Feisty Mouse

Disneyland opened yesterday in Hong Kong with great fanfare and record-breaking smog blanketing the city. There has been much gnashing of teeth among those afraid of Shanghai that Disney is rumoured to be close to announcing a park there, three times larger than the 'mini-Disney' which they have built in Hong Kong - the smallest of the five parks the group now operates.

The New York Times' Keith Bradsher, writing in the International Herald Tribune, has a different angle on this, though, which highlights the ever-challenging regulatory environment in the mainland. Not long after Rupert Murdoch's efforts to do an end-run around restrictions on foreign ownership of TV channels were torpedoed, Disney now says, according to Bradsher, that any new parks in the Chinese mainland must be linked to access for its TV channels.

As Fons Tuinstra pointed out in his post on the same issue, though, this is pretty much the one thing that the Shanghai city government can't offer Disney! Although President Hu Jintao is now well settled into his job, the administration in Beijing still seems keen to prove its "hard man" credentials and media liberalisation is simply not on the agenda.