Ziyuan (资源): Film mining and cinephilic expedition and exploitation in twenty-first century China

Abstract

This essay studies the Chinese spectators’ active releasing, searching for, and illicit sharing of imported, voluntarily subtitled, and secretly stored foreign films and videos by offering an etymological study of ziyuan (literally translated to English as ‘resource’), the most pervasively used term in the lexicon of contemporary Chinese cinephilia. Delineating the semantic shift of ziyuan from a concept of computer networking to a film and media idiom, I examine how the discursive practice of calling a digitalized film or video ‘ziyuan’ and the corresponding metadata model of representing a video by its digital identification and location information provide the mechanism both for locating and retrieving films as digital files from the Internet and for hiding them away from clear recognition and immediate access. As the neologism replacing daoban, the Chinese equivalent of ‘piracy’, ziyuan as the popular argot, I argue, rehabilitates Chinese cinephilia thriving on piracy by metaphorically reconceptualizing the global Internet as a vast reservoir and the Internet-based media files as untapped natural resources with potential use value. The common use of this term thus mounts a collective resistance to both the unequal global capitalist order and the party-state intervention in the media market by symbolically exonerating participators and beneficiaries of making, disseminating, downloading, or streaming unauthorized films of any blame or criminal charges.

Keywords:

• Ziyuan
• natural resources
• Internet-based resources
• daoban/piracy
• cinephila
• contemporary China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Masinter et al., for the 1998 definition of ‘resource’, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396.

’A resource can be anything that has identity. Familiar examples include an electronic document, an image, a service (e.g. “today’s weather report for Los Angeles”), and a collection of other resources. Not all resources are network “retrievable”; e.g. human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library can also be considered resources. The resource is the conceptual mapping to an entity or set of entities, not necessarily the entity which corresponds to that mapping at any particular instance in time. Thus, a resource can remain constant even when its content–the entities to which it currently corresponds–changes over time, provided that the conceptual mapping is not changed in the process’.

See Masinter et al., for the 2005 definition of ‘resource’, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986.

’This specification does not limit the scope of what might be a resource; rather, the term “resource” is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. Familiar examples include an electronic document, an image, a source of information with a consistent purpose (e.g. “today’s weather report for Los Angeles”), a service (e.g. an HTTP-to-SMS gateway), and a collection of other resources. A resource is not necessarily accessible via the Internet; e.g. human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library can also be resources. Likewise, abstract concepts can be resources, such as the operators and operands of a mathematical equation, the types of a relationship (e.g. “parent” or “employee”), or numeric values (e.g. zero, one, and infinity)’ (2005).

2 Although metadata is more readily understood in its digital forms in the 21st century, an analogy with a nondigital physical version of metadata, the library catalogue cards that holds information about books, will explain clearly and concisely what metadata means.

3 Although the accepted wisdom in China and abroad believes censorship to be the prime culprit of the limited distribution of foreign films, this limited distribution should be understood for multiple reasons, as the outcome of both film companies’ global distribution strategies and the barriers set by the Chinese side. The global distribution strategies may dismiss China as one of their overseas markets for their own political, legal, financial, or practical considerations, or they might postpone a film’s release in China due to their stubborn insistence on the anachronistic release window system. The barriers set by the Chinese side include the import quota system designed to balance the number of foreign and domestic films, censorship regulations by the NRTA, and mandatory partnership with two local, state-owned film distributors — China Film Group Cooperation and Huaxia Film Distribution.

4 Comparing the development of the Internet to the evolution of an ecology by means of natural selection and self-renewal, this ecosystem metaphor replaces the trope prevailing in the 1990s of the Internet as (international) superhighways, which accentuates the efforts and supports of the state in launching and leading Internet development. The ecosystem metaphor advocates instead for the autonomy of an Internet free from government interventions.

5 For example, in his film Unknown Pleasure (2002), Jia Zhangke includes a playful scene where Xiaowu, played by Wang Hongwei, is buying a pirated DVD of Xiao Wu (1997), the directorial debut of Jia, from the peddler.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jianqing Chen

Jianqing Chen is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her fields of research and teaching cover Chinese cinema and digital media, global techno-capitalism, post-socialist culture and critique, and feminist media theory.

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.