Ed’s note: Sam Voutas, the director of Red Light Revolution, is back with another film project: King of Peking, “a film about juggling fatherhood and piracy.” Check it out, then read on.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a particular aspect of Beijing history that doesn’t get written about much: bootlegging. VHS never caught on in China as it did in the West. It was only when CDs, VCDs, and DVDs landed that things shifted dramatically from state-sponsored TV and film to virtually anything that could be dubbed to disc. Suddenly the French New Wave, Chuck Norris, and Buster Keaton — even whole historical collections from foreign national archives — were available to anyone who had a few kuai to rub together. Even some of China’s best independent filmmakers admit that piracy not only introduced them to cinema, but also brought their own films to a wide audience. Piracy, love it or hate it, has totally changed movie and music culture in Beijing.

A bit of a trip down memory lane, here’s my take on the history of bootlegging in the Jing.

1986

Back in the day, if you were a foreigner and you didn’t much like CCTV, it was all about who in the community had what videos. So in each diplomatic compound there’d be an apartment where some expat would run a library of movies. It was like the Blockbuster of badly dubbed videos. I heard there were similar clubs set up in university dorms. This niche trade has been almost entirely neglected by the history books.

1993

This is roughly the year when bootlegging entered the traveling salesman model. A man enters a pub in Sanlitun carrying a faux leather black briefcase, then sells his wares in front of bored wait staff. Primarily used to distribute music, this also moved into movies with the arrival of DVDs in China in 1998. As DVD stores popped up in Sanlitun and other areas, these entrepreneurs were increasingly pushed out of the game, unable to compete.

1998

Is there anything that personifies pirated movies in the capital more than a guy standing on a corner with a handful of Hollywood blockbusters? Whatever your feelings on the legality of his trade, these individuals were fast on their feet, hawking their wares in places like Chang’an Dajie, and able to pack up and run at the first sign of a green uniform. Smart, likeable, and with a knowledge of Hollywood cinema that could rival Roger Ebert, the corner seller was as Beijing as hot roasted chestnuts in January.

2001

The precursor to online shopping, home-delivered DVDs were developed to cater for the discerning customer who likes good movies but can’t be bothered to leave the couch. The client need only send an SMS and a delivery guy arrives with a hundred-page catalogue. This was particularly popular for office types who argued they just didn’t have the time to go shopping.

2009

This entry into bootlegging history arrived as soon as entire films could fit onto a flash drive. The cousin of this is the external hard drive that includes digitized movies in a particular genre. A connoisseur’s movie collection could now be divided into drives: Action, Romance, Estonian Cinema of the 50s, you name it.

TODAY

Much like the rest of the world, bootlegging has moved primarily to online streaming and torrenting sites. The Mom and Pop shops have had to make way to large companies with multiple employees, start-up capital, and a revenue system that comes primarily from advertising and data collection. And while fans of physical DVDs still keep a smattering of stores open, the age of the physical bootleg copy is slowly passing. The era of the guy shouting “DVD! DVD!” on the sidewalk is ending, much like the disappearance of traditional knife sharpeners from hutongs.

The bootlegging revolution has flooded the capital with its own unique brand of culture, from arthouse indies to porn to twenty-part series on Stalin. Now that bootlegs have conquered the digital space, what new forms will they take in the future?

Sam is an independent filmmaker raised in Beijing. His comedy about movie piracy, King of Peking, is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

Adapted with permission from Hug China.

H&N, Zare, Hugo BGSS, SFFCCCKS Coffee: these are just some of the counterfeits of famous brands — not the same as “famous counterfeits”… or is it? — you can find on a shopping street in Wuxi, Jiangsu province.

A glimpse of these shops on the ground floor of Shimao Skyscrape commercial and residential complex in the vicinity of the bustling high-speed railway station in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, might give you the impression that they’re all selling products or services from some of the world’s most famous brands.

But take a second-look at these “high-end, extravagant, first-class” (高端, 大气, 上档次) shops and you’ll notice something wrong.

Not only the products incredibly cheaper than they should be, but oh no! it’s not Starbucks, but SFFCCCKS; not Apple, but Appla; not ZARA, but ZARE; not H&M, but H&N; not Hugo BOSS, but Hugo BGSS. Even the largest Chinese bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ICBC (中国工商银行), has a knock-off: 中国中商银行!

Maybe it’s a homage. Frankly, McDonald’s should be upset there’s no McDougal’s; Burger King should demand Booger King be installed into this building complex’s facade right this instant. And Tennessee Fried Chicken, where you be?

This shopping street in Wuxi has a cluster of counterfeit brands… (Hug China)

UPDATE, 1/14, 11:13 pm: Those brands have been removed.

Chengdu recently hosted the 88th National Food and Beverage Fair (糖酒会), the seen-and-be-seen pimp show for anybody who’s anybody in China’s F&B industry. My own Belgian beer company basically ruled the catwalk with our four phallises of draft beer, freely pumping to more than 50,000 attendants who will now go about thinking that Belgian beer is a cheap product because it was located between the second-tier baijiu and the knock-off beer stalls.

Yep, knock-off beers. “Ganter” was their name, and they produce as a subsidiary of Tsingtao in Shanxi. As if name-dropping the province “Shanxi” weren’t enough to discredit them, a quick Google search shows that Ganter is a generic German beer that has no mention of China on its Wikipedia page. Even a Baidu search leads to the German company’s Chinese blog. Closer investigation revealed that these beers, labeled “Ganter” and engraved with Tsingtao’s mountainous design…

…may have drawn their inspiration from elsewhere:

Ganter China, whoever they are, must be doing well, since it costs a smooth 15,000 RMB to join the fair. As far as I can tell, each bottle contains the exact same content. Cheers.

How did you enjoy the season debut of Game of Thrones yesterday? (No spoilers, please.) Enough to watch its opening cinematic co-opted by baijiu brand Jian Nan in a commercial?

The video is a few months old, but it was just posted on That’s Beijing yesterday, with RFH writing:

Not sure what explains the Game of Thrones connection, other than that Chinese history is too long, often unwieldy, tortuously complicated, filled with names you cannot remember and most of the last few hundred years is to be found in the Fantasy section.

In the world of Chinese sorghum liquor, King’s Landing is “Inner Hangu Pass,” Winterfell is “End of Yellow River,” everything north of The Wall is, hilariously, “Hebei,” the deserts and grasslands of the Dothraki are the “Long Mountains.”

Hmm. What have you, Westerosians… blasphemy?

Let the Games Begin (That’s Beijing)

China doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to intellectual property. Big international companies spend lots of money fighting IP theft when smaller groups here in China happen to “borrow” IP rights. Which is why the current IKEA commercial in its spring public transport ad campaign seems a little strange.

Sound familiar? Yeah, pretty sure that’s the old NES Super Mario 3 song… you know, from World 1, Level 2, i.e. Overworld 2. It’s “creatively altered,” so it seems unlikely the company licensed the tune. You would think IKEA, a company promoting creative furniture and storage solutions, could at least commission some of their own music rather than ripping off the poor, unemployed plumber Mario. Koji Kondo would like his residuals check, please.

Mr. Smith is a consultant living in Beijing.

In case you’d forgotten what the original sounds like (off-key, but close enough):