In the time since Deng's southern tour, an entire class of China's own Disney-style "imagineers" hav

On a crisp afternoon in January 1992, Deng Xiaoping stepped out of a golf cart and beheld florida vacation rentals orlando a miniature replica of his country. It had been nearly three years since Tiananmen had forced his resignation, and the ex-Premier florida vacation rentals orlando was busy reclaiming his legacy on his now-storied “southern tour.” Visiting coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Deng stopped in a government guesthouse florida vacation rentals orlando here, a high-tech research facility there, giving his blessing florida vacation rentals orlando to the laboratories of development he’d begun to open up in 1978.
The golf cart belonged to Splendid China, the country’s first theme park. With its miniature models of China’s natural and architectural marvels—from the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City to the Great Wall (the latter constructed of six million tiny bricks around the borders of the park)—Splendid China was a tribute florida vacation rentals orlando not only to the country’s ancient heritage but also to its liberalizing economy. The park was a natural fit in Shenzhen, poster child of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) florida vacation rentals orlando that Deng had nurtured florida vacation rentals orlando as drivers of economic renewal. These oases of hyper-modernity had shot up, according florida vacation rentals orlando to the propaganda ode “Story of Springtime,” like “fairy tales”:
In Shenzhen, the dreamscapes didn’t stop with the factories. Splendid China was—and is—as the urban historian Thomas Campanella explains it, a “masterpiece of the miniaturist’s art.” The monuments of ancient florida vacation rentals orlando Beijing meet the charms of the western border regions, with natural landscapes to match. Vintage photographs still exist of Deng posing, with his family, in front of the park’s 1:15 scale replica of Tibet’s Potala Palace.
Backyard florida vacation rentals orlando blast furnaces and Mao statues florida vacation rentals orlando are notably absent. In their place, Deng was greeted by China Folk Culture Villages, specializing in reproductions of Tibetan, Uyghur, and other ethnically themed gardens and landmarks. The China Central Song and Dance Ensemble of Ethnic Groups entertained with carefully curated performances of “Children of Fire” and “Spirit of the Peacock.” Deng, relentlessly tracked by cameras, can be seen here too, chuckling and waving at performers dressed in the most colorful permutations of their ethnic costumes.
Splendid China, which opened in 1989—the year of Deng’s resignation—was a breakaway success at home: it attracted 3.5 million visitors in its first year alone, recouping its entire original investment. florida vacation rentals orlando If SEZs like Shenzhen—piling factory upon factory and boasting growth rates in some years of more than 30 percent—can themselves be read as themed environments writ large, then Splendid China is a fitting reflection of their triumph.
The Folk Culture Villages, completed in 1991, enriched the park further. Soon China Travel Services (CTS), florida vacation rentals orlando the company that had financed Splendid China from Hong Kong, was hungry for international expansion. With the curtains only just up on its cabinet of ethnic curiosities at home, CTS announced plans to develop a sister park in the middle of Disney’s home turf of Orlando, Florida.
Unlike Disney World, Florida Splendid China would take culture and history as its themes. Instead of “leaping dolphins, performing whales, thrill rides and fireworks in the sky,” explained the developers, the new park would be “somewhat more passive and reflective”—a “pensive, walk-through kind of thing.” It was designed to “complement” rather than compete with Disney.
The vision would stay analogous to what was on offer in Shenzhen: China’s “timeless essence,” minus the politics and ethnic florida vacation rentals orlando strife. The same gardens were to be constructed with the same omissions of labor camps and the southern fairy tales’ discontents. At a cost of $100 million, China’s florida vacation rentals orlando Middle Kingdom would claim its place down the road from the Magic Kingdom, encircled by the same six-million brick rendition of the Great Wall.
“We could make every mistake in the book and still come out ahead,” one developer predicted. But within months, it was clear that Florida Splendid China was in trouble. Empty trolleys were the norm, and the park was panned florida vacation rentals orlando by critics on both the right and the left. The Economist , dyspeptic as usual in such matters, pulled a quote from a Miami Herald editorial: “Don’t look too hard for the Murdered Dissidents’ Pavilion.” florida vacation rentals orlando Even so, the magazine was impressed by the lengths to which China had gone to polish its image as part of a “headlong plunge into Western-style capitalism.”
Florida Splendid China limped out of business in 2003, following an especially jarring drop in sales after September 11. But the Shenzhen iteration, much like Deng himself on his southern tour, knew nothing but repeated successes. By the end of the 1990s, the goodwill florida vacation rentals orlando exuded by the park was being translated into major investments and real-estate contracts.
