The area of land approved for Disneyland in Shanghai is contained in a document issued by the Shanghai Municipal Planning and State Land Resources Administration Bureau. The document is numbers Shanghai No. 480, and targets the area of Chuansha Town (this area is close to Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and is only known to me because if you take a taxi from Pudong International and say that you are going to “Chuansha”, the taxi queue manager will give the driver a ticket to skip the queue upon return since Chuansha is too close to the airport, and taxi drivers wait from 4 to 8 hours for a customer from the airport).
An announcement on the document can be found here (in Chinese):
http://www.shgtj.gov.cn/ghsp/ghxk/ghxkz/200911/t20091126_333459.htm
According to publication, the total area is 4.12 million square meters, of which 2.23 million are awaiting requisition, meaning that people are still living there. Interesting, after the public announcement of Shanghai Disney, there has apparently been a flurry of building in the area designated for development. Farmers in area view this as an opportunity to increase the amount of compensation owed them, since compensation for relocation is often based on the total area of housing.
Story from Shanghai Daily on Shanghai farmers building on Disney’s land, post-announcement: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200911/20091112/article_419234.htm
This should dispel the idea that farmers being kicked off there is a one-sided process where innocent rural subjects are deprived of land and life by a totalitarian or authoritarian government. Clearly there are multiple tactics, illegal in this case, that farmers adopt to slow and make difficult the process of urban development.
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