
A year ago, when I wrote about Dalian Wanda Chairman Wang Jianlin’s boast that he would “devour” Disney’s theme parks in China (“Mickey’s Adventures in China: Theme Park Wars and Copyright”), Wanda was riding high. From humble beginnings as a property developer in the Chinese city of Dalian, Wang had become China’s wealthiest man through building mega shopping centres, many of them anchored by large cinema complexes, and had gone on to expand abroad, buying AMC Cinemas for $2.6 billion in 2012 and Legendary Pictures for $3.5 billion in 2016. Wang’s hunger for entertainment assets (he was eyeing Paramount) created such a political backlash in the US that 18 members of Congress signed a letter to the US General Accounting Office urging that the mechanism used in the US to review foreign investments from a national security angle (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS) consider investment from China in the entertainment sector as a possible “strategic threat”. Why? Because, according to these members of Congress, such investment could result in exerting foreign propaganda control over US media. As I wrote at the time, this was a xenophobic over-reaction, but it illustrates the reach of Wanda. Continue reading “Wanda’s Wannabe Theme Parks in China: Lacking the “Secret Sauce” of Familiar Copyrighted Content”