1704866982 Rejection to Localization:a Strategy or a Disaster

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1704866984 Disney opened its amusement park opened on July 17,1955 in Anaheim,California.In the 1980s,Disney as one of the transnational media giants desired to aggressively expand overseas.In 1983,Tokyo Disneyland was open in Japan and Disneyland Paris（which is formerly known as Euro Disney）was open in 1992.Nevertheless,different from the successful experience in Japan,Disney in Europe which replicated the American culture provoked a series of controversies over cultural domination or Americanization of their societies.In Hong Kong,despite local critics（Ip and Sze,1999）against its cultural imperialism（and other issues such as capitalism）and the initial media’s negative portrayal,the focus is not so much about cultural domination,but mainly as an economic discourse,which is not too surprising for this capitalist city（Lee and Fung,2007）.

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1704866986 Thus,what we observed apparently in the park is very much a reduced version of the American Disney,a mini Castle,a short Mainstreet USA,a downsized Fantasyland,the same fast food and cola,and more or less the same Disney merchandise such as plush toys,clothing and souvenirs.It appears that there are very minimal modifications of the global Disney in Hong Kong.Certainly,compared to the American Disneyland,inevitably there are new Chinese cultural elements added to the theme park in Hong Kong.Mickey Mouse does dress in Chinese long robe during the Chinese New Year.Varieties of dim sum,with many made in the shape of Mickey’s head,are available in a Chinese restaurant in Disneyland.On sign posts and instructions to visitors,apart from English,Chinese characters are available.Jewelry shops and café run in the name of the local sponsors or operators.Staffs of customer services,dancers,performers and acrobats are largely local residents speaking local dialect.These kinds of changes might be the some of the necessary operations to found Disney in Hong Kong,but in general,reducing the global overtone is not the direction of the adaptation.

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1704866988 However,largely,Disneyland and the two hotels are designed to appeal to the local audiences with the genuine American Disney culture.Not to mention the Disneyland,the rooms of the Hong Kong Disney Hotel,the bed,balcony,slipper,soap,towel set,to name a few all display the logos of Disney as if the tourists have entered the Disney kingdom.Early in the morning in Hong Kong Disney Hotel,these princesses and other figures would visit the lobby and take photos with children.Speaking to even to the youngest Chinese kids I saw,the princesses could only speak English.Princesses such as Sleeping Beauty,Belle and Cinderella are also white skin westerners conversing fluent English.No Mickey Mouse,Buzz Lightyear or other characters would speak any local dialect.Quite obvious,their gesture and way of waving and walking are standardized without any human personality seen.

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1704866990 The official Disney website also subtly represents Disney’s view to present its authentic American culture to Hong Kong.As shown on the pictures highlighted,it is still westerners with white skin and blue eyes dressing up as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty,and those admirers who surrounded them are local Chinese visitors.It can tell that Disneyland well recognizes that what the Chinese audience needs is a western,global experience and imagination,not something traditional or local.The deep-seated binary western culture vs Chinese culture is well-reflected in Hong Kong’s Disneyland.Thus,we can see the adaptation strategy of Disneyland is not to flatten the global culture into something acceptable for the local.Quite the contrary,Disneyland tend to cast the Disney culture into a global one that is in stark contrast with the local Chinese.

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1704866992 Stitch Encounter:Highlighting the Global Discrepancy

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1704866994 Stitch Encounter is one of the few experiences of the tourists that require full interactions between the audience and the fictional character Stitch who is a blue protagonist“Experiment 626”created by an“evil genius”from the Lilo and Stitch film and television.The original Stitch was of course English speaking but in Disneyland,Stitch Encounter was divided into three sessions,Cantonese,English and Putonghua.In the“Encounter,”audiences were asked to sit in front of the screen which displays the controlling panel of a spaceship in which Stitch is the Captain.Kids were asked to sit on the first row to chat with Stitch closely.Same as other games,there was no explanation of the story of Stitch.The immediate scene is Stitch,as in the series,committed a mischievous behavior by driving a stolen spaceship in the galaxy.In the Putonghua session,Stitch appeared friendly but he liked to tease and play jokes on the audience,spoke fast in a short temper,and even ragged the participants about their Chinese accents.In one of the sessions I attended,his way of expression did scare young kids as one of them cried.In another session,Stitch’s vocabularies about space and computers,and futuristic and scientific wordings were simply incompressible to audience coming from second and third tier cities in China.