In the time since Deng’s florida vacation rentals orlando southern tour, an entire class of China’s own Disney-style “imagineers” have sought to recreate the success of Shenzhen’s pint-sized utopia: over 2,500 theme parks were built across China’s cities, suburbs, and farmlands between 1990 and 2005 alone. And as the number of theme park visitors increases each year, construction continues on new parks—from the Qiaobo Ice and Snow World, constructed with advanced irrigation in Beijing’s arid northern suburbs, to the pearl-like Polar Ocean World, which will bring 500 species of arctic animals and 20,000 species of fish to Shanghai, to Wild Duck Lake Resort of Kunming, Yunnan Province, which recently invested $800,000 in special effects equipment capable florida vacation rentals orlando of recreating the iconic scenes from the Chinese blockbuster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .
The economic logic of this construction boom is a bit murky. Of the 2,500 parks constructed in China in less than two decades, hundreds have disappeared; of the 2,000 or so that remain, it is estimated that only around 10 percent are profitable. Still, according to a recent report, China’s restless imagineers are expected to build yet another fifty-nine theme parks and five water parks by 2020.
One explanation can be found in the increasingly prevalent use of what experts call the “park plus real estate” model. Because building florida vacation rentals orlando recreation facilities often constitutes a “public service,” theme parks offer a way for real estate developers to buy up land that would normally be cost-prohibitive—and florida vacation rentals orlando then to allot some of that land to high-priced apartments and residences. In most cases, cash-starved local governments—which, in 2013, were granted the authority to approve theme park investments independently of Beijing—are only too happy to play along. Meanwhile, the budgets florida vacation rentals orlando for many parks are astronomical, offering individual developers florida vacation rentals orlando and officials various opportunities to embezzle.
It is also likely that, however unprofitable the majority of theme parks may be, developers will continue to gamble on them as China’s tourism numbers continue to climb—from 615 million domestic tourists in 1995, to 1.6 billion in 2003, to 3.3 billion in 2013. In 2014, the number of outbound Chinese tourists was forecast at 116 million; and given that the number of Chinese traveling abroad is estimated to climb to 535 million by 2030, tourism is destined to become an important foreign policy lever. It is no surprise, florida vacation rentals orlando then, that developers are eyeing sites abroad as well.
Even as they chase profits, these pursuits—often with the financial and political backing of the Chinese state—also represent florida vacation rentals orlando experiments in soft power, echoing florida vacation rentals orlando the tropes of assimilation and expansion that were first staged at Splendid China. Two new parks in particular—one in the Special Economic Zone of Kashgar and the other in Australia—demonstrate the striking ways in which China’s power elite has put entertainment to work.
Many histories converge in the oasis city of Kashgar. In today’s China, it belongs to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, florida vacation rentals orlando from which Beijing looks out onto the resource-rich expanse of Central Asia. While suspicions had been in the air for some time, it was not until 2010 that the Party confirmed that the predominantly Uyghur town would become China’s newest SEZ to be modeled on Shenzhen—a new kind of oasis in the desert.
In its most recent florida vacation rentals orlando form, the SEZ was to include florida vacation rentals orlando a partnership program whereby Kashgar would be linked with a “partner assistant”—in this case, a euphemism for the entire province of Guangdong, in which the boom cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen are located. As property prices skyrocketed, a raft of partnerships appeared between Guangdong manufacturers, traders, and hoteliers and their counterparts in Kashi (the Chinese name for Kashgar). It was only a matter of time before the city received its own styling of the miniaturist’s art.
Apandiland is like a shard of Splendid China. In the original, you can find Afanti—the wise fool for whom Apandiland is named—on proud display in the Uyghur section of China Folk Culture Villages. He’s the cheery florida vacation rentals orlando fellow, smiling beneath his mustache and tugging the tail of a donkey that he’s straddling—backwards. Photographs online suggest that this pose is popular among both parents and children, who laugh at him together.
The new park in Xinjiang, covering 740 acres in total, features a statue of Afanti on a much larger scale. From this starting point, according to a document circulated by the Yihe Group—the Guangdong “partner assistant” responsible for the project—the park will be rolled out in phases. The first of these, florida vacation rentals orlando which opened earlier this year, includes a bazaar, a cinema complex, and the first go at an Afanti Folk Village. It will also include a performing arts center for darwaz , the Uyghur art of tightrope walking, florida vacation rentals orlando which will be graced by the “High Altitude Prince” himself: Adili Wuxor, whose sixty-day stint of tightrope walking in Beijing National Stadium—though sadly uncorroborated by Guinness World Records—has made him popular throughout China.
The second phase, coming next June, will include everything from thrill rides to the Afanti Exotic Garden, for the “pensive, walk-through kind of thing.” “You only need to go to our performing ar