16, Teaching in China
Exams are on Thursday and I will not have to teach again until February the first. The school has my papers so that they can finalise arrangements for me to send regular payments back to
Australia and when that is concluded I will go on holiday. The period after Chinese New Year, which varies as much as Christian Easter, is called Spring Festival. The title doesn’t seem to fit well for the coldest weather does not arrive until February but maybe I will understand why some day. Maybe it is when the New Year springs to life.
I am spending some of my time watching DVDs. They are from a dollar(AU) to $2.50 each and I have acquired a respectable little collection of good films. The quality is inconsistent in the cheaper ones but the shop is willing to take them back without question if I find there are flaws. I was warned that occasionally I would come across one that was filmed in a cinema and actually experienced this with a copy of the last of the Lord of The Rings series. There were a couple of spots where I could hear the audience laugh! I don’t think the major film companies have anything to fear from Chinese pirate DVDs. They are nothing like the quality of the originals and anyone with enough money would buy the original. Maybe the companies should adopt a different marketing strategy here and put out an inferior quality series themselves. They would still be better than watching movies where the kissing noise comes after the kiss finishes! I can’t believe that a couple of foreign teachers I know were such cheapskates that they would watch a movie and then take it back to the shop claiming it was faulty. I took some back but only if they were truly faulty, then I would buy more.
There are some good reasons why media companies should back off of hassling
China to enforce bans on pirating. The first one is that millions of Chinese will never be able to afford DVDs at true copy prices. In
Australia those companies have such a stranglehold that the prices are insanely high. If they want to reach a mass market they should lower the prices greatly. Another reason they should ease off in
China is that the pirates are developing the market for them by allowing millions of people to actually see movies and get a taste for them. Even so it is only the middle class that can buy the players. We must realize that today the middle class has moved downwards economically because of the greed of the filthy rich, like the people who make decisions in the media companies. I wasn’t poor in
Australia but couldn’t afford to build up a DVD collection. Now I’m watching movies I never saw when they were new and I am writing reviews online about them. Ironically I am assisting the very companies that I condemn as some of the worst examples of Empire building capitalism. Using economic power to invade third world countries with no less serious consequences to the common people than those their ancestors inflicted through force.
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