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1704866996 Neither did Stitch repeat what he said in case of miscomprehension.Nor did Disney want to clarify the confusion.In the introductory speech of Stitch,he physically pointed to a mainland participant,asking his or her name and the place of origin.In front of the mass audience,the participant audience naturally growled out a Chinese answer.Stitch then taunted the audience by repeating the words with a funny“space”brogue and broken Putongua,and mentioned that he had never heard of this name or place.The conscious attempt to jest about the background of the audience aims at distancing the imaginations of Disney from the realities of the Chinese audiences.Besides,Stitch also picked up a teen on the floor begging her to be his girlfriend.Such a bold act many a time created a cultural shock for the kid who once denied being his companion.In sum,the interaction itself simply was intent on preserving the misunderstanding,one that emerged because of the discrepancy between the background of the audience and that of the fictional Stitch and between the realistic world and the imaginations manufactured by the American version of Disney.It was also that incongruity that indexed the subordinated status of the Chinese audiences who resided in a closed environment.Preening himself in front of the audience,Stitch managed to normalize his own imaginative behavior and language while marginalizing the earthly,Chinese ones.The Chinese audiences were also reminded of their“inferior status”-being not able to comprehend the world outside-and hence reinforcing their yearn for something global.As we observed,such act of ridicule was somewhat effectively applied to Hong Kong audience as well.

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1704866998 The Festival of Lion King:the Deliberately Unexplained Cultural Logic

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1704867000 Festival of Lion King is a musical show about the story of the Walt Disney Animation Lion King released in 1994.The music show however does not follow a chronological flow of the story.Instead,the finale of the story was the opening scene of the show.It was a triumphant celebration of all the animals in the African forest on the green Pride Lands with the grown-up lion King Simba and his Queen Nala standing on the top of Pride Rocks to receive the applaud of their people.The apex was the moment when Rafiki（a wise old mandrill）presenting Simba and Nala’s newborn cub that symbolizes “The Circle of Life.”The show returned to the scenes of the old days when Simba was still a cub misguided by his uncle that he was responsible for his own father Mufasa’s death.Then it was followed with the long journey of Simba to survive with his friends Timon and Pumbaa,a warthog duo who adopt and raise the cub under their worry-free philosophy（Hakuna Matata）.The show was mainly a performance and musical in English.Since each session audience is a potpourri of people who speak different language,the English-speaking show is occasionally inserted with and explained in Cantonese or Putonghua,but Disney made no attempt to explain the plot and internal logic of the story to the diverse audience.

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1704867002 The reaction of the audience was expected.Audience from the Anglo-Saxon worlds and also many Hong Kong grown-ups know the plot of Lion King well.Despite the chronological order of the story was reversed,it did not create any reading difficulty for this category of audience.They enjoyed the pleasures,laughs and tears conveyed by the show while there was no need for them to spend extra energy to read the story.The musical simply reinforced the audiences the values and imagination of the Disney story.

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1704867004 However,for the Chinese audience,they were puzzled.First,they did not possess the cultural resources,capacity and knowledge to unpack and reorganize the upside-down story and the logic presented.Second,because of the language barrier,they were not able to comprehend the English lyrics and conversations.The cultural barrier was also crucial.Not to mention the name of the characters,the jargons（e.g.Hakuna Matata）and the latent meanings of the story,after the musical,many Chinese audiences at most could tell the narrative was a legend of a lion king.Of the complex messages of the musical,the Chinese audience might only concur with the notion of championship of the justice over wickedness,good over evil and harmony over disparity-the very same thought of the Confucian and Chinese ethics.When I asked a participant about the feedback when we walked down the stairs together,he said,“I don’t understand ［the plot and story of it］.It is a game ［and］ a show.It doesn’t matter.But I feel good about it.Great! Great!”（informal talk on July 7,2008）

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1704867006 What was intriguing was that few Chinese tourists had complete understanding about the Lion King story,but they seemed highly satisfied with the performance.It has two possible explanations.First,while this person had no gratification sought,the children in the family accompanying him appeared very happy and excited.The person might prioritize the happiness of the family over his own perceptions.Second,without a conscious effort to appreciate the story,he valued more the exposure to this fresh,creative and professional musical as such.In other words,the new cultural form itself was powerful than the messages it contained.Attractive to the Chinese audience who were in general deprived of the freedom to connect to the western modernity before,the global Disney imaginations and plots had to remain non-global as a contrast to the reality.

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1704867008 The Globality for Chinese Audiences

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1704867010 To sum up,for the local Hong Kong residents,many western visitors and the young kids of mainland China,as they grow up with Disney culture and are exposed to various forms of Disney entertainment and media,Disney culture is seamlessly integrated with their own.They have no a strong attention and ability to negotiate over the meaning of it.Using Wasko’s category of Disney audience,there are hardly any cynics and antagonists for Chinese audience.For the Hong Kong children,though they usually start to know and contact to Disney products at quite an early age,and internalize the values of Disney.Rarely are they critical of the entertainment park.For adults,many are pulled by their friends to visit the Hong Kong Disneyland.They might be parents who visit there with their family and buy Disney products for their children as gifts.However,their personal interest and passion of the Disney brand is low and feel somehow compelled to do so under drive of the ball-holding news from media;or as to adult,they feel also reluctant to refuse their children’s curiosity.But unlike Americans,they are not growing up from the Disney tradition.

