DisnEY
This artist rendering shows the Shanghai Disney Resort
Mickey
Takes
Shanghai
The Shanghai Disney Resort in Pudong is expected to open
to the public in 2015 but long before the magical castle goes
up, the project is triggering a boom in other types of theme
parks across China
By Lauren HiLgers
A
fter 10 years of negotiations, of rumors in the
media and speculation on where the theme
park would land in Mainland China, Shanghai
Disney Resort broke ground on a plot of land
in Pudong District just over a year ago. The
impending arrival of the Disney resort has heralded a theme park
boom in China, with its center seemingly in Shanghai.
Campaign photos
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The Shanghai Resort is intended to anchor a huge new
tourism and resort zone in the city, reflecting Shanghai’s goal to
be the most international city in China not just for business and
finance, but for tourism and leisure. The city is home to a number
of domestic theme parks and, in addition to Disney, Dreamworks
recently announced plans to develop an entertainment zone in
Puxi, where they will focus not on rides, but on live shows, a
C o v e r s to r y
Kung Fu Panda-style Pagoda, and
what they promise will be the world’s
largest IMAX Theater.
For Disney, the project is
challenging the company to adapt
deeply-engrained theme park and
resort traditions to a new, and very
Murray King
different market. “This project is
of Shanghai Disney
turning us into a much more globalthinking company,” says Greg Morley,
vice president of human resources at
the Shanghai International Theme
Park and Resort Management
Company Limited. “It’s challenging
the way we’re doing work globally.”
At the same time, the opening
General Manager
of the 3.9-square kilometer resort,
Mike Crawford
targeted to open at the end of 2015,
promises to bring thousands of jobs to
the area, anchoring what local officials envision to be an expansive
tourism district and introducing Disney, and theme parks, to a
whole new audience. “Studies from other resorts show that, for
every job our resorts fill, it creates two jobs in the community,”
says Murray King, the vice president of public affairs at Shanghai
Disney Resort. “It’s a huge job creator both directly and indirectly.”
The success of Disney’s endeavor, everyone seems to agree,
depends largely on how well Disney and China can adapt to
each other. Disney culture has its own distinct quirks. Morley
and King are speaking from a conference room at Disney’s
current headquarters in Pudong, surrounded by frosted glass
embellished with what looks like scattered bubbles. If you look
close, says Morley, you can find the “hidden Mickeys” in the
design. Absent-mindedly, King draws his own Mickey Mouse
on a sheet of paper as he speaks. The biggest challenge for the
Disney team, they say, will be establishing a Disney presence in
China that is distinctly local while at the same time preserving
the identity and core values of the company.
“We want to give the public an authentic Disney experience,”
says King. “We’ve done focus groups and individual surveys with
our cast and people want the real Disney experience. The other
part is that we want it to be distinctly Chinese.”
To strike this balance, Shanghai Disney is being developed
with a heightened awareness of local expectations. Considerations
such as food, recognition of Disney characters and China’s
unique travel patterns are all being taken into consideration
during every step of the development process. New hires are
required to take a training course on the history and values of
Disney. Community outreach and a series of publicity campaigns
that are scheduled for the future are expected to increase
awareness of the Disney brand.
China’s theme park boom
Over the last decade, while Disney was negotiating the terms
of its Shanghai arrival, the country’s increasingly affluent middle
class has been learning about theme parks on its own. Mike
Crawford, general manager, Shanghai Disney Resort, points out
that an increase in wealth and disposable income leads to more
DisnEY
Mickey Mouse at the groundbreaking for Shanghai Disney Resort earlier this year
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imaginE China
travel and more demand for leisure destinations like a Disney
resort. “It’s a country where Disney already has a number of
businesses that continue to be critical for its long-term growth,”
says Crawford. “Shanghai is the largest city in one of the world’s
most dynamic and fast-growing economies.” This is a sentiment
that Chris Yoshii, global director of consulting group AECOM,
heartily agrees with. In fact, Yoshii says, theme parks are already
a growing phenomenon in China.
