Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Mice get into everything. Just look at the best-known member of the species, Mickey. Since World War II he’s infiltrated every Bedouin tent and Russian dacha with a TV antenna. It truly is a small world after all, or so the Walt Disney Company used to think. Then Disney decided to open a theme park in Hong Kong. After determining that roughly 30 percent of their draw would need to come from mainland China, Disney sent emissaries into the hinterlands to gauge brand awareness. The Chinese, they discovered, barely knew who Mickey was, much less Donald, Goofy, and the rest of the gang. This was a problem for Disney, whose parks in Japan and Europe relied on existing interest in Disney’s characters. Luckily for Disney, it was also a problem for the Chinese government, which had invested $2.8 billion in exchange for a 57 percent stake in the Hong Kong theme park.

Enter the Chinese Communist Youth League, the venerable (it was founded in 1922, nearly three decades before Mao came to power) and massive (68 million Chinese between the ages of 14 and 28 call themselves members) organization that grooms China’s future party functionaries. With the tacit approval of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Disney linked up with the league to prepare China’s young people for the park’s September 2005 opening. Disney has sent video and music materials to the league’s thousands of “youth palaces,” and held “storytelling sessions” in a “grassroots brand-building program” meant to introduce Chinese youth to everything Disney. In the Guangzhou province, kids have been learning to draw their own Mickey cartoons.

“Education in China is changing,” says the vice president of the new park’s public affairs, “to encourage greater imagination and creativity. And that’s what our business is about.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate