with the appointment of Winslow and Eliasoph, explained the Winslow/Eliasoph appointment by noting that “a lot of people aren’t there [at the State Department] anymore” and “a lot of what happened is kind of a blur.”
5. The State Department’s Office of Inspector General has forwarded a private citizen’s complaint that touches on this selection process directly to the secretary of state’s executive office.
6. The State Department’s noncompetitive authorization of Nicholas Winslow and Ellen Eliasoph means that the group’s architect and design weren’t subject to a competitive review, a highly unusual procedure in selecting any $61 million building [addendum 4/4: at the time the State department awarded the authorization to Winslow and Eliasoph, the building was budgeted at $84 million], much less one meant to represent the United States abroad.
7. Eliasoph and Winslow raised almost no money from the time they were awarded the pavilion authorization, missed multiple construction deadlines, and, in the process, alienated large segments of the U.S. business community in Shanghai, as well as numerous Expo officials.
8. In the spring of 2009, Chinese Foreign Ministry officials, concerned and frustrated by the faltering U.S. effort as led by Winslow and Eliasoph, were forced to make personal appeals to Clinton to fix the situation.
9. The film featured inside of the USA pavilion was produced by long-time acquaintances of at least one of Shanghai Expo 2010, Inc’s founders [Winslow].
10. Commissioner General Villarreal and others connected to the USA pavilion effort have declined to release the pavilion’s budget and books [though they are required to do so by IRS regulations governing non-profit entities like theirs].
11. In two spring 2009 interviews, Nick Winslow informed me that he’d arranged a Chinese government loan for the purpose of keeping his group’s USA pavilion effort afloat.

Next, the unanswered questions: (more…)

Last year, Clive Grout, the Canadian architect commissioned to design the USA pavilion for Expo 2010, spoke to a US trade journal devoted to theme parks, about his design:

“The building is designed here the way we’d do it if it was in downtown Philadelphia or in Los Angeles,” he explains. “It’s a model for high-density, low-rise development in our cities. We have a very prominent site and it is the USA Pavilion. People will find it. We have not felt the need to do an architectural handstand to get attention.”

$61 million later, this is the result – as of yesterday (click to enlarge):

To put this design in perspective, I encourage readers to click over to William Bostwick’s “Exporting Architecture: the Rise and Fall of US World Expo pavilions” over at Fast Company. For those who’d like to better understand how the US settled on its 2010 design, you might click over to my recent Foreign Policy piece, A Sorry Spectacle. After the jump, images of several Expo 2010 pavilions within a ten minute walk of the USA pavilion (each of which cost less than $61 million, by the way). (more…)

Today Foreign Policy publishes “A Sorry Spectacle,”  my history of the regrettable and often bizarre effort to build a USA pavilion for Expo 2010 [a/k/a, the World's Fair] to begin on May 1, in Shanghai. Some of the material has been aired on Shanghai Scrap and elsewhere over the last year; much of it has not. The full FP story can be found here.

The USA pavilion saga is a difficult, murky story, and one that I haven’t always enjoyed reporting, to put it lightly. But, for the record, if my reporting has given anyone the impression that I’m somehow opposed to a US pavilion, I’d like to set the record straight. I’m very much for a quality USA pavilion, designed, selected, and built in a manner that displays the best of American architecture, design, and values. For reasons which I detail in the FP piece, I don’t believe that the 2010 US pavilion accomplishes that; rather, the design and machinations surrounding its selection, funding, and construction, have served to embarrass the US. Are we better having a poor pavilion than no pavilion at all? I suppose so, but that’s a sorry, sorry choice. Fortunately, I’m not alone in the opinion, and as a result there’s good reason to hope that – if the US decides to participate in Expo 2015 in Milan – things might be better. More on that another time. (more…)

[UPDATE - February 22, 2010. Three weeks later, Tim Stratford accepts a job in the Beijing law office where Dr. Kasoff's wife is a partner.]

Tomorrow at 12:30 PM, the US-China Business Council [USCBC] and the US Information Technology Office [USITO] in Beijing will host a luncheon briefing featuring Tim Stratford, an assistant US Trade Representative, and Dr. Ira Kasoff, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Asia. According to the notice for the event posted at the American Chamber of Commerce, the two gentlemen “will provide an update on plans for the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) in 2010 and a briefing on their meetings with Chinese officials during their visit.” It should be an interesting briefing: the JCCT is a twenty-seven-year-old dialogue between senior US and Chinese government officials that has played a key role in resolving trade disputes and, in the process, has directly benefited – and penalized – companies involved in that trade (a list of China’s JCCT commitments between 2004 and 2009 can be found here).

The presence of Dr. Kasoff at the event should be particularly informative. As a senior Commerce Dept deputy for Asia, and a member of the Market Access and Trade Compliance Staff at the International Trade Administration in Washington, D.C., Dr. Kasoff is a highly influential figure in US-China trade relations. And he has been so for years: prior to his current role, he served in six US Commercial Service assignments in Asia, including a stint as the Chief Commercial Officer in Shanghai.

Thus, when Friday’s off-record lunch convenes at the Westin Chaoyang in Beijing, Dr. Kasoff’s stature ensures that he will look out at an audience that includes  representatives of leading American and Chinese businesses with a keen interest in how his actions – and, by extension, the work of the ITA and the JCCT – will impact their operation in coming weeks, months, and years. No doubt, many of those faces will be familiar to Dr. Kasoff from his years of work on US-China trade issues and, no doubt, many of them will be familiar to Dr. Kasoff’s wife, Ellen Eliasoph, a co-chair of the troubled US pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. [She is also a partner in the Beijing office of Covington &Burling, the law firm which Stratford announced he was joining three weeks after his joint appearance with Kasoff.]

The reason is pretty straight-forward: Ms. Eliasoph, in her official State Department-designated capacity, has naturally solicited many if not most of the leading US companies operating in China for donations to the privately-financed US pavilion project (donations that are often measured in the millions of dollars). She has also solicited and raised money from Chinese companies. In both cases, her actions, and relationship to Dr. Kasoff have gone mostly unquestioned.

Those questions need to be asked. (more…)