‘Open’, ‘connected’, ‘distinctive’, ‘pioneering’, and ‘committed’: semioscaping Shanghai as a global city

ABSTRACT

The identity of a city matters in a global age. This article explores the discursive construction of the global city’s identity in relation to semiotic landscape, using the construction of Shanghai as a global city as a case study. In this increasingly globalising world, Shanghai authorities have recently demonstrated the desire to establish itself as a global city. Under the assumption of city agency in the semiotic practice of public signage, the signs photographed on site at Pudong International Airport of Shanghai were analysed from a critical perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, focusing on identity building for unique selling propositions. Questions addressed include what the identity of the global city looks like in Shanghai and how Shanghai is semioscaped as a global city and thereby its ethos implicitly represented. The findings suggest both global convergences and local particularities in the semioscaping of Shanghai as a global city. It argues that this way of identity building is attributable to the negotiation and contestation of power subject to the social norms, ideologies of a specific city.

KEYWORDS:

• Global city
• identity
• semiotic landscape
• multimodal analysis
• airport
• Shanghai

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of this paper. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen Jeaco and Paul Cheung for their useful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to these works.

2 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to these works.

3 Due to access prohibition, the data collected reflect what travellers can see in one direction. Not sure if the same board is also observable on the way of travellers to the check-out.

4 Historically, Shanghai dialect as part of the Wu language in China is an integration of the various forms of Wu when millions of people throughout the Wu-speaking region settled there during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

5 First proposed by President Xi Jinping in November, 2012, ‘realizing the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the Chinese nation’s greatest dream in modern history.’ The notion Chinese Dream inspires China to responsibly share development opportunities with the rest of the world (http://english.qstheory.cn/2016-12/04/c_1120047779.htm, accessed on July 8, 2020).

6 Backhaus (2012) observes that official multilingual signs in Tokyo tends to relate information across two or more languages in ‘mutual translation’. We think the same generally holds true for ‘新时代, 共享未来’ and their English translation, although we see Chinese taking on a marked salience and a visual hierarchy suggesting directionality in translation, where ‘the language given in prominent position appear as the original version of the message to be conveyed, while the other languages contained are assigned the status of mere translations’ (Backhaus, 2006, p. 60).

7 It is desirable to conduct a comparative study of cities worldwide for relatively rich, comprehensive, and credible findings in the future.