First posted to the Chinese social network Weibo, blogs around the world are republishing the photos, which show trash, graffiti, trampled landscaping, and even a child defecating in a planter.
Even though Shanghai Disneyland won't open until June 16, the train station that will serve the park recently opened, and thousands of Chinese tourists visited Disneytown over the recent May Day holiday. While most enjoyed the opportunity to see the park for free — at least from the outside — a few others, well, didn't exactly mind their manners on their sight-seeing visit.
China is battling the stereotype of its visitors acting poorly in locations around the world, and these pictures just fuel that perception.
What will happen when Shanghai Disneyland opens next month? Keep in mind that anyone who gets inside the park will have to pay to enter. Will that help ensure a better behaved crowd inside the gates? Will Disney react to this by hiring more security and custodial staff to police the grounds? Whatever happens, with so many visitors armed with cell phones and Weibo accounts, we can be sure that if anyone does something ugly in or around Shanghai Disneyland, the world will get to see it.
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Yeah, just putting this out there, if I dedicate a lot of time and effort into making my house look nice, and someone had the nerve to throw trash around everywhere, first thing I'd do is kick them out.
Did it ever occur to you that Shanghai Disneyland will be collecting Chinese currency at their gate and the gate prices will be based on the Chinese market. Your argument about savings in wages would only be true of they charged US prices for admission!
Disney is not blind to reality either. They're well aware of Chinese manners and the fact that China is a very different market.
@70: Chinese cost of living is much lower than the US. Relative to the admission cost, comparatively the poor Chinese is less likely to afford an admission ticket than the US. Disney will appeal to the sweet spot of middle income that are increasingly traveling and free spenders. The poor is much poorer.
Is #TrashShanghai just the custodial cast member training program?
The actions you see in the photos aren't acceptable behaviour in China.
If I were, do you think the people would have taken photos and blog about it?
This only adds to my disbelief that the Walt Disney Company believes that U.S. is currently saturated with theme parks and resorts. I have confidence that they did their due diligence and have the research, data, and evaluation to back up their refusal to build again in the U.S., but it occurs to me that if this exact park were transplanted to just outside of Chicago or Columbus, they could charge $110 a day and the place would be packed to the gills. Shanghai Disneyland has practically NO attractions in common with Disneyland or Walt Disney World – seems to me that folks from around the country would've flocked to this park if it were in the U.S. Instead, the uphill battle is doomed to continue. Just seems absolutely silly to me.
Once upon a time, I felt pretty smart for buying DIS in the low $40s. I did sell at a gain and manage to double my money for the most part. I just have no faith in the current management team.
I wonder if theme parks only work well in certain cultures? I was shocked at the way people acted at DLP.
As long as the majority stake holder in Hk Disneyland is the HK Government (53%) Hk Disneyland will not fold. The HK government will not let that happen. They will just negotiate with Wdc for the addition of new attractions and lands in return for a reduction in their stake to 51 percent.
This would be similar to the agreement reached that lead to mystic manor, grizzly gulch and toy story land being added.
Children in China may not be familiar with all of Disney characters but they know FROZEN!
I do agree that Shanghai Disneyland will have disastrous debut. It's 3 times the size of HK Disneyland but will open with the same number of attractions that hk Disneyland did at 12! That is a recipe for disaster.
Re: Jaiden
Don't judge a book by its cover please. I currently live and work in Hong Kong and have travelled to China numerous times. There are places in China that are as nice if not nicer than anything in North America but of course there are places in China much worst. It is a developing nation after all.
Additionally, in my area (and most cities I've visited), there are basically 24-hour groundskeepers. They are constantly sweeping up leaves and trash, putting them in plastic bags and/or piles to haul away. It will be no different at the park.
I've been to HKDL 3 times now, and never ever thought it felt dirty. I guess a clean park doesn't equate to a successful park, but it can't hurt. I just don't believe the Shanghai park will be dirty. Maybe a disaster, but not due to a lack of cleanliness.
The pictures I've seen of the park are awesome, so hopefully it will make a good first impression, avoiding a Hong Kong style debacle. I think Disney learned their lesson in Hong Kong, it seems like they didn't skimp on the details this time.
Disney could have saved money by cloning attractions for Shanghai, but they opted to come up with totally new attractions like Tron and Pirates, and they must have done tons of research on what the Chinese audience likes.
Also, they're opening only two hotels, so it seems that they're also avoiding making the same mistake in Paris where they built too many hotels which sat empty.
First off, with these types of comments, I think you might wanna consider a different profile name.
Second, with all of the new projects WDW has in store, I highly doubt they're gonna see a decline in attendance anytime soon.
Third, (and this goes out to everyone on this thread) if we're gonna criticize Disney for building such an expensive park in China, then what about Universal? Aren't they building their own Chinese theme park as well? And I've heard it's gonna be the most expensive project they've ever worked on. Surely our Lord and Savior Universal couldn't ever dissapoint us, right?
2. The cost of operations at SHDR will be lower.
3. Disney did NOT foot the entire bill to build the resort.
4. China is the second largest film/media market in the world, and will be number one within five years. Many of those movies, are Disney brands.
5. SHDR is a capital investment, NOT an operating expense. Therefore, it does not affect the Wall Street opinion. #thanksshanghai is ridiculous, as GAAP would not let them show net revenue offsets by cutting operating costs in the US. The lemmings who think that are uninformed about accounting rules. The park is a NRE capital expense, and does NOT affect the bottom line.
6. The vast majority of people making these uniformed racists statements have never been to Shanghai.
Imagine if you saw photos of Detroit, would you judge our entire country on that cesspool?
I guess what I feel matters about the situation as a whole is not what the chinese culture dictates, but how Disney would like their SDL guests to act on their property, or any guests on any of their properties for that matter.
Cost of building Shanghai Disney: $5.5 billion was budgeted. True cost after going way over budget, who knows?
I've twice seen young kids at my daughters' school drop their drawers in pure daylight and relieve themselves without a hint of fear or embarrassment.
The truth of the matter is that there are dirty, filthy people all over the world and from all walks of life, and unfortunately some of those people eventually gather enough money together to visit a Disney park.
The GOOD thing is that Disney is THE master of getting the vast majority of people to do the right thing and behave in a civilized manner, so we can only hope that they can help change the culture a bit for the better, at least one day at a time within their park borders.
In earlier years, I think people sometimes checked themselves because they were afraid of publicly embarrassing themselves and being called out on their behavior but now? Everything goes and people are afraid of being accused of being politically incorrect not to mention beat up if they dare say anything to people behaving badly.
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