Evergrande promised 15 theme parks bigger than Disneyland — 5 years on, zero had opened

Evergrande Fairyland (恒大童世界) was chairman Xu Jiayin's plan to turn a property developer into a theme-park operator. Design firms with Disney and Universal pedigrees were briefed to build each park at 1.5 times Disneyland's scale. Ground broke first in Changsha in 2016, then Kaifeng, Taicang and Jurong in 2018, expanding to Wuhan, Guangzhou/Nansha, Xi'an, Qingdao and Yantai. By its 2020 results, Evergrande said it had 'completed the layout' of 15 Fairyland projects nationwide, combined investment cited at over ¥1 trillion, planning to open them from 2022.

Individual sites carried enormous price tags on their own — Kaifeng and Xi'an were each budgeted at roughly ¥100 billion, Changsha at ¥50 billion — funded the same way as Evergrande's core property business: heavy leverage against future cash flow the group did not yet have. As of August 2021, five years after the first groundbreaking, not a single one of the 15 parks had opened; entrance castles and theater shells stood half-built while suppliers were already chasing unpaid construction bills.

Evergrande's broader liquidity crisis became public later in 2021, and every site halted. Local governments began reclaiming idle land without compensation at sites like Wuhan and Shenyang. Elsewhere, state-owned platforms have bought out the stalled projects at steep discounts — Changsha's core parcels sold at judicial auction for ¥283 million in December 2025, Kaifeng's project company sold the same way days earlier — rebuilding them under new names, stripped of the Evergrande brand, the most advanced targeting reopening around 2028–2029.