Generation Gap for Disney in China

Ever since Mickey Mouse visited Lin Huanbin’s school here last summer, telling fairy tales and passing out Mouseketeer certificates, the 11-year-old boy has been unable to get Mi Laoshu out of his mind.

The boy loves the big mouse’s funny misadventures. He keeps a photo of Mickey and himself in a chest for safekeeping. And every chance he gets, he asks his parents to take him to Hong Kong Disneyland when it opens this fall.

His parents aren’t so enthused. They’re wary of the theme park’s planned high admission cost. The boy’s father, a businessman, also has a more deep-seated worry.

“If Huanbin receives too much Western culture, in the future he may not cherish family relations, forget his ancestors and not go back to our hometown,” Lin Zhengguang says.

Inside the Lin home and many others in China, there is a distinct generational, cultural and economic divide -- and it figures to be a major challenge for Walt Disney Co. and other Western companies trying to sell entertainment in the world’s fastest-growing emerging consumer market.

Although many Chinese children have grown up eating at McDonald’s and watching Shaquille O’Neal take on Yao Ming, their parents’ generation isn’t so familiar or comfortable with many aspects of American life, especially if they cost a lot.

Chinese movies, theme parks and entertainment merchandise -- although often lacking in technical or artistic sophistication -- are much cheaper, although not always legal. Inexpensive pirated DVDs and other knockoffs of Western films continue to run rampant, despite government efforts to crack down.

What’s more, even as Beijing has recently eased restrictions on foreign media as part of an effort to encourage foreign investment and expertise in China’s entertainment industry, officials remain suspicious of Western cultural influences.

That’s particularly true when sex, politics and social mores are involved. Popular American television programs such as “Friends” have been censored. Beijing has long had a quota of how many foreign films it will approve for theaters, and movies like “Ocean’s Eleven,” which makes heroes of criminals, have been rejected even for the DVD market. Hollywood movies, shown on prime-time TV a decade ago, are now scheduled only late at night, past children’s bedtime.

“The government is cautious about opening the youth media industry to foreign companies,” says Yin Hong, vice dean of the journalism and communication school at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Recently, a few global entertainment corporations, including Sony Pictures Television and Warner Home Video, have been allowed to form joint ventures in China and enter markets long closed to outsiders. But government red tape and rules have slowed their progress.

As much as any Western entertainment company, Disney has a long history in China. The Magic Kingdom has been in the Middle Kingdom since 1937, when it first showed “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to a packed movie house in Shanghai.

It’s easy to see why the Burbank-based company is stepping up efforts here. China has about 260 million children younger than 15, not that much less than the entire U.S. population.

Older teens are an attractive market too. Disney recently launched its ESPN magazine in China and a mobile-phone subscription service, adding to other businesses that include a 30-minute daily television show called “Dragon Club,” cartoon magazines in Chinese and hundreds of Disney merchandise stores.

Despite Disney’s overall favorable and wholesome image, however, some of its more recent releases, such as “Mulan,” haven’t fared as well. That’s in part due to criticisms of cultural insensitivity. Analysts say Disney’s advances also have been slowed by a rigid, all-or-nothing strategy that has made it harder to cut deals with the government and Chinese partners.

Late last year, Disney hired Stanley Cheung, a former Johnson & Johnson executive, to head up its efforts in China. Disney declined requests to interview Cheung and other managers in China.

But Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO-designate, has told investors that China is a priority. He’s counting on Hong Kong Disneyland, scheduled to open Sept. 12, to drive the company’s retail and media businesses in that region, and he’s spoken about more investment ahead, including the possibility of a second Chinese theme park in Shanghai.

The $1.8-billion Hong Kong park is projected to draw 5.6 million visitors in its first year. At 311 acres, the park is relatively modest in size, just 10% the size of Euro Disney and less than a third the size of the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. Disney says it will incorporate rides and shows from its other parks, with Hong Kong Disneyland sectioned into familiar areas such as Fantasyland, Toontown and Main Street, USA.

A good 40% of the visitors are expected to come from the mainland, many from Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where Disney is now campaigning hard.

The Lins, with their Mickey Mouse-manic 11-year-old, are just the kind of family Disney needs to attract to the park. They are among a burgeoning Chinese middle class with money to spend on leisure and entertainment. And many Chinese families, having only one child because of government edict, are willing to spoil their kids.

