The Walt Disney Company is taking a series of steps to address local cultural sensitivities as it prepares to open Hong Kong Disneyland a little more than a year from now, the company’s president said here Tuesday night.
The new theme park, long controversial here because of the local government’s lavish investment in it, will include local food and music and provide services not only in English but in two Chinese languages, said Robert A. Iger, Disney’s president and chief operating officer. He described these steps as part of the company’s broad effort to recognize national differences.
“We know if we’re too U.S.-centric, the products won’t be too relevant to those markets,” Mr. Iger said. “That’s particularly true as it relates to Hong Kong Disneyland.”
Esther Wong, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong Disneyland, said that the company had rotated the orientation of the entire park by several degrees in the early design phase after consulting a master of feng shui, a Chinese practice of seeking harmony with spiritual forces. “This is essentially an American product, but it’s a question of how we tailor it to an audience in this part of the world,” Ms. Wong said. “Disney is an American brand, and our guests, our potential guests, believe in this product.”
As Disney prepares to open the park with the broadcast on Thursday of the first television ads in Shanghai, there are some signs of growing anti-American sentiment here. A survey of nine Asian countries and territories released on Monday found that 47 percent of residents here held a negative opinion of the United States, second only to Indonesia. Gallup and TNS, a market information company, conducted the survey.
The survey found that the poor opinion here had been shaped mainly by American foreign policy, however, with residents still holding a much higher opinion of the American economy. Eden Woon, the chief executive of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, which played host to Mr. Iger’s speech, said that he saw very little chance of any anti-American protests here and doubted that any such sentiments here would hurt Hong Kong Disneyland.
“China always is conflicted between accepting foreign things and trying to maintain its own culture,” he said.
Many prosperous residents here pursued various stratagems to obtain American passports before Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997. Jeffrey K. F. Lam, a member of the Legislative Council here who attended Mr. Iger’s speech, said that some were now renouncing their American citizenship. But he said this was mostly to avoid paying American taxes in addition to Hong Kong taxes, and because of renewed confidence in Hong Kong’s future, not because of hostility to the United States.
The park is controversial here because it is being built with $2.88 billion (22.45 billion Hong Kong dollars) in investment from the Hong Kong government. The government provided the land and is building road and rail links, although some of the road and rail costs might have been incurred even if the theme park had not been built.
The government owns 57 percent of the park, with Disney owning the rest. The government also holds subordinated shares that would convert to ordinary shares, raising the government’s ownership as high as 75 percent, if the park does much better than originally envisioned.
Many here were upset by the disclosure – made after the deal was signed – that Disney was in separate talks to open a park in Shanghai. Disney has not concluded any deals in Shanghai, however, and has said that any park there would not open before 2010.
Michael J. T. Rowse, who negotiated the deal for the government as tourism commissioner and is now the director general of the government’s foreign investment attraction arm, InvestHK, said that a series of recent visa policy changes by Beijing would result in far more visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland than originally anticipated.
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