Shanghai Disneyland gets trashed by thousands of tourists before it actually opens

I don't want to think about how the park will look like after a day of operations.

 

This is the one thing that is holding me back from visiting Shanghai Disneyland. I already experienced some of this behavior at HKDL, but this looks so much worse. I think I will give it a few years to settle down and get its bearings.

 

How incredibly sad. I don't understand that behavior at all.

 

I wonder how long it will take to settle down. I mean the Olympics in Beijing happened already eight years ago and the behaviour didn't change at all in China. I guess it will never change, I mean it's their culture. In Europe people have always and they will continue to do so, despite international DLP visitors complaining about that. It's in the culture and I don't think that Chinese will adapt to Western culture. Even Europe and the US are different, but at least similar.

 

It certainly won't come quickly, but the changes have already slowly taken root in Chinese culture. These sorts of behaviors are much more noticeable with people who live in rural areas; when seeing the big attractions in Beijing, it was easy to pick out the rural visitors from the urban locals. And people in Shanghai tend to follow Western standards even more than those in Beijing, since the city has long had influence from foreigners (similar to Hong Kong, though to a lesser degree), though the park is sure to attract a variety of visitors

As China continues to transform from an isolated rural country to a highly-urbanized place with a lot of international involvement, I suspect Western behaviors will be more widely adopted. But obviously that's something that's still many years or decades away, and has relatively little direct connection to SDL itself.

 

Thanks to your post, I just noticed that the word "smoked" is missing from my post.

I'm sure Chinese people will change over time, with more Western influence coming into the country, but I wouldn't expect that too soon. I have never been to China, but I know you have been several times to Hong Kong. Since HK was for a long time part of the British Empire, I guess people behave differently there compared to mainland China?

 

Yes, HK is very different from mainland China. In a lot of ways, the customs are essentially British, but the overall culture has a very east-meets-west vibe to it. The city itself is very clean and orderly, and behaves much like a European city. In recent years, Beijing has tried to make HK become more like mainland China (as part of a long-term plan to ultimately re-annex it), but it seems like a lot of those differences still remain. HK has even pushed back on a lot of the measures, though I'm not sure how effective that has been

It's also kind of amusing to be on the other side of the world and have everybody speak with British accents!

 

I'm wondering if it is very easy for the Chinese government to make a city, that has been under Western influence for such a long time, more like mainland China. I guess the demonstartions in recent years show that.

 

They're struggling with it, but I think it helps that HK also never really had a government of its own. As a British colony, most of the government was appointed from London; now they have "elections" with one or two Beijing-approved candidates. HK is still very different from mainland China, but I think it helps to a degree that they were never fully autonomous

 

To be honest I encountered some pretty bad behavior at DLP. Maybe not as awful as what's described at Disney parks in China, but very bad compared to American theme park visitor standards.