Ah, the guilty pleasure...

...of buying pirated CDs. There are a couple of amazing AV stores on Dongsi Nan Dajie just north of Dengshikou, one on each side of the street, both proffering an astonishing selection of daoban goodies. I picked up Gordian Knot's album Emergent, and I'm listening to it right now. The bass player from Cynic, Steve Hackett (watched his acoustic concert in Budapest this afternoon--lovely!), Bill Bruford. Good old school Progressive Rock. Hackett actually shreds. I also bought something by Dream Theater's keyboard player Derek Sherinian, which I haven't listened to yet.

Here's something I wrote for Time Asia ages ago about the benefits of disk piracy in China:

Made in China: Necessary Evil?
Piracy offers Chinese an unprecedented window to the Western world
BY KAISER KUO

It's hard to escape their solicitations. They accost you on pedestrian overpasses and on street corners, even in broad daylight. These days, in Beijing at least, they even lurk in respectable restaurants and cafes, trying to entice customers. Sure, what they're selling is plainly illegal, but it's so cheap, so satisfying.

To the great dismay of Hollywood studios, record companies and software developers, pirated discs -- CDs, DVDs, VCDs, CD ROMs -- are still everywhere in China. The prevalence of piracy is a perennial issue in trade talks between the U.S. and China, with the former making dire pronouncements and the latter responding with high profile but largely ineffectual raids on pirate factories and the public immolation of fakes.

The evils of China's pirate industry are familiar to most of us: Hollywood reckons its annual losses are in the billions; legitimate retailers cannot compete with the selection and price offered by pirates; and faced with such competition the Chinese entertainment film and music industries find it difficult to recoup their investments in new movies and recordings.

But I submit -- even as one whose work has been extensively pirated -- that the impact of piracy in China has not been entirely baleful. All those Hollywood movies and all those CDs flooding the streets of Chinese cities have provided unprecedented exposure for young Chinese to the cultural output of the West. Pirate discs have penetrated deep into the interior, opening a window into the Western world otherwise inaccessible to the insular Chinese hinterland. The great boom in the Chinese film industry, the explosion of rock music talent coming out of Beijing and other Chinese cities, even much of mainland China's Internet revolution--all this has in large part been made possible by the piracy phenomenon. Piracy has provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration for musicians and filmmakers, raising the bar significantly for them, and created larger and more discerning audiences.

Piracy of media has been around in some form since the late 1980s, when VHS tapes circulated underground within limited circles. Music, too, made the rounds in this fashion as cassettes changed hands among those few urbanites who had developed a taste for rock and other forms of Western popular music. The real popularization of Western pop culture began in about 1992, when the first "saw- gashed CDs" hit the streets of China's larger cities. Easily recognizable from the inch-deep saw mark cut into them, these discs originate in the U.S. as catalog cut-outs -- excess inventory, usually recordings of artists dropped from a given record label, slated for destruction in order to realize tax benefits. These end up in containers bound for ports in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. (The street price in China is usually 10 yuan -- just over $1 -- and since CDs play from the inside outward, usually only one song is affected by the saw-gash. By comparison, a legitimate imported CD -- all songs intact -- costs about 150 yuan, or $18).

1995 saw the flood of pirated VCDs, mass-produced in Pearl River Delta factories. Quality was pretty spotty, and consumers quickly learned to distinguish between better copies made off laser disc and those shaky, low-fi VCDs shot surreptitiously in movie theaters with hand-held cameras. Music CDs followed a couple of years later, with catalogues mirroring album charts in the West with surprisingly short lag-time. In 1999, with DVD players becoming increasingly affordable, high-quality DVDs could be found everywhere. The offerings in places like Beijing's Sanlitun Bar District are astonishing. Some bars and restaurants have house dealers who will rotate stacks of discs among customers while they wait for their first courses.

The pirate disc market functions with an efficiency that should be a model for clumsy state-owned enterprises. One rarely encounters price differences between rival vendors. And distribution is fast and far-reaching. The vendors seem able to keep mental track of what titles are moving, and the market responds to consumer preference very quickly.
For those Westerners eager to see China drawn more closely into global culture, sweeping condemnations of the pirates and the consumers who support them could be ultimately counterproductive. A case could be made, after all, that broad exposure to the values of the liberal bourgeois West will lead the Chinese people inexorably to increased political openness and deepened reform. Then again, an equally persuasive case could be made that rule of law, to include respect for intellectual property rights, is ultimately the more critical variable in attaining those same goals.