Wuhan - China's entertainment mecca

Wuhan

HERE in the industrial heartland of China, along the scenic East Lake and Yangtze River, a big swathe of land in the city of Wuhan once occupied by smoke belching factories and old houses is being laid as the groundwork for the Chinese leaders' top economic priority: the rebalancing of the national economy.

Over four years since 2010, a canal was duly dug up to connect two adjacent lakes to form an ecological reengineering marvel and an integrated modern entertainment district. All told, the developer, Dalian Wanda Group, China's largest mall and cinema operator that also owns the US's second-largest cinema chain, has spent more than 50 billion yuan (S$10.61 billion) to build this swanky entertainment mecca, its single largest piece of investment in China to date.

Tang Jun, vice-president of Wanda Cultural Industry Group, calls it "the construction of a new town", an apt description for a mammoth task.

"Going forward, China will emphasise internal consumption; entertainment can be an import driver of the domestic economy," Mr Tang said, adding that "such a large scale comprehensive development project exists only in Wuhan in China today, unprecedented in China historically".

Wanda's unprecedented project in Wuhan involves a 1.5-kilometre outdoor pedestrian-only street running parallel to the canal, its shopping areas covering 210,000 square metres and housing more than 200 shops in low-rises that mimic the historic buildings the city was once famous for at the turn of the previous century.

Also included in the shopping areas and the canal's neighbourhood are a shopping mall, two fancy five-star hotels, several residential high-rises and office blocks, and a Macau-style ultra high-tech theatre in the shape of a giant LED-panelled red lantern whose surface projects images on all sides to present a viewing experience similar to a panoramic 225-square-metre Imax screen.

To top it all, a 3-plus-5D interactive indoor movie theme park - touted as the world's largest of its kind - is slated to open on Dec 20. It is said to be the world's only large-scale indoor multi-hall movie theme park, with the largest Flying Theatre, and the most advanced simulation equipment - its fighter simulator, using the world's largest three-dimensional screen, costs 2.5 times more to build than similar rides in Hollywood, all of which are boosted by special effects created by the Oscar-winning team for the movie, Life of Pi.

In Wuhan, the capital city of the central Hebei province, Wanda is making the most of its theatric ingenuity and abundant financial firepower, helped by its willingness to enlist worldclass talents such as Mark Fisher, designer of the Red Lantern theatre in Wuhan. Before he died in June last year, Mr Fisher served as the artistic director of the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, and the Guangzhou Asian Games.

Grand plans

Come late December, Wanda will bring to Chinese audiences the work of Franco Dragone, famed for his 13-year stint as artistic director of Cirque du Soleil and later for a long-running Las Vegas show for Celine Dion.

Wanda chairman Wang Jianlin impressed Mr Dragone in their first meeting with his outsized entourage and his enthusiasm to complete a deal.

"We expected to meet one or two people, but we were in front of so many people . . . The one hour meeting became six hours," Mr Dragone said. The pair started working together after their initial meeting in December 2010 in Beijing, where Wanda has its headquarters.

Mr Dragone's design for Wuhan will be a permanent show, called the Han Show, built on a scale more daring and technologically-complicated than his recent runaway success in Macau, the House of Dancing Water, a US$20 million theatrical spectacle and his first permanent show.

Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was chosen for the development because of the city government's initiatives and its central geographical location. In a typical weekend, half a million Chinese travellers pass through the city - by train, high-speed rail, air, bus or boat - on their way to another city.

An initial success is seen in the outdoor shopping district. Since opening in September 2011, it has turned the formerly backward, sparsely-populated neighbourhood into a buzzing all-night destination for youngsters and professionals. On a recent Thursday, throngs of shoppers milled about the well-lit outdoor street to frequent the restaurants, bars, coffee shops, retail shops and cinema, or just to hang out.

Wanda's Mr Tang said that it opened the canal and the shopping street less than nine months after construction began, and the plan was to develop the area as an "all-in-one space, combining working, living, shopping, dining, culture, entertainment and retail". In short, everything a Chinese consumer needs to splurge on.

Elsewhere across China, Wanda is working on eight similar all-in-one entertainment complex projects called Wanda City, albeit on a less ambitious scale. These complexes will feature live-show theatres, entertainment arcades and indoor ski resorts such as the one planned for Harbin in North-east China.

In its core shopping mall business, Wanda is racing ahead, planning to build more than 20 malls each year in the next few years to add to its existing stable of 100 malls, all self-owned and operated. By the end of 2015, it will own 25 million square metres in completed gross floor areas.

To finance this spending spree, Wanda is in the process of staging an initial public offering (IPO) for its shopping mall business in Hong Kong to raise as much as US$6 billion. It has also filed an application in October seeking an IPO in Shenzhen for its cinema business, Wanda Cinema Line.

All these financing plans will feed the appetites of Chinese shoppers for something new, often on an enormous scale.

For a start, the Han show that Mr Dragone will present to the Chinese audiences from late December is guaranteed to be a technological breakthrough, not least because of its use of 200 winches to suspend actors and acrobats as they fly at six metres per second, above a massive 8.7-metre-deep pool of water.

"If China can do this, it is on the stage to lead in world-class entertainment," said Chris Delizza, production acrobatic rigger at Mr Dragone's company, Dragone.