What we watched

Thirty years ago, the Academy Award winner for Best Picture was The Deer Hunter. Not only was it not shown on the Chinese mainland, but few Chinese even heard of it.

The next year, Kramer vs. Kramer won the Oscar and was mentioned in the Chinese press. Pundits discussed it as if they had seen the movie. They tried to analyze the sociological implications of the story - how marriage as an institution was breaking down in the "decadent and bourgeois society".

Such was the state of China's exposure, or lack of it, to entertainment from abroad 30 years ago. When the door finally opened, Western classic literature poured in. But when it came to movies and television, the culture watchdogs seemed to be overwhelmed by the possibilities, new and old.

Movies produced before the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976) came out in droves for re-release, and that included many imports. The most popular was not Hamlet by Lawrence Olivier, or Jane Eyre, a 1970 version starring George C. Scott, but Awaara, an Indian movie with a theme that struck a chord with Chinese audiences.

In the 1951 film, a judge loses his son, who grows up to be a thief. In the end, the father has to face the fact that the son of a judge may not be a judge, which shatters everything he believes in. In China, during the age of class struggle, one's fate was determined mostly by the social class of his or her family, which created many tragedies.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, foreign movies were devoured as if every release was a major event. People did not know when the films were originally released or how they had been received in their home countries. Occasionally, there was a "contemporary" import, such as the first installment of Rambo. But overall, what mattered was not the artistry, but the relevance to Chinese filmgoers.

The very first television imports were Man from Atlantis and Garrison's Gorrilas, both little-known drama series from the US. In the first one, people could not figure out how the underwater shots were done. In the second, the idea of bad guys having fun was so novel that censors pulled it off the screen lest youngsters imitate the anti-heroes.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the accessibility of foreign entertainment was haphazard. More foreign countries were represented. Japanese movies and television series became very popular - but there was no guarantee of quality.

Starting in 1995, China began to import foreign movies using a profit-sharing scheme and a quota system. As many as 10 so-called "big pictures" are screened every year. Most of these "big pictures" are new releases from Hollywood with eye-popping production values. Some are artistically outstanding as well, but the choice usually leans toward box-office potential.

In early 1998, Titanic was released in China, and the box-office record it set has yet to be topped. The quota system is still in operation, but disks of current releases, both movies and televisions, are readily obtainable on the street or online. Meanwhile, on Chinese television stations, foreign programming has disappeared entirely from primetime.