How Ocean Park can rebrand itself as the face of new Hong Kong

Ocean Park could be Hong Kong’s next cultural heart, with rent-free spaces for struggling artists and revamped theatres for major concerts
Its open spaces and gorgeous views could host fine dining and boutiques as well eco-tourism and extreme sports. The possibilities abound

Brian Y. S. Wong

Published: 8:15am, 18 Oct 2020

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Ocean Park has been an integral part of our city’s collective memory and an invaluable piece of Hong Kong’s tourism-driven economy. But with the recent double whammy of political instability and the Covid-19 pandemic, many say that the theme park is on its last legs.

In May, Hong Kong’s lawmakers approved a HK$5.4 billion (US$697 million) bailout to salvage the park, which reported a record deficit of more than HK$557 million in the 2018-19 financial year. The bailout would keep the park solvent for now but it remains unclear whether the government will play any further role in keeping it alive.

So what now? As someone who was enamoured with both Ocean Park and Disneyland as a young child, I believe that there is much that can be done to revive Ocean Park.

It needs to be rebranded and reshaped into a site that caters not just to those who relish nostalgia for the good old days of 1980s Hong Kong, but also to a younger crowd, to artists, to high-spending visitors looking for a boutique experience, and to tourists seeking an easy escape from Hong Kong’s concrete jungle.

Firstly, Ocean Park is at its best when it typifies Hong Kong. From its signature Halloween specials (with eye-catching, outlandish adverts featuring veteran actress Helena Law Lan), to its long-running hopes for a Hong Kong-born giant panda, the park thrived on its Hong Kong brand.

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Yet being bona fide Hong Kong in 2020 is very different from what it was 30 years ago. The buskers at Star Ferry, the street performers and rappers in Causeway Bay, the fledgling troupes and thespians struggling to find permanent, affordable venues – to a young person in Hong Kong, these are the tribes that best typify Hong Kong culture.

The park could revitalise its footfall by providing open plots and collaborative spaces for these artists to perform in. It could, for example, provide a free-entry space near the park entrance, waiving rent in exchange for the performance attracting a hip audience to the park.

Or Ocean Park could revamp and expand its theatres, transforming them into venues more suitable for large concerts, such as Hong Kong’s biggest annual music festival Clockenflap or Taiwanese rock band Mayday’s annual shows. This approach would not only resolve long-standing worries about the sprawl of performers on Hong Kong’s densely populated pedestrian thoroughfares in the city, but would also lure culturally cosmopolitan middle-class and well-to-do young people out to Ocean Park and its attractions.

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Secondly, since counting purely on spending from young people would be naive and ill-advised, Ocean Park should also cater to high-net-worth individuals by introducing high-end establishments. Some of the less frequented attractions atop the hill should be scrapped to make way for restaurants and boutique shops, which could artfully make use of the gorgeous vistas and unrivalled location in fostering a new hub for fine dining and retail.

Drawing on signature brands to establish a nascent outlet centre in the south of Hong Kong could be another option – no longer would tourists in the city centre have to travel to Tung Chung to quench their thirst for high-quality products. Only a few minutes away from the central business district via the MTR, Ocean Park is both a sounder and newer choice compared to the many others existing.

The success of the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts shows that, with commercially minded rebranding and targeted advertisements, even rather dilapidated sites of moderate cultural or historical significance could be transformed into lucrative and trendy sites attractive to big spenders.

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Finally, Ocean Park must continue to open up – as it has recently begun to – the lush and vast terrain on which it is situated. Brick Hill not only offers family-friendly hiking routes, but also a prospective tourism site. For a city with a budding eco-tourism industry struggling to demonstrate viability, Ocean Park is perhaps the best place in which to begin formalising sustainable tourism practices – the park is uniquely situated next to Aberdeen and Stanley, two flourishing urban and suburban clusters, while sitting on a vast mountainous terrain.

Ocean Park could introduce a healthy mix of extreme and wild sports, including war games, parkour and abseiling. These would help dispel the view that Ocean Park is outdated and irrelevant, while also helping to pull in start-ups and regionally prominent sporting and event management firms, which may have networks and consumer bases from which the park could benefit.

Ocean Park is haunted by the spectre of abandonment, anachronism and economic angst. Thousands of jobs are at stake here – there is more to the park than just another tourist attraction. It is high time that the powers of Hong Kong – old capital, new innovation – unite to exorcise this spectre. Given everything that we have been through these past two years, surely we deserve a better Ocean Park.

Brian Wong is a DPhil in Politics candidate at Balliol College, Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar (Hong Kong 2020) and the founding editor-in-chief of the Oxford Political Review

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