Disneyland is Too Far

In class, we discussed the Disney Corporation’s desperate and successful attempts to secure its effectively indefinite copyrights through legal lobbying. While such legal protection may exist in the United States, enforcement of such copyrights elsewhere, poses a problem.

Welcome to Disneyland in the land of pirated, fake and bootlegged– where international copyright law is all that’s left of western culture not already imported.

Everytime driving to my grandmother’s house in Beijing, I would see the elegant spires of China’s own Disneyland in ShiJingShan District poking above the urban landscape. Complete with rides, fake Disney characters, and the red banner “Disneyland is too far away, come to ShiJingShan amusement park!” draped over the park entrance.
The park was opened in 1986, just seven years after the end of Communist isolation, being run exclusively by the local ShiJingShan District Government – a division of the Beijing Municipal Government.
The very design of the park is a spin-off of Disney’s trademark Sleeping Beauty Castle. Its characters, either employees dressed in suits or statues on the premises, include a slightly-altered version of most Disney characters, Dreamworks’ Shrek, Hello Kitty, Doraemon, and Bugs Bunny. The park also includes its own version of Disney World’s golf-ball-like Spaceship Earth Building.

The president of the park alleges that the park's characters are not related to Disney's, but are either original creations or based off of the Grimm's fairy tales, according to a Japanese news interview. The park president also said in a Chinese interview that a Minnie-mouse look alike, was actually "a big eared cat".

Visiting amusement parks across China, in Qingdao, North Beijing, Hunan, Dalian, I've seen Disney spin-offs decorate park-rides and posters, and never thought twice about them. The birth of Disney in China came hand-in-hand with the influx of Western culture, which today dominates the urban streets and minds of China.

The iPod culture, the McDonald culture, Hollywood culture, permeates urban Chinese society deeper than traditional arts and literature. When Chinese seek to participate in that culture, they often lack the financial and logistical means to do so: Chinese families msut have the money and good fortune of winning a visa to a Disneyland host-country; they must travel to Hong Kong to buy non-pirated movies imported from American record/movie companies; they have to spend their entire discretionary income to buy a Prada bag - impossible situations for increasingly globalization-seeking middle-class Chinese.

According the Hong Kong Standard, “A US congressional panel says China's own data suggests [pirated] goods account for 15 to 20 percent of goods made in the country.” This news comes in tandem with US diplomatic efforts to reign in Chinese copyright abuses - economically, is it possible?

That statistic and the omnipresence of counterfeiting activities, could be verified by anyone who has lived in China - piracy becomes a part of life. In Beijing, I have spent mornings at fairgrounds strewn with Hello Kitty spin-offs, followed by shopping for fake foreign-brand clothes in the afternoon, and dinner at a McDonalds knock-off, going home to watch a DVD of Transformers before it has even left theaters in America.

When the real North Face or Billabong products are nowhere to be found, their counterfeit counterparts hang on bazzar stalls lining Beijing’s streets, always selling for only a few dollars. Tour-group buses fill streetparking along these bazzars, as they unload bargain-eyed Europeans into these commercial havens for the rich and the poor. Local Chinese teens parade these shops wearing American Eagle and Hollister with iPod earphones dangling from their ears, walking alongside me and my Western friends who look no different; piracy and copyright violation mean so much more than cheap spin-offs: because of the close relationship of branding and culture, they give millions of uncertain, newly emerging Chinese the ability to forge a new identity and particpate in a new post-communism culture, even if it may be one just more like ours.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/233002/beijings_copycat_disneyland_park_sparks.html
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=20&art_id=41990&sid=13078355&con_type=1&d_str=20070411
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=3140039&page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Shijingshan_Amusement_Park
http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/05/02/disneyland-in-china/