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Mice get into everything. Just look at the best-known member of the species, Mickey. Since World War II he’s infiltrated every Bedouin tent and Russian dacha with a TV antenna. It truly is a small world after all, or so the Walt Disney Company used to think. Then Disney decided to open a theme park in Hong Kong. After determining that roughly 30 percent of their draw would need to come from mainland China, Disney sent emissaries into the hinterlands to gauge brand awareness. The Chinese, they discovered, barely knew who Mickey was, much less Donald, Goofy, and the rest of the gang. This was a problem for Disney, whose parks in Japan and Europe relied on existing interest in Disney’s characters. Luckily for Disney, it was also a problem for the Chinese government, which had invested $2.8 billion in exchange for a 57 percent stake in the Hong Kong theme park.

Enter the Chinese Communist Youth League, the venerable (it was founded in 1922, nearly three decades before Mao came to power) and massive (68 million Chinese between the ages of 14 and 28 call themselves members) organization that grooms China’s future party functionaries. With the tacit approval of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Disney linked up with the league to prepare China’s young people for the park’s September 2005 opening. Disney has sent video and music materials to the league’s thousands of “youth palaces,” and held “storytelling sessions” in a “grassroots brand-building program” meant to introduce Chinese youth to everything Disney. In the Guangzhou province, kids have been learning to draw their own Mickey cartoons.

“Education in China is changing,” says the vice president of the new park’s public affairs, “to encourage greater imagination and creativity. And that’s what our business is about.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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