70-100 million visitors and exhibitions from 192 countries are expected at the event, opening May 1 and welcoming visitors for the next 6 months. An exclusive metro line has opened to service the event. Haibao, the official mascot of the 2010 Expo, carefully designed to resemble the Chinese character for "person" (although actually resembling the blue-gel creatures of Crest Kids Toothpaste commercials you may remember from 1991), has filled toy store racks in plush and robot form. The city is undergoing a $45 billion USD makeover to prepare.  

 

All the hubbub is strikingly reminiscent of the fanfare surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which led to infamous crackdowns on human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, and of course dissidents and protesters, in Tibet and around the country, held in detention centers without trials.

So it should come as no surprise that the fantastical Shanghai Expo is being preceded by a massive "special crackdown" to clean up the city.  In the past few months, "more than 30,000 police officers have made at least 900 raids" collecting 6,402 detainees.  Of those thousands, 35 were foreigners "taken in on suspicion of being in the country illegally."  Missing from that number are the many more individuals who were arrested and released following a re-education process, according to the China Daily.  The theme of the Shanghai World Expo is "Better City, Better Life," but its clear from recent waves of arrests that's to mean a particular kind of urban improvement that actively excludes and victimizes thousands.