Diggingtochina’s Weblog

It’s rare that you see a look of profound disappointment on the face of a thirty-something woman but there it was when R went to the DVD shop in Beijing’s Chaoyang district.

She had gone there full of hope and expectation, only to have her unnatural optimism crushed. Shelves upon shelves of pirated recent releases had been replaced by a few, widely spaced copies of Hollywood classics and a lonely boxed set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. All worthy viewing but not the first series of Monk.

“It can’t be,” she said. But it was.

R was not the only one to notice the declining selection of pirated DVDs in Beijing. Her colleagues said it had everything to do with a visit by a US commerce delegation and, as evidence, suggested the happiest hunting grounds were to be found nearest the North Korean embassy. There was certainly nothing from the digital age within striking distance of the Silk Market.

Mr N brought the issue up with his long-standing dealer who was told that he could no longer sell the top-shelf merchandise every day of the week. In one of the clearest examples of the art of commercial compromise, the vendor now restricts sales of his new releases to Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the time, home viewers can choose between any number of copies of Broderick Crawford’s breakthrough performance in director Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) and Cary Grant’s star turn with Loretta Young in The Bishop’s Wife (1947).

Still, maybe a return to the golden days of Hollywood was what the town fathers and mothers of Chaoyang district had in mind when they erected a billboard near the second ringroad urging residents to: “Reject piracy and be a civilized Beijinger”.

Researchers have yet to document the effects of access to cheap copies of popular American television dramas and British nature series on the capital’s Anglophone population. If Ms N is any guide, the first series of Fox television’s 24 was audiovisual crack. The usually outgoing government worker turned down all social offers and stayed up way past her bedtime to feed her growing need to know whether that nice Jack Bauer unravels the assassination plot.

The medical community would no doubt warn people of a fragile state of mind against consuming an entire season of The Sopranos in one weekend but some viewers have spoken of the therapeutic benefits a little television can bring. Sometimes all it takes is an episode of Nip/Tuck to make you realize your own family falls within normal bounds.  

Irrespective of whether DVD piracy is a victimless crime or an infringement of intellectual property rights, authorities need to consider the social impact of taking low-priced, popular viewing off the streets and leaving nothing in its place. Would it really be wise to have so many unsedated people abandoning their couches and circulating unchecked?

Who’s to know – the second season of Carnivale is in.

To see a giant panda is to want one – there is little not to love about them. Black and white pandas are the chubby, doe-eyed slackers of the animal kingdom and, despite their preference for untamed regions, have all the makings of a domestic animal. It’s just that, quite clearly, there are not many of them.

The giant panda is the poster child of the international conservation movement and not without good reason. Only about 1,600 of them are left roaming the Earth and if this animal can be brought back from the brink, there is hope for all other endangered species. They tend to congregate in the southwest province of Sichuan where the elements can kill but the air is clean.

Even when roused, the adult animal is reluctant to reproduce but it’s not all bad news. Last year’s captive breeding season got going with the birth of not one but two sets of twins at Sichuan’s Wolong Nature Reserve. The new arrivals join dozens of surviving cubs born at the centre since 1991. The total is no mean feat for a species that only becomes interested in creating future generations three days a year. It’s a small window of opportunity that has been shown to become even smaller in captivity. More than half of all the male pandas in behind bars just aren’t interested.

To reverse the population decline, animal scientists have turned to artificial insemination and now most captive births are the result of human engineering. The scientists have also turned to improved nutrition and pornography. It’s a rite of passage for young male pandas to be shown videos of consenting adults in intimate situations.

The giant panda seems to move at a glacial pace but for such slow-moving creatures, the wild variety can be hard to track down. In his decade or so in the field, Yang Jian, the museum director at Wolong centre, only caught sight of the animal five times. Yang is described by others as a human map because of his knowledge of the region’s forbidding terrain and his ability to detect the animal’s presence from the evidence it leaves behind. He still goes into the wild each year looking for signs of panda life.

The animals are much easier to spot in the gentle surrounds of the reserve where the bamboo is home-delivered and the environment studiously monitored. Everything a panda could ever need or want – from humidicribs to the chance to star in a documentary – is provided at the base. Californian red trout have even been introduced to the reserve’s water system as aquatic coalmine canaries. Apart from being a picturesque addition to the centre, they go belly-up at the slightest chemical provocation. The creature comforts apparently have a big impact on life expectancy – wild pandas are thought to live until about 20 years of age while the captive animal can better this figure by at least a decade.

But how long can this human intervention go on? And how much responsibility should a panda bear for its own future? The rule of thumb, even if it is not opposable, is that nobody will help you if you won’t help yourself.
 

In some parts of the world, adults tell impressionable toddlers that if they go out into the back yard and dig, they’ll eventually burrow to China. Some toddlers take a small spade and people at their word.