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1704867012 Those hardcore resisters who feel it beneath their dignity to pay the local theme park a visit will not go in the park anyway.For those visitors,the intact,relatively nonlocalized,global cultural forms of Disney,its values and products basically pitch in with their values and lifestyles.From the perspective of Disney,they have no need to kick off the“localization.”Nor did we witness the backlash to Disney’s “conquer”in Hong Kong.Though some audience sneered at the small-scale of the Hong Kong Disneyland and media outlets were quite critical of the Disney Corporation at the outset,few audiences consume Disney products as American cynics who are critical of the intense marketing and merchandising efforts.

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1704867014 In the Hong Kong’s Disneyland,literally,“localization”is largely concerned with mainland Chinese audiences.As we have illustrated,the strategies of Disney was to deliberately construe a large cultural gap between their American dream and the veracities of the audience,privileging the former and disparaging the latter.Thus,in this Hong Kong Disneyland study,rather asking the question whether Disney culture be internalized as part of the Chinese culture,we would ask why and why not people are not willing to see a localized version of Disney in Hong Kong?

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1704867016 On the one hand,the denial to localize the global form is due to practical reasons.As tourists in Hong Kong,mainland Chinese would like to experience the real Disney tradition,the one that has been constructed since 1928 when Walt Disney launched the beloved Mickey Mouse character.Mainland Chinese are simply fed up with the overwhelmingly exposure to pirated versions of Disney characters in different mainland channels and the“fake culture”in China in general.They are all aware of the scandalous media report about the fake Mickey Mouse,Tigre and Seven Dwarfs in the state-owned popular（with 1.5 million visitors annually）Shijinshan Entertainment Park.Able to temporarily escape the malevolent culture,Chinese audiences are eager to witness the authentic ones in Hong Kong.Though they never know what Disney really is-perhaps knowing only Mickey Mouse always landing on his feet no matter what adversity threw at him-Chinese are prepared for a cultural shock that they have not experienced in China.

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1704867018 Yet,we have to admit that we did come across many adult mainland visitors who are keen merely on purchasing Disney merchandise over games and activities in Disney.Understanding the games and shows or not is not an issue concerned.Many of the Chinese audience can be described as the uninterested audience as many of them are “go-and-see”travelers.Quite interestingly,groups of mainland visitor joined the cheap,packaged tour to the Disneyland in Hong Kong.Well-informed or not of the Disney culture,the travelers to Hong Kong are attracted by the non-expensive tour charge and the good service are offered by the travel agency.Some of them are even sponsored by their own business organizations to visit Disneyland for free or at an unreasonable low price.We did encounter Chinese visitors who openly admitted that coming to Hong Kong-and sojourning Disneyland as part of the trip-was an open secret bonus from their company they were working.Stopping by Disneyland for a short time-and it could be short as a morning-they had no anticipation of take pleasure in the rides and games.As a result these uninterested visitors never feel too excited nor reluctant about the visit.

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1704867020 On the other hand,some Chinese audiences can be enthusiastic about the Disney’s global dream.For those mainland Chinese visitors did immerse themselves in the pleasure of the shows and rides,they consume Disney in a different way.They developed the aesthetics,not from a direct consumption of Disney’s cultural icon,but by contrasting the imaginations and fantasy connected to Disney with the assumed lower standard version of aesthetics they used to develop in their homeland.

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1704867022 To foreground the difference or the Disney’s global dream,the Disneyland constantly reminds the audience what they are consuming are uniquely American.The more intact and unchanged the original Disneyland is,the more global the Chinese audiences feel.Having no intention at all to internalize such culture,instrumentally,they understand the globality the audiences exposed to are superior to the nationalist culture they have been bombarded with.

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1704867024 Conclusion:Globality over Nationalism

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1704867026 Based on a case study of the localization process of Hong Kong’s Disneyland,this paper revisits the concept of localization in the era of cultural globalization.Contrary to the commonplace notion of a localizing global culture,The Walt Disney presented an American fantasy and imagination,not a diluted or a modified version to the audience of Hong Kong.In various shows and games in the theme parks,as we have suggested,Disneyland assumes the“foreign”audience,even those from a non-western culture,fully understand the plot and legends of the original Disney animations.There is no sign of implementing so-called“localization”strategy.The“localization strategy,”if any,is only a segregation of Hong Kong,mainland Chinese and English-speaking visitors.

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1704867028 This case then problematizes the concept of localization,which does not necessarily mean the incorporation of local elements into the global culture forms nor a modification of the global cultural forms which,with other variations of adaptations are intent on increasing the familiarity and reception of the global culture.Localization is not necessarily advantageous for the global corporations.Current literature on localization might largely focus on the desires of the audience for traditional culture.The aspiration could be a preservation of traditional culture as such but the desire can also facilitate the local reception of global culture.However,such a perspective neglects the very urgent need of the audience for an external set of culture for modernity,empathy and empowerment.

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1704867030 In this paper,we underscore the power of neo-globalism,which,different from globalism that simply consider the values,process and impacts of globalization,we define from the view of the audience,a set of global mentality that audiences around the world,including China,has developed and internalized with the flow of global culture circulating around.Neo-globality functions hence not from a top-down perspective,but from the internal and psychological or social need of global culture for various purposes,survival,entertainment,commercial competition,resources of political power,to name a few.

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