“We are definitely seeing a growth in interest in visiting theme
parks,” says Yoshii. According to Yoshii, visitation numbers at
existing parks have been showing strong growth over the last few
years and theme park managers have been investing in building
better attractions. “The middle class market is growing and
there are a growing number of tourists that are traveling around
China,” he says. “One of the things they want to see are the
different theme parks and different experiences that they don’t
have in their home city.”
China’s theme parks, he says, have a few distinctions from
theme parks that are more popular globally. “In China they don’t
like the really thrilling coasters,” he says. “Here it’s much more
about spectacle rather than thrills.” The Chinese audience leans
toward shows, water features and live entertainment. This, says
Yoshii, will be an advantage for Disney.
“Disney is much more about shows and themes than it is about
thrills,” he says. At the same time, some domestic theme parks are
catering to a Chinese audience in a way not available to Disney. A
Ghengis Khan theme park, for example, is presenting the ancient
warlord as an alternative to Mickey Mouse. In Beijing, a US$4.7
billion theme park showcasing Tibetan culture is also under way.
These home-grown parks will likely draw visitors, but will
pose little threat to the success of Disney’s arrival. The Disney
brand, Yoshii points out, is on the rise in China and the arrival of
Mickey and Minnie in traditional Chinese outfits
the resort is coupled with a number of other Disney endeavors.
Disney English has a growing presence in cities throughout
China and, earlier this year, Disney announced plans to open up
to 40 retail outlets in the country over the next 3 years. “I think
10 years ago very few people knew much about Disney,” he says.
“They’ve done a really good job educating people about what
Disney is all about.”
superlative country, superlative resort
imaginE China
DreamWorks will build a Kungfu Panda style pagoda
in Shanghai
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Although Yoshii expects Disney to be a success in China,
he recognizes that the company faces some challenges. While
Morley says Shanghai Disney is making its parent company more
“global-thinking,” Disney Resorts has had a global presence since
1982, when Tokyo Disney opened its doors in Japan. Morley
himself has worked at Disney’s resort in Paris as well as in the
corporate division responsible for Disney’s global cruise line.
Disney’s international ventures have not always proceeded
smoothly. When Disney opened its Paris-based theme park in
1992, the company famously banned wine from theme park
restaurants. When Hong Kong Disney opened in 2005, the
resort’s performance was disappointing and marred by a handful
of cultural snafus. During Spring Festival, for example, the
resort neglected to give days falling during the holiday special
designation. As a result of the oversight, and with the park filling
to capacity quickly, the park was forced to turn away visitors with
valid tickets. The confrontation between ticket-holders and park
security made it onto Hong Kong television.
“We learn lessons in every market we go into,” says King.
“There is no one-size, one-model fits all.” He points out that
Hong Kong Disneyland has gone on to be successful and is
C o v e r s to r y
“
The resort is going to be huge.
At opening, it will include not
only a theme park, Shanghai
Disneyland, but a resort area
that offers hotels, restaurants,
shopping, an entertainment
district and a lake.”
currently in the midst of a major new expansion. “At opening, I
think one of our biggest challenges in Hong Kong was the scale,”
he says. As Disney’s then newest resort, Hong Kong Disneyland
started out smaller than other Disney resorts, though with the
new expansion that is no longer an issue. “This is a region where
everything is a superlative,” says King. “When you think about
the scale of everything, particularly in this market, this is one of
the things which matters most to mainland Chinese guests.”
Shanghai Disney seems poised not to repeat any of these
past mistakes. The resort is going to be huge. At opening, it will
include not only a theme park, Shanghai Disneyland, but a resort
area that offers hotels, restaurants, shopping, an entertainment
district and a lake. And there will be room for future expansion.
The theme park itself will be located to the northwest of the lake,
and the entire complex will be reachable by subway and highway.
