Pictures: China's Fake Disneyland, Overgrown and Ghostly

Fit for a Princess?
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
With China's decaying answer to Cinderella's Castle looming overhead on December 5, a farmer walks through cropland reclaimed after the late-1990s failure of the Wonderland amusement park—"rediscovered" this month by photographer David Gray.
Surprisingly easy to visit for adventurous travelers in China, the sprawling site offers a ghostly look at what was to have been Asia's largest theme park—now a rusting parallel universe of Disney World doppelgängers.
In 1998 the Reignwood Group, a Thai-owned property developer, touted plans to build Wonderland on 120 acres (48 hectares) in the village of Chenzhuang in China, some 20 miles (32 kilometers) outside of Beijing.
But the deal—which seemed poised to reap the bounty of a surging middle class with time and money to spare—went sour around 2000, when the developer, the local government, and farmers could not agree on the value of the land. An attempt to resuscitate the project in 2008 also failed.
While Reignwood moved on to other equally ambitious projects, including a golf course and a chain of luxury hotels, Wonderland's grand plans have yielded to more traditional production—in this case, corn.
Many analysts say such scenes may become more common in China as property values that soared over the past decade have moved steadily downward for the first time since private home ownership became legal in the 1990s. Local governments, which have used land as collateral for some U.S. $1.7 trillion in debt, are left in a dangerous situation.
—Zoe Alsop in Beijing
Published December 22, 2011
No Admittance?
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
Wonderland's entrance gates have been boarded up, echoing the deserted high-end residential buildings, vacant luxury malls, and ghost cities now found across China. Nonetheless, the country's newly moneyed class continues to invest in empty buildings. Property prices have risen 140 percent since 1998.
In 2011 prices fell for the first time in years, and Wonderland began to look like something of an omen for the country.
"I saw this amazing complex when travelling to the Great Wall years ago and planned to photograph it later," said Reuters photographer David Gray who this month revisited the ersatz Disney World as "an interesting way to illustrate the property-market problems China is facing."
(See Hyland's Wonderland video.)
Published December 22, 2011
Bitter Harvest
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
Catherine Hyland, an artist who documents abandoned construction sites around the world, passed Wonderland-pictured with corn growing in an abandoned building-on a bus this spring.
Right away, she knew she'd have to go back, and she found that the fake Disneyland is easier to visit than expected, even for foreign travelers-at least those willing to ignore "proceed at your own risk" warnings.
"My only obstacle to getting back to Wonderland was the language barrier," Hyland wrote in an email. "I found myself copying Chinese characters off the Internet ... passing my scraps of paper to bus drivers or taxis or general passers-by in the hope that my instructions might make sense. It turns out the route is actually very simple when you know the way."
(See Hyland's Wonderland video.)
Published December 22, 2011
Winter Wonderland
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
On December 5 fresh snow dusts a promenade built as a part of Wonderland, which was abandoned in part because of disputes with the local government, which at least partly owned the land.
Across China, local governments have borrowed heavily from state banks to fund massive infrastructure development as well as flashy projects meant to stake their place in the booming country.
Such development has helped keep China's GDP growing at a rate of more than 8 percent for over a decade. The property market, which accounts for 10 percent of Chinese growth, has driven unprecedented expansion in 50 sectors across the economy, according to Reuters.
Published December 22, 2011
Whistle While You Work
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
Farmers dig a well in the would-be Wonderland.
Initially Hyland, the video artist, found the place eerie. Then she saw how people had adopted the site, making it a sort of rural haven at the edge of a roaring superhighway into Beijing.
(See pictures of China cities.)
"At first glance you wouldn't be blamed for thinking you had walked into some post-apocalyptic scene straight out of a film," Hyland said. "But once you have a closer look around, you realize there is a strange allure to what the locals are doing here ... they appear to be tending the plants growing in the car park and using the haunting architectural remnants of the project as a communal base."
Published December 22, 2011
Sign of the Times
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
The fake Disneyland's demise more than ten years ago may foreshadowed an explosion of land battles in China.
Conflicts over land are the leading cause of unrest in the country, sparking tens of thousands of riots, strikes, and protests each year, according to an official report released in June. More than 50 million farmers have lost their property over the past three decades, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Chenzhuang's farmers have quietly reclaimed Wonderland for their crops, but that's not always the case in China's abandoned developments.
The situation in Wonderland is a sharp contrast to a standoff now playing out in the southern town of Wukan. That area was cordoned off after villagers had driven out officials for attempting to appropriate land used for raising pigs for the construction of luxury housing.
Published December 22, 2011
Ghost Town
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
A Disneyesque "village" at Wonderland stands vacant amid very un-Disney undergrowth on December 5—a victim of property speculation in capitalist China.
Economists estimate local governments rely on land sales for as much as a third of their revenues.
Last year, the central government in Beijing took steps to reign in property speculation, making it tougher for investors to buy new property. Developers, assuming the policy was temporary and cosmetic, continued to build with abandon. But Beijing has held its ground.
"In this series of real estate control measures, there must not be the slightest shake," Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in November.
Published December 22, 2011
Warning Sign
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
A sign warns of potential poisons in the Wonderland soil.
This year has seen an unprecedented drop in demand for Chinese land, leaving local governments in desperate straights as payments come due on $1.7 trillion in debt.
More than a hundred local government land auctions failed last month, according to the property agent Centaline. Revenues from land sales in Beijing were down 15 percent this year. Most other cities were worse off. In Xi'an, a tourist mecca famed for its underground army of terracotta warriors (picture), land values dropped more than 50 percent, according to the China Index Research Institute.
(See our Beijing-travel must-dos.)
Published December 22, 2011
Palace Prospect
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
In the wake of theme park failure, the Reignwood Group doesn't seem to have lost its appetite for over-the-top projects. In 2009, for example, the company launched a yachting forum and won an award for the "Multimillionaires' Most Favourite Golf Course in Beijing," according to Reignwood's website.
But the appetite for such magical thinking may be shrinking, at least officially. Earlier this year the government announced plans to build ten million units of low income housing that regular Chinese people could afford to live in.
(Quiz: How well do you know Beijing?)
Published December 22, 2011
"Surreal Playground"
Photograph by David Gray, Reuters
Hyland, the U.K. artist, was "dumbstruck" when she saw children climbing to the pinnacle of this unfinished Wonderland structure.
"This type of structure would be heavily manned, security wise, in England," she said. "It seemed very dangerous but very touching to see these children really adopt it as their own surreal playground.
"But I guess it is in children's nature to mold their situations into a positive, and that is what a lot of people in the town seem to have done. They are carrying on."
Published December 22, 2011
Next: 16 Stunning Pictures of China's Natural Wonders >>
Photograph by Michael S. Yamashita
Published December 22, 2011