In a land where the benchmark index more than quadrupled in two years, does the Magic Kingdom really have a place? According to the Shanghai government, yes - although Disney itself seems more reticent.

I first read rumors of a Shanghai Disneyland in March 2006, when China Daily quoted the city’s mayor, Han Zheng, as saying a theme park was being planned.

“We have hoped to build a Disneyland theme park for a long time, but we are not sure when the construction will begin,” the report said. Han was talking to reporters in Beijing during the 10th National People’s Congress.

Then, nothing. Now, new, more detailed rumors have surfaced. AP did a story recently (it was carried on the website of Singapore’s subscription-only, no-free-archive Straits Times, and I can’t seem to find that story on the news aggregators) saying that a Disneyland for Shanghai has nearly been confirmed. All that’s left is approval from the central government. It even named possible sites for the park: Chongming Island or Chuansha in Pudong.

The evidence this time? The AP quoted an anonymous source in the city government, and also pointed to a quote by city official Qian Weizhong in the online edition of “state-run magazine Oriental Outlook”: “Once we have central government approval and a concrete plan, Shanghai Disneyland can begin construction right away.”

AP also pointed out that two “high-level executives” from a US Disney theme park had surveyed Chongming Island twice in early 2007. Disney has denied that a Shanghai park is in the works.

Interestingly, the report says public discussion of Shanghai Disneyland was suspended after the pension fund scandal that took down former city party boss Chen Liangyu shook the city in 2006.

That theory would explain a few things. Han Zheng was only recently officially let off the hook - this Reuters report says he’s been allowed to keep his job despite being implicated in the pension fund abuse probe. There’s a new party boss (former construction minister Yu Zhengsheng) in town, and anointing a Disneyland for his new jurisdiction would surely be a nice bonus - even if the heavy lifting for the deal began during Chen’s reign.

The set-up seems perfect: Chongming is already earmarked for the Dongtan eco-city project, which means Disney visitors won’t be choking on smog while they ride Space Mountain. It’ll be a major tourism boost for a city that desperately lacks top-class family entertainment venues. And Disney would get a major presence in the mainland market, introducing millions of newly minted middle-class Chinese to the joys of Mickey and co.

Although Shanghai and Hong Kong are two very different markets - and the parks will also surely be quite different, at least in terms of scale - the question remains: Will a Shanghai park end up like Disney’s Hong Kong venture, which isn’t exactly raking in the cash? Or will Disney conquer China with all-American values and entertainment? It’s a small world, after all.

I mentioned in a previous post my tour of the then still-in-progress Venetian Macao (which opened on Tuesday) how massive the building was. I had no idea, but according to this video from the magazine Destination Macau (via editor Jennifer Welker), it is not just the world’s largest casino, but also the world’s second-largest building. Presumably that means by total floor space - 10.5 million square feet, according to the fact sheet they sent me. The largest, if this is still right, is the Boeing factory outside Seattle - not the Pentagon as I had originally believed. Then again, maybe different measurements are being used here - the Boeing article doesn’t mention the factory’s floor area, just its total volume (472 million cubic feet).

Links on the Venetian’s opening:

NYT: Bigger Than Vegas? That’s Macao’s Bet

World’s biggest casino Venetian Macao opens

Gaming giant launches resort complex in Macao

I just returned from a behind-the-scenes tour of the Venetian Macao, soon to be the world’s largest casino, along with many other superlatives, when it opens at the end of this month. But it still has three weeks to go, and though the construction is done, the huge, multi-million-square-foot property is aflutter with thousands of hard-hatted workers putting the finishing touches on the place - golden chandeliers in the conference halls, felt on the game tables, custom outfittings for the swish luxury shops that line just about every corridor.

It is a massive undertaking (click here for a rundown of the features and here for a floor plan). From the scale of the place I’d expected an imposing, Bond villain lair-type atmosphere (and there was some of that - the employee entrances had recently switched from a hand-size-measuring ID system to a face-recognition one), but everyone seemed to be going about his task fairly cheerily. Movers in the packed service elevators squeezed past each other with grins and the employee cafeteria buzzed with excited chatter in Cantonese and Mandarin. (Most of the workers at this stage, due to already full-to-bursting employment in Macau, plus lower wages, come from across the border.) Morale seems to be high with the big day just around the corner.

The Venetian will be the first of the “integrated resorts” on the Cotai Strip, a sort of phase two for the SAR, and a testing ground for Macau’s next big thing, the MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) industry. Many of the six other resorts currently planned for the strip, built on reclaimed land between the once separate islands of Coloane and Taipa (hence “Co” and “tai”) will have conference space, though none as big as the Venetian’s, which to my eyes resembled the inside of about four Home Depots back to back - and there was another identical floor upstairs.

MICE, of course, is now the backbone of Macau’s spiritual cousin, Las Vegas, thanks to Sheldon Adelson, the boss of Las Vegas Sands, the Venetian’s parent company. But despite the presence of a sparkling new convention center in just about every Chinese city, China’s MICE market is still immature. Adelson’s number two, Bill Weidner, is betting on the sector to grow rapidly in importance as Chinese companies continue to move up the value chain and begin thinking more broadly and strategically. With so much money at stake I’m sure it’s more than just a gamble, but in order for Macau to replicate Vegas’s transition, it needs to seep into the collective consciousness of China’s business travelers as something more than a place for gambling and the occasional whoring. Judging by the patronage of the plain-vanilla casinos back on Macau Peninsula, that will be an even bigger undertaking.

This is the seventh in a series of posts Alfred Romann will file on India.

The list of assets of Mularam Kharida, a driver in Delhi, includes but is not limited to:
- A 24-hour-a-day job as a driver (earning 3,500 rupees, or US$90, per month),
- Access to tourists that tip well,
- The ability to take said tourist to shops that tip him badly,
- A small parcel of land three hours from Delhi where the one-room home for his family of five is,
- Another piece of land in the same village where he is slowly building a new and bigger home,
- Four buffalo,
- One cow,
- His wife’s job as a kindergarten teacher in his home village (earning 1,200 rupees per month or US$30).

Mularam’s list of liabilities includes:
- About 9,000 rupees per month (US$220) in household expenses,
- School fees and expenses (uniforms and supplies) for his two dauthers, aged 18 and 16, and one son, aged 14.
- Lack of sleep (three full hours on a good night),
- Two daughters, aged 16 and 18, that will likely be married soon and require a “very expensive” dowry,
- Ongoing construction costs for his new home,
- Occasional and unexpected medical costs.

The list of things Mularam would like includes:
- Enough money to pay for his two daughters’ marriages/dowries (a few hundred thousand rupees),
- To finish his new home (another year or two),
- Constant electricity,
- A refrigerator (see above),
- Less work,
- For his entire body to hurt less,
- A few nights of uninterrupted sleep.
- Go overseas to work (”I work hard. In a few months pay for my daughter’s marriage. Pay for new house.”)

The list of things Mularam dislikes includes but is not limited to:
- People from Pakistan (”no good people”),
- The cheap three-wheeled taxis that populate the streets of India’s capital,
- People from Bangladesh,
- Coffee (tea with milk and sugar is better),
- People from Sri Lanka (”no good people),
- Chinese trinkets,
- People from the mountainous regions of the country (”no good people”),
- Beer (although rum in moderate doses is OK),
- Local tourists (they don’t tip well),
- Beggars (”Always drugs”),
- His brother in law,
- Mutton (other non-veg meals are fine).

This is not, of course, a comprehensive profile but it is not atypical of the millions of Indians that have, at best, seen marginal benefits from the country’s growth. This is the core of the customer base in the country. Of the 1.1 billion people in India, about 650 million live, more or less, like Mularam.

This is the sixth in a series of entries Alfred Romann will post from India in the coming weeks.

Few cities in the world do extremes like Mumbai.