This artist rendering shows a winding staircase in the
Enchanted Storybook Castle
istoCKphoto
A theme park celebrating the ancient warlord Genghis
Khan is being built in Tianjin to compete with Mickey
Among other things, Shanghai Disney will be a transportation
hub. “We need to make people feel that the resort is the newest
and best that Disney can offer from a design and service
perspective, and that it represents the global Disney standard,”
King says. “And that it’s comfortable from a Chinese perspective.”
Shanghai Disney is the result of a joint venture between Disney
and a state-owned enterprise under the Shanghai municipal
government. The state-owned enterprise, Shanghai Shendi
Group, owns a 57 percent stake in the joint venture, while The
Walt Disney Company maintains 43 percent ownership. “For this
market, having a great local partner supported by the Shanghai
Municipal Government is important,” says King. “It creates a
seamless interface between partners, the government and the
local community.” Disney, however, is maintaining a controlling
stake in the management company that will be responsible for
operating the park.
As the resort continues to develop, Shanghai Disney Resort has
been doing its best to gauge what its visitors expect of them. They
have conducted focus groups, organized community activities
and held online meetings that give locals an opportunity to
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DisnEY
Disney executives and Chinese officials at the groundbreaking earlier this year in Shanghai
express their opinion on the resort. “People want the real Disney
experience – they don’t want anything packaged or watered
down,” says King.
To do that, Disney is focused on food, service and culture.
The most important differences, King says, will be in the details
of how the resort operates. “Food and cultural traditions are
key parts of making the park distinctly Chinese,” says King.
The theme park and the surrounding resort will offer a range of
Chinese cuisine that is high-quality and familiar to visitors from
all over the country. Local vendors will be incorporated into the
resort. At the same time, Disney is planning to pay particular
attention to local holidays, offering special shows and deals that
correspond with Chinese traditional celebrations.
In addition, the Shanghai resort is going to be big.
Designers have changed the footprint of the park slightly from
its global brothers and sisters. While Shanghai Disneyland will be
a Magic Kingdom-style theme park, it will have no Main Street
– found in every other Disneyland theme park in the world – to
accommodate a new layout that Disney is yet to fully reveal. But
one of the most distinct features of the Disney theme parks, the
storybook castle, will be larger than ever in Shanghai. Chinese
audiences like their attractions to be big, “superlative,” King says.
So Disney is giving them the biggest.
Building the cast
When King mentions the details that will make Shanghai
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Disney distinctly local, he is quick to point out Morley’s work.
“I’m sure you’ll see it walking around the office,” he says. “People
working here are from the local community, and they reflect that
in their work.”
The Disney park itself is only just starting to take shape. The
first year of construction, King says, was spent sucking water out
of the site and making sure the ground was level and stable. Similar
technology was used to build the second runway at Shanghai’s
Pudong Airport and the Shanghai F-1 track, but Disney had to
dry out and flatten a much larger area. “When you’re going at a
fantastic speed on some of the world’s most sophisticated ride
systems, you want to make sure that that ground is hard, hard,
hard,” says King. “It’s the largest scale project of its type anywhere
in the world.”
While the construction site is still in its early stages and
Disney is keeping the details of its resort under wraps, one of the
most important projects of the past year has been hiring the core
of Disney’s Shanghai-based team. “Every day we come into work
and the workforce increases,” says King.
The challenges of hiring the right “Cast Members” in many
ways reflects the challenges of creating the park experience itself.
Morley is tasked with building a team that is largely local, and
making sure that his team understands what Disney theme parks
are about. “The focus for us right now is building up the team
of ‘Imagineers’ who are actually going to design and create the
park,” he says. “We currently have about 200 Chinese Imagineers
on staff and there are a number of people that will come from the
C o v e r s to r y
U.S. to provide a certain level of guidance, technical knowledge,
Disney knowledge.”
