Robert Iger has been busy. On the last day of August, the Walt Disney Co.'s president and CEO announced Disney's intent to buy Marvel Entertainment—makers of comic books and Robert Downey Jr. films—for $4 billion. Just more than a month later, Iger replaced Walt Disney Studios chief Dick Cook with a TV executive, Disney Channels Worldwide president Rich Ross. But the most eyebrow-raising Disney news came Nov. 4, when the company announced that it had gained approval from the Chinese government in Beijing to build a new theme park in Shanghai.

"China is one of the most dynamic, exciting, and important countries in the world, and this approval marks a very significant milestone for the Walt Disney Co. in mainland China," Iger said in a written statement announcing the deal.

It was a long mile. Disney had reportedly been engaged in on-again, off-again talks with the Chinese government regarding Shanghai since 1995. The new park will be the company's fourth international attraction and its first in mainland China. That means a steady flow of American actors, singers, and dancers could begin pouring into Shanghai as early as 2014, the year the new park is expected to open. So says James Higashi, a principal at Management Resources, a theme-park consultancy whose clients include Universal Studios, Sea World, and, yes, Disney.

"I think you will see a lot of American actors and performers," Higashi said. "There are specific character needs in which they want to stay within the guidelines of those characters. I do believe that there will be a fair amount of Americans and other actors that fit those roles, as there are in all their parks."

Simba Is Equity

Disney employs American performers at all three of its international parks. One recent casting notice announced auditions to be held at Screenland Studios in North Hollywood, Calif., for vocalists to portray characters such as Simba from "The Lion King" and Belle from "Beauty and the Beast" at Hong Kong Disneyland. Hopefuls would be vying for a six-month contract that would include "a competitive salary, a daily living allowance, roundtrip airfare, individual housing with paid utilities, shuttle service to/from work, medical and dental coverage, and paid vacations and sick days."

In Disney's domestic parks, such jobs fall under union contracts. Performers at Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure are covered by the American Guild of Variety Artists. At the company's massive Florida resort, Actors' Equity Association covers, according to the union, about 550 performers—a number that fluctuates seasonally. Chorus performers in Florida earn a minimum of $13.33 per hour, with a 40-hour-per-week guarantee. Principals and "chorus stepping-out" bring in $14.94 per hour with the same guarantee. But at Disney's parks in Paris (where 200 union employees participated in a 1998 work stoppage), Tokyo, and Hong Kong, such contracts must be negotiated by a union in the country where the park is built, if such a union exists.

Bill Marcus is an American reporter in Shanghai for Fox News Radio and American Public Media's "Marketplace." "There are no unions here," Marcus said. "If there are, they're state unions. Believe it or not, Wal-Mart has a union here. It's run in-house."

According to Marcus, conditions for Americans working in Shanghai, from executives down, have been deteriorating as companies have cut back on wages and benefits since the global economic downturn began. But, he added, Americans working alongside native Chinese still tend to be paid on a better scale than local Chinese workers. As evidence, he points to "The Painted Veil," the 2006 film starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. Marcus, who used to moonlight as an actor, had a two-line part in the film. He said the pay for American extras was more than $100 a day, while the Chinese extras were getting about $5. "There was enormous disparity," he said.

Marcus made about $300 for a day's work on the film—work, he points out, that would have earned him much more had it been performed under a Screen Actors Guild contract in the United States.

Global City

Although Shanghai represents Disney's first attempt at running a theme park in a place where labor laws are notoriously unrestrictive, it is not unforeseeable that American performers there will find themselves working under contracts not much different from their counterparts' in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris. According to Jeffrey Wasserstrom—a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the book "Global Shanghai, 1850–2010"—the city those performers will encounter is seeing a renaissance of Western influence.

"There's a really bustling expat community with quite a lot of Americans, and there's been just a profusion of foreigners coming in for all sorts of reasons to live and work in Shanghai," Wasserstrom said. "There are restaurants, there are clubs, there are all sorts of entities now that cater largely to this international crowd."

That wasn't always the case. Wasserstrom describes living in Shanghai in the early '80s and attracting attention whenever he walked down the street, being one of so few Westerners in the city. But China has changed. For Disney, Wasserstrom said, the decision to move into it, and particularly into Shanghai, makes sense.

"It was the place between the 1840s and the 1940s where Western fashions, Western movies, and Western popular culture came into China," he said. "Shanghai has started to reclaim its old role as a place where different parts of the world come together."