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China and the US may be at loggerheads over currency issues but they are united on one thing: they have both produced embarrassingly bad national pavilions for the $55bn Shanghai World Expo, which opens on Friday.

The US at least has an excuse: America has a law forbidding taxpayer dollars from being spent on grand (and, US lawmakers appear to think, ultimately futile) extravaganzas like Expo. Last year at this time, it was not even clear that the US would build an Expo pavilion at all – though failing to do so would have been a major snub to China. In the end, Hillary Clinton twisted corporate arms and the US pavilion raised the $61m it needed to take part.

But ground was only broken a scant nine months ago, and it shows: the US pavilion is just a series of movie theatres that will show Americans doing schmaltzy things like speaking bad Chinese and living in a paradise of happy social diversity. Expo’s 70m-100m mostly Chinese visitors, vast numbers of whom still idolise the American lifestyle, deserved better – and if the US Congress had not got in the way, they would probably have got it.

But if Washington can blame it all on haste, there is no excuse for China. Shanghai historians say the city has been planning for Expo since 1902, enough time for every conceivable government department to get in on the act, and mess things up, apparently.

The official China Pavilion website says the shape of the building captures the concept of “Oriental Crown, Splendid China, Ample Barn, and Rich People”- and that about sums it up: coherence is not its strong point.

Visitors are subjected to a train ride through a blasted empty neon dystopia which, the website tells us, gives “an appreciation of the great wisdom and achievements in China’s urban development from ancient to modern times”.

Apparently the ultimate achievement was to do away with people altogether. And the crowning glory is a sort of migrant worker love story on three vast screens, which celebrates the infinite benevolence, the untold munificence and the unparallelled wisdom of…the Chinese government.

Luckily for Expo visitors, there is plenty to enjoy between the two twin pillars of disappointment at the US and China pavilions: plenty of wacky architecture to look at, plenty of international foods to sample. But one could have hoped for more from the world’s two feuding superpowers: perhaps they deserve each other after all.

Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent.

Related reading:

In pictures: Shanghai gears up for World Expo 2010, BBC
Q+A: Why is Shanghai holding the World Expo?, Reuters
Shanghai World Expo 2010 Pavilion PHOTOS: See The 25 Best, Huffington Post