China Cultural Review: the Cathays, Pornography, and Bootleg DVDs

China, like any land worth being written about, is a land of contradiction. Simultaneously utterly conservative and yet rushing into modernization, the dinosauric Communist authority waddles far behind the rapid economic development. Somewhere in-between lies the social evolution of the average Middle Kingdom citizen.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the "Special Economic Zone" that began this headlong rush into neo-capitalist moderndom: Hong Kong's experimental sister-city Shenzhen. Founded by the great reformer Deng Xiaoping less than thirty years ago, the Southernmost city boasts a highest per-capita income than Beijing. A city where everyone is from somewhere else, here to make money, and quite a younger demographic. And they like to get off.

As any media analyst of the internet will tell you, as good a benchmark as any of a culture's shifts in attitudes is pornography.

How is media-sexuality represented in Shenzhen? Unlike nearby Hong Kong, with its still British western attitude and laws, there are no Penthouses for sale in the liquor stores of Shenzhen. There are few sex shops, admittedly, but they require immense digging to uncover. No "classy" Hustler Store. No hipster porn scene to shop at with your girlfriend. No erotica section of the bookstore, no backroom of the family video store.

Still, the oldest profession is barely obfuscated beneath the shadiest of massage parlors. Though most of them quite legitimate - the Chinese do like their spas - there is an obvious subtext to the ones with skimpy outfitted girls in shoddy neighborhoods. But prostitution and hand-jobs are not the subject of this writing.

A culture is as defined by its media as it is by its call girls. Yet China has some ways to go before they have a homegrown media of their own to be proud of. Hong Kong cinema aside, and the occasional internationally renowned mainland film by Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige, the bloody history of this post-Communist nation has stilted the growth of an adequate film/tv/pornography industry.

Hence bootleg DVDs' immense popularity. On every street corner you will find openly sold in flat paper cases: Hollywood blockbusters still in theaters, American B-movies never released in the States, every season of your favorite show, Hong Kong action stars on display, and Japanese anime for the kids; all burnt at home, the studios not making a dime in residuals, and purchase at your own risk because it might not even play when you get home. But this is no problem when several movies over costs ten to thirty yuan, amounting to only a handful of dollars.

This neo-Capitalist attitude of movies on demand, legality be damned, certainly extends to porno as well as the mainstream. Purely for research purposes, this writer felt it necessary to purchase these street-corner illicets. The stack of boxes might innocent at first, but give the seller a second look and he may show you the secret stash underneath.

A random set of discs was purchased, the title in unreadable Chinese. Cute cartoon girls on the cover. Upon going home and inserting into the laptop, it was discovered that for only ten yuan - one dollar something - two discs were in possession a total of eight hours of hardcore animated pornography. Each film with completely random language selections; some with homemade Chinese subtitles, some even English dubbed and bootlegged from the American exports, and most only in untranslated Japanese. This other Asian culture, homegrown and unique, is known for their strange fetishes, and violent sexual images of school girls and dungeons and fantasy and tentacles and animated penises were all presented before the modest 14 inch laptop. Suffice to say, while perhaps not turned on, one can be very morbidly fascinated by these things.

And here in Shenzhen it is against the law to sell such. But, in the spirit of capitalism and modernism, the Chinese do not care. Powered by the dynamic spirit of human freedom, and the still-evolving media technologies of cheap DVD burning, the modern Chinese youth have broken free of past conditionings by society and state, and have joined the global culture. The globalist dream, extending to America's famous export of Hollywood, and Japanese porn as well.