When Niu Tianlong graduated from the Shanghai University of Sport last year, the 22-year-old planned to pursue his passion for a full-contact, Chinese martial art known as wushu.

Then The Walt Disney Co came calling. Nowadays, he’s lacing up his knee-high boots, donning pantaloons and a blue bandanna, and rehearsing a sword-fighting scene ahead of the June 16 opening of the $5.5-billion Shanghai Disney theme park.

“The physical part is not tough at all compared with wushu, but the performance, the expressions on my face and acting－that’s very challenging,” said Niu, who has been hired to play a swashbuckler and entertain park visitors between attractions.

In Disney’s effort to expand its signature character-based entertainment to China, figuring out millions of small details such as the Mandarin translation for hakuna matata has been the least of its worries. Instead, managing an epic, year-long casting for the 1,000 performers for marquee musicals such as The Lion King and all manner of other acts that make the Magic Kingdom such a powerful draw, has proved more challenging.

Shanghai Disneyland set to open in June

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Performance arts training on the mainland tends toward classical Chinese forms in major urban areas, and is pretty much non-existent everywhere else.

In the United States, there’s a surplus of people who can act, sing, dance, or do all three. In China, the relatively small number of performers who have studied Western musical forms are more likely to have studied operatic bel canto pieces than belt-it-out Broadway tunes.

That’s forced Disney to improvise. Years ago, when the Shanghai Disney was in the concept phase, the company started building its own talent development network from scratch by partnering with 30 arts institutes around the country.

“Disney is doing something in China that has never been done before,” said University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Elliott Weiss, who has written a case study on the Shanghai Disney. “The question is when the park can be profitable, given the additional investment they have had to make finding and training talent.”

Disney has steadily cultivated its brand with Chinese millennials, many of whom first encountered Mickey Mouse only in 1986, when the China Central Television network started to broadcast Disney animations.

In 2008, the company launched its Disney English-language training schools in China, starting in Shanghai. Disney now has 28 learning centres in seven cities across China that teach kids ranging from ages 2 to 12, with class materials featuring Disney characters such as Buzz Lightyear and Nemo.

Yu Liang, 24, said she became entranced with Disney after learning English by studying The Little Mermaid.

When she entered the drama and dance programme at Shanghai Normal University in 2011, it coincided with the first year of Disney’s outreach programme to arts schools. For the rest of her undergraduate programme, she attended Disney’s talks during on-campus recruitment visits and participated in performance clinics. Last year, Yu landed the female lead role in a Shanghai Disneyland production based on the Pirates of the Caribbean character Jack Sparrow. “I almost cannot believe it has happened,” she said. “I wanted to work for Disney for 10 years or 20 years.”

For more experienced performers such as Li Weiling, 28, who will play Nala in the Mandarin-version of the Lion King musical, a callback from Disney after a year of auditioning was a huge career break. The Xiamen graduate of the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory of Music had been teaching full-time after finishing a two-year run in 2014 as Silibub in a Chinese-language production of Cats.

“In my second year of university, my teacher gave me Nala’s song, Shadowland, to sing,” she said. “I didn’t know about this musical then. Now I am trying to cope with the pressure of being China’s first Nala.”

With just two weeks to go before the Shanghai Disney opening, Chinese performers are rehearsing with directors and trainers flown in from the US. After Disney gets its troupe ready for prime time, the next challenge may be keeping them.

Starting next year, Shanghai Disney will face greater competition. DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc has a $2.4-billion DreamCenter park scheduled for 2017 in Shanghai, while Haichang Ocean Park Holdings Ltd will open China’s largest marine park in the metropolis next year.

And Six Flags Entertainment Corporation will open a park on the mainland, its first outside North America in 2019.

Industry consultant Aecom forecasts that 59 more theme parks will open in China by 2020, serving 220 million park-goers annually.

That’s roughly the current size of the entire US market. “After it has invested in training,” said Darden’s Weiss, Disney “might lose the talent to competitors”.

Niu, the martial arts student turned pirate, said he’s enjoying his crash course in show business, though his proud parents back in his home village in Henan province are a little puzzled by the career change. “In the village, we know characters like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but you don’t really know that they belong to a company called Disney,” he said. Shanghai Disney is all about changing that.

On Children’s Day, the Shanghai Children’s Hospital received a special festival gift – a payment of 6,600 yuan ($1,002) for an overdue medical bill dating back to the 1960s.

Younger brother Zheng Bin was just two years old when he was admitted to the hospital for a hernia, thepaper.cn reports.

The treatment cost 220 yuan and grain couple worth 2.5 kilograms of food. But the boy’s family was so poor, the bill wasn’t paid before he was discharged..

For decades, a medical bill reminder was kept somewhere in the family home. The brothers never knew it existed.

That was not until they sifted through their late mother’s belongings recently when they stumbled across the reminder note, thus deciding to pay the overdue bill.

While the hospital said they would accept only the original sum, the brothers insisted on repaying the debt plus interest – as much as 30 times the original cost. Besides, they donated 2,000 yuan each to help sick children in the hospital.

Huge crowds at the highly anticipated Shanghai Disneyland, which is forecast to draw 10 million visitors annually, may discourage Shanghai residents from visiting Disney’s first theme park on the Chinese mainland, a poll showed.

Roughly two in three Shanghai residents shook their heads when asked whether they will visit Disneyland this year, according to the poll conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics in April and published on Friday. Avoiding big crowds is the main reason.