To reach such households, the entertainment company has undertaken an unusual grass-roots campaign, partnering with the Communist Youth League to organize promotional activities at schools and communities.

At Youth Palaces run by the league, an organization better known for training Communist Party members than plugging American brands, Chinese kids have learned about the pleasures of the Magic Kingdom. This month Disney representatives will stage nightly performances in several cities in Guangdong province. Disney camps and more school tours may also be on the agenda.

Disney’s visit last July to Fineland Experimental School in Guangzhou was a hit. The private school has about 500 students, from kindergarten to junior high, most of them from solidly middle-class homes. Tuition runs as much as $1,450 a year for some students -- a large sum in a city where the per capita income was about $1,815 in 2003.

When Mickey and his gang arrived, Zeng Weiqi, a 10-year-old who doesn’t easily get excited, was thrilled. After doing the Mickey Dance and shaking hands with the mouse -- “I noticed he has four fingers,” she said -- the girl, too, asked her mom to take her to Hong Kong Disneyland.

Her mother, Zeng Shaofang, 35, says she isn’t concerned about Western corporations brainwashing her only child.

“We should let kids be exposed to different cultures,” says Zeng, who teaches fourth grade at another school in Guangzhou.

Yet she says she has no special feelings toward Disney. Unlike her daughter, she doesn’t know any of its stories, only Mickey Mouse. Zeng says she prefers Doraemon, a popular Japanese cartoon of a robot cat with an oversized round face, a button nose and a collar with a bell.

“I think it’s a better fit with Chinese culture,” she says. “In Chinese belief, big head means ‘clever.’ And the combination of its blue and white color may be more appealing here.”

Whether Zeng will take her daughter to Hong Kong Disneyland depends on time and money, she says. China has one of the world’s highest saving rates, about 40%, and Zeng and her husband, also a teacher, are no exception. But her eyes widened when she learned about Hong Kong Disneyland’s planned ticket prices: $38 for adults and $27 for children 3 to 11. It will be higher on weekends and school holidays.

That’s a lot even for people in Guangzhou, which has perhaps the highest per capita income of any city in China.

Happy Valley, an amusement park in Shenzhen, a bustling city less than two hours’ bus ride from Guangzhou or Hong Kong, charges $14.50 for adults and $7.25 for children taller than 3 1/2 feet. Shorter kids get in for free. The 86-acre park looks like and imitates Disneyland, complete with its own version of Frontierland and Toontown, which Happy Valley calls Cartoon Street.

Knockoffs present a particularly tough challenge for premium brands like Disney, as they both undercut prices and cheapen the original’s creative and cultural value. Even before the Disney-Pixar movie “The Incredibles” was released in China in February, street vendors were hawking DVD copies for as little as 60 cents -- about one-tenth the admission price at a movie house.

Still, Disney and other entertainment companies are betting that the Chinese public will want the real thing. “I think ... Disney’s park [in Hong Kong] will have more clever themes and characters,” says Li Dan, 22, a Guangzhou college student who was visiting Happy Valley on a recent Saturday.

Chinese children say they like Disney characters because they’re funny, original and often do surprising things. Huang Huishan, principal of Fineland school, is a Mickey fan. She says it wasn’t a tough decision for her to allow Disney to hold a promotional event at her school. In her view, there’s no cultural divide, at least not with Mi Laoshu.

“No matter East or West, Mickey Mouse has the nature of kids,” Huang says. “He might make mistakes but he’s lovable.... The character is really lovely and cute.”

But others in China don’t see Disney in the same light. Some haven’t forgotten “Mulan,” the animated Disney film that was criticized for adapting a classic Chinese tale to fit Western tastes. That 1998 movie is a story of a courageous young girl who goes to war on her father’s behalf. Some said that with her long neck, big, round eyes and oval face, she looked more like Pocahontas.

“The face of Mulan, it’s not typical of Chinese beauty,” says Yvonne Gong, a Beijing woman in her late 20s who works for a foreign consulting company. “Even though I had a Western education, I grew up in a traditional Chinese environment. I still believe the clothes and colors should be Chinese.”

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Cao Jun of The Times’ Shanghai bureau contributed to this report.