The Shanghai Disney Resort leadership has worked to make
sure that local Chinese designers have been involved from the
beginning. In the early stages of designing the resort, King says,
the team made sure that there were Chinese nationals working
from their headquarters in Glendale, California. “We’re also
“
People want the real Disney
experience – they don’t want
anything packaged or watered down.”
market is that visitors and employees are not as familiar with
Disney as their counterparts in other countries. Unlike France,
Japan or Hong Kong, Mainland China has no Disney Channel.
Chinese tourists are also largely unfamiliar with the theme park
experience. “Many of our employees don’t really know what the
theme park experience is, because they’ve never been there,” says
Morley. “So part of our job in HR is to educate the Cast Members
and let them know what they’ve gotten themselves into.”
The presence of the alumni helps familiarize people with the
spirit of Disney theme parks (this tactic is effective outside of the
Disney offices, also. Eight hundred alumni have formed a group
on Weibo that also helps inform the general public on the Disney
experience). In addition, new employees are required to take a
class. “‘Disney Traditions’ is a very ubiquitous Disney class,” says
Morley. “We are already teaching it here in Mandarin.”
DisnEY
– Murray King, Shanghai Disney
bringing in Chinese experts,” he says. “So when we come up
with an idea, which is based on our interviews and surveys of the
Chinese public, we can test the ideas on our experts.”
As the project has moved forward, Morley has headed the
hiring efforts in China. The opening team for Shanghai Disney,
he says, will be the most locally based of any opening team in
Disney’s history. “We’ve been really heartened by the level of
talent that we have in almost every role,” he says.
Two things have helped smooth the hiring process, Morley
says. One is technology. “Now you can do work virtually much
more effectively than you could in the past,” he explains. Experts
that would have been imported to China a few years ago can now
work from Glendale, helping to train and to review the work
done by the local staff.
In addition, Morley says, Disney has a pool of what he
calls “Disney alumni,” some of whom have joined the team in
Shanghai. The “alumni” are a group of Chinese nationals –
Morley estimates there are around 3,000 – who spent summers
working at Disney in the United States over the last few years as
part of an internship program.
Even those who haven’t joined the team, King adds, are helping
spread the word about Disney and getting potential employees
and potential visitors more familiar with what to expect from the
Disney experience. One of the unique challenges of the Chinese
Snow White and friends at the groundbreaking
As the Disney project progresses, these education efforts are
going to ramp up, both inside and outside the company, says
King, as are the local partnerships, community outreach projects
and other activities that will build awareness of Disney and give
the company an increasingly local feel.
“We’re going to start to talk more and more about the project
publically in the near future,” King says. “We want people, by the
time we open the gates, to know the story, to know a lot about
the resort and to understand what we built. We don’t want them
to come in the gates and not know what they’re doing, or what
Disney stands for, or what our theme parks are about. That will
make a successful launch.”
Lauren Hilgers is a freelance writer.
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Meet the Cast
Several Shanghai Disney employees agreed to answer a few questions about working
for one of the most well-known brands in the world. In their written responses to the
questions, they talked about Disney, their jobs and what they do every day. Here are
the excerpts.
vivian Chen
Learning & Development Manager
Start Time: September 2009
Insight: What did you know about
Disney before you came to work
at the company? Do you remember your first experience with a
Disney character or movie? How old were you?
Chen: “When I joined Disney in 2009, I was most familiar with
the Disney Parks and Resorts part of the company’s business.
Growing up in China, I always loved Disney films too – from
the animated films to the action thrillers. I am also familiar with
the Disney characters and enjoy purchasing Disney merchandise. My earliest Disney memory might have been when I was
just a little girl 30 years ago. There was a famous TV series program featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.”
Insight: Why did you want to work for Disney?
Chen: “I first started working at Disney English, which was a
new business in China. Having an opportunity to work at Disney felt like a dream come true, and the experience has been
both fun and professionally rewarding. Especially being able to
work with a group of people who are passionate, creative, fun,
and inspiring. I am proud to tell others I work for Disney, and
my kids are happy to say: ‘My mom works for Mickey Mouse.’”
