Cheerios, Nescafé, and Disney—if you happened to be living in China in the early nineties, those brands likely constituted the coördinates of an impossibly opulent universe that existed mostly on glossy poster boards or the opposite side of the TV screen, reflecting the life you wish you lived. There were other iconic Western emblems, like “Dynasty,” the television series about the proudly capitalistic Carrington clan, whose melodramatic plotline (and magnificent shoulder pads) mesmerized a generation of socialists. But if you were about seven years old, as I was, its narrative of love triangles and corporate succession paled in comparison to the vision of a life in which everyone feasted on Cheerios—ubiquitously advertised but decidedly unaffordable to the masses—sipped “ka-fee,” and, most fabulously for the children, was granted access to a fortified Magic Kingdom. Still, although everyone knew its name, and its vague association with the duck and the mouse, no one I knew had ever visited the fantastical spires of a Disney park. The happiest place on earth evidently was not accessible to China’s people.
Since then, Chinese tourists have become fairly regular visitors to Disney resorts, including one in Hong Kong. But it was still a milestone when, this month, the conglomerate opened its sixth and most expensive resort in China’s preëminent financial hub, Shanghai. Fifteen years in the making (negotiations began in 2001), with building costs upward of 5.5 billion dollars, the Shanghai Disney Resort has been hailed by its chief executive, Robert Iger, as the “greatest opportunity the company has had” since Walt Disney himself bought swampy land in Central Florida, in the nineteen-sixties. The new resort may occupy a thousand acres of mostly developed land in Pudong, the city’s financial district, but in many ways the venture is embarking upon similarly untrodden territory.
In a country where the government retains ultimate ownership of all urban land, Shanghai Disney’s prime real estate required unprecedented compromises from an American company accustomed to holding tight its corporate reins. A big reason why the resort took so long to open its doors had to do with its delicate terms of negotiation. Unlike Disney Hong Kong, built in 2005, in which the city footed a large part of the construction bill while Disney retained management control, the state-owned Shendi Group holds fifty-seven per cent of the Shanghai resort; Disney also handed the government thirty per cent of the Disney management company that runs the property, giving the state a say in the choice of rides, ticket prices, and other structural decisions ordinarily kept within the company.
“Ten years ago, all foreign companies wanted to get into China, and the Chinese were curious and excited about all things foreign,” Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Yale, told me. “China’s come a long way in the past decade. Now, for there to be excitement on either end, the foreign company must offer something that the Chinese still can’t or haven’t yet produced themselves.” Qian’s words sum up a sentiment about the changing flow of cultural currency and capital as China, the world’s second-largest economy and unapologetic superpower, revises its indiscriminate idolatry of all things Western. Gone are the days when Cheerios and instant coffee marked the heights of luxury purely on the basis of their provenance.
Instead, Shanghai Disney arrives at a time when the Chinese possess greater bargaining power than ever and are disposed to being selective in their accommodation of foreign entities. Analysts have forecast that once Shanghai Disney is fully up and running, it could generate as much as five hundred million dollars in operating income a year, and no one is more attuned to the profit potentials of the world’s largest untapped market than the Chinese government. (Three hundred and thirty million “income-qualified” people live within three hours of the Shanghai resort, more than the entire population of the U.S., and Disney is eager to court them.)
This reversal of dynamics—in which the Magic Kingdom is eagerly knocking at the gates of the Middle Kingdom—speaks to the economic might of China’s middle class, whose growth and penchant for travel may go a long way toward shaping the market and the economy. “China currently has a middle class consisting of one hundred million people, perhaps the world’s largest,” Liu Qingmin, an associate professor of economics at Columbia University, told me. “This population has a huge demand for high-quality cultural and entertainment products.”
Shanghai Disney’s tagline, often repeated by Iger, is to be “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese,” underscoring the growing emphasis placed upon both import products and services that recognize the relevance of the country’s own culture and seek to replicate aspects of it, a standard that was far less of a priority for foreign companies as recently as a decade ago. The park’s signature restaurant is a Chinese tea house, designed to represent different regions of the country, and eighty per cent of the rides are unique; there will be no Space Mountain, and the Shanghai version of Main Street, U.S.A., is called Mickey Avenue instead. There are mosaics of Disney characters representing Chinese astrological signs, in the Garden of the Twelve Friends.
For the time being, not everyone agrees. In the words of Liu, “The creativity and optimism of Disney, and American culture more generally, are attractive to Chinese. This element might not be what Wanda has at this point, and can take years to develop. This is an opportunity and challenge for both foreign and local companies.”
None of this can happen, of course, without sustained economic growth and the support and patronage of a stable middle class that may, in time, demand choice and quality in all aspects of life. Rather than watching the fantastical lives of the Carringtons and Colbys with the sort of resignation both adults and children alike learned to nurse and repress, a large swath of the Chinese have decided that some dreams, like a vision of the happiest place on earth, are eminently within their grasp. And the choices they make then can be hard to predict. Once families like mine could actually afford Cheerios, I found to my dismay that the adorable loops tasted like chalk.