Culture and Ideology at an Invented Place

The theme park, as a special kind of landscape, has become a major subject in interdisciplinary studies and received increasing scholarly attention in the past few decades. Analytic perspectives have varied from American approaches, which treat the theme park as the production base of the American Dream, to various interpretations of the cultural space from semiotic, structural and post-modernistic approaches. Other studies of the theme park have been conducted in a more practical way with a focus on economic development and urban designing for the local and peripheral surroundings. Such research has proved to be beneficial in understanding the theme park as a multiple-dimension space in an ever-changing cultural context. The Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) theme park is one of the most popular tourist sights in China, a space which epitomizes the country's cultural business and Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, an emerging metropolis. As the ultimate icon of Chinese and global cultural representation, OCT has attracted visitors from around the world. This book's focus on OCT will shed a cultural, political and ideological light on the multiple space constructed and consumed in both China and beyond. In view of the overwhelming quantity of theme park studies in the USA and Europe, a shift of orientation to China becomes significant as the emerging theme parks in the country are described as springing up like bamboo shoots after a rain.