Chinese Government To Boost Property Market (Photo : Getty Images)
It is not just Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man and chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, who is wary of the June 16 opening of the Shanghai Disneyland. Residents of the Chinese financial capital are also not too keen on the approach of the formal opening of the resort.
However, their dislike for Shanghai Disneyland are for different reasons. Wang Jianlin sees Shanghai Disneyland as a competitor to the 15 to 20 Wanda parks across China that he plans to build and operate in the next 10 to 20 years.
Shanghai residents, meanwhile, dislike the huge crowds they anticipate descending upon the city by middle of the month. As a result, a survey among residents, conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics in April, showed two-thirds of residents do not have plans to visit the resort in 2016, reported China Daily.
Of the one-third who have plans, they do not want to be crushed by the expected rash of visitors, so they plan to visit on a weekday when the queues for entrance and rides are shorter. To do that, the locals plan to go on leave from their jobs for one or two days.
Since the park’s soft opening on May 7, over 40,000 people have visited Shanghai Disneyland. When it opens, the resort is anticipating 10 million annual visitors which would be a boom to the Shanghai economy, but at the same time a bane to its residents who have to deal with additional stresses of city life such as gridlock, congestion, overpopulation and high prices.
This early, the operators of the resort are experiencing the rude and crude behavior of Chinese tourists. Orlandoweekly reported that because of reports of children pooping in the bushes, visitors carving graffiti on lampposts and thrash thrown all over, Shanghai’s Civilization Office and Tourism Bureau just issued a new guide.
The guide contains six rules, namely: throw trash in the garbage bin, protect public property, do not destroy the flowers or plants, do not lay down on the grass, do not jump queues and maintain proper behavior while inside.