Home to one of the oldest stock exchanges in the world, started by a group of 22 traders under a Banyan tree more than a 150 years ago, Mumbai is a city of high flying finance.

It is also home to the largest urban slum in Asia, the residence of poor migrants and urban dwellers who haven’t yet read the news that India is undergoing an economic boom.

This is not much of a secret. Politicians and businesspeople know the wealth gap is there and they know that closing it will not be easy. Just look at China, where they’ve been working at it for almost 30 years and, despite remarkable progress, it remains an uphill battle.

Mumbai is to Shanghai what Delhi is to Beijing and the similarities between the two pairs are striking.

Both Delhi and Beijing are imposing cities, dusty and generally unwelcoming to the pedestrian. There is green, but it is found in concentrated spots between huge chunks of city. People in both are obsessed with politics.

Mumbai and Shanghai are, on the surface, nicer. They boast trees (well, in parts) and streets that can be walked. Both have cosmopolitan communities, top notch restaurants of every cuisine imaginable and, at least in their architecture, an obvious blend of local and European. (While Shanghai is home to buildings of French, English and Japanese design, the foreign flavor of Mumbai is purely that left behind by the British colonialists.)

The people also come in many varieties. In a single day, it is possible - in fact likely - to meet a fund manager looking to place US$100 million in Asia, a driver hoping to earn 500 rupees for the day (a little more than US$10), a Bollywood star or producer, a Japanese tourist and a street merchant selling juice.

Walk around the semi-circular Bombay Stock Exchange building in downtown Mumbai and the contrasts are even more apparent. Inside, billions are traded every day. Outside, homeless people look for a spot to lie down and sleep covered by old onion sacks.

With some luck and a lot of work, the spread of the world’s second fastest growing economy will reach them soon.

It took 2,500 years, but China finally made it illegal to deface the Great Wall. Fines for violating the ban can reach RMB500,000 and include such lewd behavior as “graffiti, carving, planting trees, plundering and driving vehicles”. Too bad they didn’t make plundering a felony back in Genghis Kahn’s time - paying that fine would have taken all the horses in Mongolia!

Seriously (sort of) the authorities are worried about the erosion of the Wall’s integrity, as well as the structure itself. The occasional all-night rave parties that gather at the Wall are a likely target for shutdown. Apparently, some party-goers were (horror!) peeing on the Wall, no doubt in the fits of drug-induced madness.

Well, at least American skateboarding legend Danny Way already jumped the Wall last year. Such stunts may now join the ranks of the Mongol Empire in the dustbin of history.

Golden Week hasn’t arrived yet and Chinese tourists are already getting bad press.

According to the Sunday Morning Post, China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) and the Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee (worth mentioning if only for its fantastic name) have listed the worst habits of Chinese tourists in a bid to promote good manners.

The list is populated by all the usual suspects: spitting, littering, smoking in prohibited areas, queue-jumping, talking too loudly, taking off socks, shoes and sometimes shirts in public areas, bargaining with merchants where prices are fixed.

The CNTA observed that last year there were 31 million outbound Chinese travellers and this figure is expected to reach 100 million by 2020. But “the behaviour of some Chinese travellers is not compatible with the nation’s economic strength and its growing international status.”

You can take the man out of China but you can’t take China out of the man, they might as well have said.

Apparently the campaign is due to run until the 2008 Olympics, just like every other initiative, promotion, offer and bout of public recrimination or ego-massaging. (What happens when the Olympics finish? Wondrous bureaucratic armistice turns ugly as people take to the streets in search of regulations to fill the void?)

I don’t know how many projects have been launched in the last few years aimed at making the capital more palatable to hygeine and decorum-conscious tourists.

What I do know is that, while my typical Beijing cab driver now rolls around in a green-and-gold sedan as opposed to a suspension-free Xiali, he still has a tendency to open the car door for a sly spit at every other set of traffic lights.

You can complain about the man in Beijing but you can’t take Beijing out of the man… unless he voluntarily hacks it up from his pollution-scarred lungs.