In 2007, Hangzhou Future World shut down with 260 million yuan in lost investments. In 2000, Shanghai's 400-million-yuan-invested Universal Park closed after only four years.

The most ephemeral one is the Froebelland Park in Wujiang, 70 kilometres west of Shanghai, involving an investment of 1 billion yuan. It shut down in 1999, less than one year after it opened.

Professor Dong Guanzhi of Jinan University released a research report on mainland theme parks, the first of its kind, after his team conducted interviews on hundreds of them. The common theme: they could not attract enough attendance to keep running.

'For example, a theme park with 1 billion yuan of investment needs to sell at least 5,000 tickets a day to repay its loans and pay employees' salaries and other maintenance fees,' Dong said.

Investors in Froebelland Park, for example, optimistically hired 3,000 employees in anticipation of at least 15,000 visitors per day. Actually, it attracted fewer than 150 people one day. Dong said theme parks were still luxury goods to most Chinese people. 'Most mainland theme parks charge 100 or 200 yuan for one ticket. That's far beyond what people can afford,' he said. 'Not to mention trying to have frequent visitors.'

The history of failures has not stopped new capital from trying to enter the mainland theme park market, however.

Billions of yuan are still going into new parks in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hubei and Shandong , among other places, with the encouragement of local governments.

'Local governments are always wooing big theme parks and treating the parks as the officials' political achievement, with a slogan to create jobs and tourism income,' Dong said. 'Under the excuse of developing theme parks, developers can easily get support and land from local authorities.'

But developers don't want just theme parks. Their final aims are to build resort destinations comprising theme parks, hotels, golf courses and real estate, especially villas.

The Beijing Business Today quoted an unidentified industry insider as saying: 'A theme park developer doesn't really lose money even if its theme park goes into the red ... local governments ask only small land-transfer fees ... the developers make great money when they build projects on commercial property around the theme park and sell them out. Even if a theme park shuts down, its developer can still sell the land and get the money back.'

But despite the shaky history, the mainland continues its theme park optimism. According to this year's edition of China's Tourism Green Book, the mainland will enter a new era of park development from next year. While more international theme parks will enter the Chinese market, it says, domestic theme parks will also grow.