“We need to get that many visitors to the Expo to outdo Japan… You know how Chinese feel about the Japanese, don’t you?”

I heard this comment yesterday from a cab driver in Shanghai, who chuckled when he said it, sounding more bemused than virulently nationalistic, as I chatted with him about the curious obsession in the Chinese press with whether or not the proclaimed target of 70 million visitors to the country’s first World’s Fair would be reached.

This came after I’d asked him whether he thought the Expo, which is about midway through its six-month run and which I’ve been blogging about at “The China Beat,” would have a good or bad impact on Shanghai.

He said the event would be remembered as have a good impact, “as long as it succeeds,” and mentioned that getting 70 million visitors through the turnstiles would be the key to determining success or failure. He took it for granted that I would simply know off-hand (and why not, as it has been mentioned in lots of television programs shown and books about the Expo published here in Shanghai) that the previous record for World’s Fair attendance had been set by the Osaka one of 1970.

(China has already outdone Japan in holding its first World’s Fair just two years after its first Summer Games, instead of having a six-year space between them, and getting many more countries to put up national pavilions here–albeit some of them bankrolled not by foreign governments but rather by the Chinese state, in the case of some countries in the developing world, or underwritten by corporate sponsors like Coca Cola, GE, Chevon, Johnson & Johnson, FedEx and Walmart, in the case of the U.S.)

I know that quoting taxi drivers to shed light on a country can seem a hopelessly clichéd move to make. And yet, this isn’t the first time I’ve gone that route and probably won’t be the last. That’s because, for various reasons, I find my discussions in cabs in Asia so notable.

Sometimes, this is due to the strong opinions that a cabbie expresses when I ask a question or engage in idle chatter. For example, I’ll always remember the Shanghai driver I rode with a few years ago who, when I asked him to take me to the museum created out of the famous author Lu Xun’s old house, launched into a long and detailed disquisition on why Mao Dun (who also lived in that same district in the pre-1949 era) was a much better writer, since he had a better feel for the realities of working life and had more stories that involved strikes. (I wish I’d gotten this cabbie’s contact to see what he made of the wave of taxi strikes that swept through China late in 2008.)

Sometimes, it is because I get an answer to a simple question that surprises me. A good example of this came when I first visited Taiwan midway through the last decade and I asked a driver whether he’d ever been to the mainland. “No,” he said, “but my wife works in Shanghai.” (I’d heard that by 2000 a few hundred thousand Taiwanese were living and working in the city, but that really hammered the point home.)

But I worried–until yesterday–that I’d go through this month-long Asian sojourn (I’ve been in Shanghai for a few weeks, hosting a series of dialogs with journalists and freelance writers, the last of which will take place on Sunday and find me conversing with Evan Osnos, who reports and blogs for the New Yorker) without hearing anything particularly memorable from a taxi driver. I’ve asked each one I’ve encountered the same question: “Have you been to the Expo?” And almost invariably, I’ve gotten one of two answers, both explaining why they haven’t gone: “Ren tai duo!” (Too many people!) or “Meiyou kong!” (No free time!).

When I ask them to elaborate on the latter response (no need for clarifying the former, as everyone here knows from the newspapers and t.v. that close to half-a-million people a day are reportedly going to the fairgrounds, nearly all of them Chinese, many of them coming from outside of the city), some have mentioned that they work 20-hour shifts, then take a day off to sleep (due to sharing the cab with another driver and living at the outskirts of Shanghai, making it more convenient to do long stints than ordinary length ones). I’ve found this explanation chilling, as Shanghai roads are worrisome enough without wondering how long it has been since a driver had some shut-eye, but not very quotable.

It was a relief when yesterday’s driver broke the mold. It is true that he hadn’t been to the Expo, but he mentioned quickly, after the typical comment about too many people going, that he was definitely planning to go in the fall, when the crowds might have thinned out, the lines might be shorter for the best pavilions and it would definitely be cooler outside. (As the giant thermometer at the fairground that they’ve made out of a smokestack shows, the temperature has been hovering close to 35 degrees Calsius, or 100 degrees, as I’m used to reckoning things, in Fahrenheit.)

This driver was also one of the first I’ve met to ask me why I was so interested in the Expo. When I said it was because I teach Chinese history in the U.S. and my research focus is on Shanghai history, he also said something striking. Usually, the first follow-up to any mention of history where both China and the U.S. have been mentioned leads to a comment about the great length of the Chinese past and short length of the American one. His comment was that Shanghai hadn’t been a major city for all that long and the U.S. was a pretty young country.

He then asked me when the first American World’s Fair had taken place, and I said that was in 1876, exactly one hundred years after our Revolution. I’ve thought a lot about parallels between China’s position now and the situation of the U.S. in the late 1800s, a theme that figures in my new book and was also the subject of a commentary I co-wrote with “China Beat” editor (and Forbes.com contributor) Maura Elizabeth Cunningham on World’s Fairs and related themes.

And yet, it wasn’t until the turn the conversation with yesterday’s taxi driver took that I realized the centennial parallel: the PRC recently marked its 60th birthday, but it was back in 1911 that the Revolution that brought Sun Yat-sen into power (albeit briefly) took place. And Sun’s supporters liked to equate him with George Washington; a popular nickname for him was Guo Fu (Father of the Country).

P.S. The long working shifts of some current drivers is not the scariest thing I’ve ever learned about Chinese cabbies. That honor goes to finding out, back during my first stay in China in the mid-1980s, when glasses were in short supply, that spectacles were distributed with preference given to those who had attained a high level of education, the notion being that academics and teachers needed to read for a living. I felt, admittedly selfishly, that it would have been much better to see more squinting scholars than have taxis on the streets driven by people who needed–but hadn’t been able to get–eyeglasses.