Shanghai Surprise Pt. 3

If one is left with any impression of Shanghai, it's that there's a lot of places to eat and shop and eat and shop and eat and shop and...well, you get the idea. In fact, the city is so driven by commerce and consumption (both literally and figuratively), that it's very easy to forget that you're in a communist country.

I turned to another local to get a perspective on this. I spent a lot of time talking to Gary Wang, aka DJ V-Nutz, who's one of a mere handful of local hip-hop DJs and happens to be China's first DMC national champion. Age 31, Gary grew up in Shanghai but has also lived in Japan for half a dozen years and is impressively trilingual in English, Mandarin and Japanese (quad if you count that he's fluent in Shanghainese, a dialect that most Mandarin speakers won't understand). Gary's breakdown of how you reconcile China's communist ideology with Shanghai's capitalist personality traces things back to Deng Xiaoping, who was China's main ruler post Mao throughout the '70s and '80s. Around 1980, Deng realized that if China didn't modernize its economy (i.e. open it up to trade and a market system), it likely wouldn't survive the next several decades especially given the burdens that such an immense population demands on a socialist gov't.

In some ways, you can see what the alternative path could have been by looking at North Korea which stayed the course in disastrous fashion and is now one of the poorest nations in the world (of course, that's also a result of what can only be described as militantly obtuse leadership). Deng's vision was for a China that could still keep ideologically loyal to some of the tenets of Mao's original blueprint but could also stay competitive on the world stage and in some ways, Shanghai was his experiment. By allowing for foreign investment - and just as important - private salaries, Deng opened up the door for the creation of a small, but influential middle class. Shanghai's consumer obsessions is largely a byproduct of that class shift with many local city residents making far more than their countrymen in other places in China. If there's one thing that the middle class - around the world - is good for, it's buying things as displays of their privilege and Shanghai's local market economy has been more than happy to respond in kind.

I've never seen a city with so many places to shop, especially for clothing. It helps that China probably has the largest garment industry in the world (hello sweatshop & child labor!) and that Shanghai is a hub of distribution for it. I went to at least five major shopping districts across the city that ranged from open-market stalls with hundreds of sellers hawking inexpensive clothes to high-end designer fare from Louis Vutton, Prada and the like. One problem though is that the knock-off trade here is immense and you can buy facsimile merchandise for practically any major designer. At the open markets for example, you'll be approached countless times by sellers asking, "Prada? Gucci?", often times with catalogs in their hands showing what you can buy from them. Same goes for designer watches actually - I got offered more fake Rolexes in one hour than a day spent in Times Square.

For example, take CDs. In any given suitcase, you can never really predict what you'll find. Many are bootlegs (the sure sign? If the covers are like the American CDs but with Chinese printed on them, that probably means they're booted) but some are also cut-outs - surplus stock unloaded on the cheap overseas by distributors. The trip though is that the mix of what you find is baffling. Sure, there's big, current hits like Justin Timberlake's recent LP and Alicia Keyes' "Songs in A Minor". But when I was rolling with my man Dana (see below), he was pulling all sorts of random hip-hop LPs including Casual's "Fear Itself", Monie Love's "In a Word or 2" and Kwame's sophomore album. Price? 5Y a piece, or, just over 60 cents a pop.

DVDs are a little more expensive, ranging between 10-20Y (i.e. $1.20-2.50). This gets a little tricky because you have a couple of different formats floating around. There are VCDs, which are of decent but notably inferior quality. They used to be a lot more popular (and still are to a large degree) but have been pushed aside by the DVD format. In that case, not all DVDs are the same. Some DVDs have image quality that's no better than VCDs but some are labelled as DVD-5. These have very good visual quality but the top of the line is DVD-9, which is basically the same as a legitimate DVD.

Bootleggers work fast throughout Asia. When I was in Shanghai, I could have easily picked up a boot of "Gangs of New York", "Two Towers" or "Catch Me If You Can." They would have all sucked in terms of visual quality - usually a step above some guys with a camcorder inside a movie theatre, but it's amazing that the turnaround time is so quick. For example, I also saw DVD-9 quality copies of "Die Another Day".

What's truly comedic about the bootlegs is how they are marketed. In most cases, the packaging is rewritten in both English and Chinese and for starters, typos abound. But even more notable, there's many DVD boxes that feature scenes from entirely other movies - I didn't see this myself but Gary told me he saw a copy of "The Exorcist" that had Pinhead from "Hellraiser" on the cover instead. Likewise, I saw a copy of "The Ring" that had an image from some other movie that I couldn't ID, but it certainly wasn't from "The Ring" itself. Equally as entertaining is reading the back descriptions, often times talking about an entirely DIFFERENT movie. For example, I brought back a copy of "Austin Powers: Goldmember" and the description on the back is a typo-laden blerb written about David Lynch's "Blue Velvelt." Moreover, the credit information is for "Lord of the Rings". Likewise, I picked up a copy of "Legally Blonde" on bootleg for a friend and while the back description was correct, the credits were for Denzel Washington's "John Q". In some cases, I was fairly certain that they straight-up invented new movies even though they name dropped well-known American actors and directors.

There are also a few cases of clever deception - for example, I saw many copies of "Amelie II" and "Amelie III" in Shanghai even though there's no such movies. Instead, these were other movies starring Audrey Tatou but labeled as sequels to "Amelie" in order to attract buyers. They were even packaged similar to the original "Amelie" - with the same kind of colors and photography.

Interesting enough, the only film that is impossible to find on bootleg is "Hero", Zhang Yimou's latest. First of all, when the film comes out in the US, GO SEE IT. Like Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", it's a wuxia period epic, starring (peep this): Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Donnie Yen. The film is the most visually arresting in Zhang Yimou's long career and jaw-droppingly stunning image-wise. And yeah, the fighting rocks too.

I saw "Hero" twice in Shanghai. The first time, it was inside the enormous theater hall at the Film Art Centre, which is where the Shanghai Int'l Film Festival is held every two years. The space was great, but the only problem was that the movie was in Chinese with no subtitles. Oops! (though luckily, as an action flick, you can still appreciate its visual qualities). I watched it a second time at the UME Int'l Cineplex which is the only place in Shanghai for foreigners to go to see movies with English subtitles. It also runs what few Hollywood films are allowed to show in China (only 20 a year) and inexplicably, alongside "Harry Potter", the other American film was "Kate and Leopold." Go figure.

It's worth noting that at these two theatres, movie tickets have preassigned seats which is actually a nice change of pace and at the newer theaters, they have computer displays that show you where you're seat will be in case you want to move. Movies here aren't cheap though by local standards - between 50-60Y.

But anyways, "Hero" came out about three weeks ago and is already setting box office records in China. Normally, this would be plenty of time for bootlegs to start coming out. But "Hero" was produced in China for a whopping $30,000,000 (easily the most expensive film ever made in China) and the gov't has issued stern warnings to any bootlegger foolish enough to sell copies, threatening to hit them with a major fine. This is likely the only reason why copies of the movie aren't already floating out there though my man Gary told me that someone bribed a member of Zhang Yimou's team with $300,000 to buy a digital copy of the movie that will no doubt serve as the template for bootlegs once the market opens up.