Insight: How do you think the culture at Disney fits in with Chinese culture? Do you think Chinese people will find anything
strange or unusual about Disney?
Chen: “There are many similarities between the two cultures.
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Both cultures have a similar focus on family values, and Disney resorts are truly places for families to come together in a
safe and friendly environment. In addition, Disney stories and
Chinese stories both advocate optimistic outcomes, for example, with themes such as: love can overcome social barriers; the
greatest beauty is found within; you can always count on true
friends; the circle of life never ends; and those who are selfish,
vain, or cruel never win. Our brand is about hope, aspiration
and positive resolutions. Chinese individuals will have no trouble relating to these because of the values that they share.”
tina Dai
Specialist, Development Support
Start Time: November 2011
Insight: Why did you want to work
for Disney?
Dai: “My experience at Walt Disney World’s International College
Program 6 years ago made me realize the great service Disney provides to guests, and the management that goes on behind the magic. I worked on the frontline with Disney merchandise and not only interacted closely
with guests, but also developed an understanding of the actual
products we deliver. The training I received and the influence of
my fellow Cast Members made me think of how great it would
be to work with Disney as a lifetime career.”
Insight: What is your current role at the company? Could you
describe a typical day?
Dai: “I am a development support specialist for the Project
C o v e r s to r y
Management Team of Walt Disney Imagineering Shanghai. My
responsibility is to support our project management executive
and creative executive as they communicate with our Chinese
partners and local regulators. Each day is very different for me.
I spend most of my time translating documents, coordinating
and interpreting meetings with our local partners.”
Janice sindoni
Insight: What makes working at Disney different than working
at other companies? What has surprised you most about working at Disney?
Sindoni: “Anyone will tell you this: what makes Disney different is its people. I have worked for several large companies with
very good people, but Disney people are great! They are happy,
helpful, kind, creative, intelligent and just fun to be around.
What has surprised me most is that after 15 years with the company, I still find this to be the case – now more than ever.”
Community Relations Manager
Start Time: March 2012 at Shanghai Disney Resort project; held
various roles at Disney since 1990s
Insight: What did you know about
Disney before you came to work at
the company? Do you remember
your first experience with a Disney character or movie? How
old were you?
Sindoni: “I knew a great deal about Disney stories and Disney
parks, but not very much about the company. Honestly, I don’t
remember my first experience with a character or movie. Disney has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember,
from enjoying Disney vacations and movies to having favorite
Disney toys and clothes.”
Insight: What is your current role at the company? Could you
describe a typical day?
Sindoni: “My current role with the company is Manager of
Community Relations at Shanghai Disney Resort. I have the
opportunity to develop partnerships and programs with local non-government organizations to address key community
needs which align with Disney’s corporate social responsibility and philanthropy goals, focusing on compassion, creativity and conservation. It’s a real privilege to be able to work
with organizations that are making such a positive difference
here in Shanghai. So far, there has not been a single typical
day – every day is an education, with new experiences and
new opportunities.
Chris shi
Project Director, Design Management
Start Time: October 2010
Insight: What did you know about
Disney before you came to work at
the company? Do you remember
your first experience with a Disney character or movie? How old were you?
Shi: “I had some knowledge about Disney films and Disney
Parks and Resorts in America. My first experience with a
Disney movie was 18 years ago when my first son was born in
Vancouver, Canada. I took note of the Disney movies that my
neighbor’s daughter was watching and started to watch them
with my family.”
Insight: Why did you want to work for Disney?
Shi: “I was involved with the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort
when I worked in Hong Kong. Initially, I was motivated to join
the team because it was a large and well-known project. However, I soon became more interested in the project team because
of the company culture. It is an open environment among professionals, and Cast Members are encouraged to express their
opinions. In addition, I am drawn to the level of trust among
the WDI (Walt Disney Imagineering) colleagues, which inspire
me to bring more and better contributions to the project.”
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