As China “rails at [the recent] theme park boom“, with officials criticizing what they see as “unclear concepts, blind construction, imitations and plagiarism, low-standard duplication and other issues” in the industry, our photo theme this week is Theme Park Dream — a look at some of the weirder and whackier theme parks to have cropped up in the country in recent years. Today’s image is of Nanchang Wanda Park in Jiangxi province, which was Dalian Wanda’s first theme park when it opened just weeks before Shanghai Disneyland in the spring of 2016. Wang Jianlin, Wanda’s chairman, famously criticized Disney for entering China’s theme park market, and seemed intent on driving the company out of the country with his plans to open 15 parks by 2020. But in July last year Wanda sold their theme park arm to Sunac China for a reported $9.3 billion and exited the sector. Image: Shutterstock More theme park weirdness on RADII: Photo Series: A Day at the Abandoned American Dream