Among those who said they will visit Disneyland this year, more than 37 per cent said they will take one or two workdays off to visit the resort to avoid huge lines, according to the survey that polled 1,800 residents older than 16.

Shanghai Disneyland set to open in June

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Tourists have shown great passion for Disneyland, which is the third in Asia following one in Tokyo and another in Hong Kong.

All tickets for the first two weeks after its official opening on June 16 are sold out, and on average more than 40,000 people visited the theme park during the trial run that began on May 7, Wang Kai, vice-president of the Shanghai Disney Resort’s public affairs, told a media briefing on May 19.

Lu Yun, who stayed overnight in the resort over the past weekend, said the trip was worth it in terms of the amusement, setting and dreamlike atmosphere, but the experience was more or less impaired by the large crowds and she was sure she won’t go again this year.

She also mentioned potential safety hazards.

“Numerous people waited at the entrance of that part of the theme park and set off like they were competing in a running contest when staff let us in. It seemed that a stampede could happen easily and some people even ran with their children,” she said.

Zhou Hong, who paid a visit with her mother and husband last week, also said they felt discouraged from paying another visit.

“The lines will undoubtedly be longer after the theme park is officially open. Although there are some destinations that I unfortunately couldn’t try this time, either because they were not in service during the trial or the long lines. I’m sure I will put off my next trip to Disneyland to next year or even sometime later,” said Zhou, a media worker.

But still, the Disneyland experience on the whole was perfect, she said.

ISLAMABAD – A young Pakistani woman died Wednesday (June 1) after she was tortured and set alight in the country’s conservative northeast for refusing a marriage proposal from the son of a former colleague, relatives and police said.

Maria Sadaqat, 19, was attacked by a group of people on Monday in the village of Upper Dewal close to the summer hill resort of Murree, outside the capital Islamabad.

“She was badly tortured and then burned alive. We brought her to hospital in Islamabad but she succumbed to her wounds today,” Abdul Basit, Sadaqat’s uncle, told AFP outside a burns centre at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in the capital.

Pakistani teen burned alive for refusing marriage proposal

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Grieving relatives outside the centre wept and protested at the teenager’s death as police moved her body to another hospital for a post-mortem.

Basit said his niece had been attacked by the principal of the private school where she had formerly worked as a teacher, and by his accomplices after she refused a marriage proposal from his son.

“He was divorced and twice her age, so she refused the proposal and left her job when they pursued her time and again… eventually they attacked her,” Basit said.

Police said Sadaqat gave a statement before her death naming the principal and four others as her attackers.

“We have arrested at least one of the accused and a hunt is on for the rest,” Mazhar Iqbal, the officer directing the murder investigation, told AFP.

A doctor at the hospital said Sadaqat had succumbed to serious burns.

“The poor woman was becoming better but then could not survive because most parts of her body had serious burn injuries,” said Ayesha Ihsani.

It was the second time in just over a month that a Pakistani woman had been murdered over a marriage issue.

A woman believed to be aged between 16-18 was drugged, strangled and her body burnt on the orders of a village jirga (council) in northwest Pakistan on April 29, allegedly for helping a friend to elope with her lover.

Hundreds of women are murdered by their relatives in Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour.

CHENNAI, India – At least 300,000 children across India are drugged, beaten and forced to beg every day, in what has become a multi million rupee industry controlled by human trafficking cartels, police and trafficking experts said.

Writing in a report which is about to be circulated across the country’s police forces, the authors urged law enforcers to carry out greater surveillance of children living on the streets.

According to the Indian National Human Rights Commission, up to 40,000 children are abducted in India every year, of which at least 11,000 remain untraced.

“The police don’t think begging is an issue because they assume that the adult with the child is either family or a known person,” said co-author Anita Kanaiya, CEO of The Freedom Project India, which works on trafficking issues.

“But for every 50 children rescued there will be at least 10 who are victims of trafficking. And there has to be a constant vigil to identify them,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Children are sometimes maimed or burned to elicit greater sympathy and get more alms, said the report.

The money they earn is usually paid to the traffickers, or to buy alcohol and drugs.

The report is based on the experiences of police and charities in Bengaluru city – formerly known as Bangalore – in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

There is a seasonal pattern to begging, local police said.

Cities like Bengaluru see a sharp rise in the numbers of children wandering the streets just before festivals or after a natural disaster.

In 2011, Bengaluru police launched “Operation Rakshane” (“To Save”).

In coordination with various government departments and charities, they drew up a blueprint to help children forced into begging.

Months before carrying out a series of rescues, they spread out across the city, taking pictures of children on the street, documenting their daily activities and shadowing them back to their homes.

“When we started, we had nothing to prove the connection between begging and trafficking. But we went about meticulously recording any signs of forced labour on the streets of the city,” Kanaiya said.

According to inspector general of police, Pronob Mohanty, who spearheaded the operation, teams of police and health workers rescued 300 children on a single day across the city.

The traffickers were arrested and later imprisoned.

“Operation Rakshane is meant to be a template which can be replicated as a model of inter agency cooperation,” Mohanty said in the handbook, which includes suggestions for surveillance, data collection and rehabilitation, as well as listing relevant laws.

Kanaiya said: “We are now initiating a planned campaign to take the book to every police headquarter in the country and follow it up with a workshop on child (begging) and rescue operations for policemen.”