Imagine an Ang Lee movie, Brokeback Dragon Hill, starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li as gay Japanese martial arts masters. If it were ever made, it probably wouldn't make it onto cinema screens in China. But, in a nation with such a well-developed pirating industry, it could still be a household hit. Such is the power of the DVD and the internet.
Most mainland cinemas are allowed to show only one new foreign movie per month, which limits consumers' choices. Then, even if a foreign film is an Oscar-winning hit - such as Lee's Brokeback Mountain - international honours mean nothing if it's deemed unsuitable for Chinese cinema audiences.
Memoirs of a Geisha is another recent high-profile film that didn't make it onto China's silver screens, even though it starred the nation's two most famous actresses. The reasoning, though, seems clear: Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li demeaned the nation by playing Japanese 'wives of nightfall' - as Zhang's character describes geisha. In light of China's wartime suffering at the hands of the Japanese, it was an insult to national pride.
'Zhang Ziyi could play a Korean prostitute and it would be okay, but not a Japanese hooker,' said a veteran Chinese journalist I talked to about the film. 'Memoirs of a Geisha wasn't banned in China,' he said. 'It just didn't get approval for a cinema release. I saw it on DVD but didn't think much of it.'
A number of issues arise here. First, whether a film is banned, criticised or just not 'approved', it can still have a widespread audience via the DVD market and internet downloads. Second, box office limitations and wide-scale DVD pirating make it hard for foreign movies to make money in China. But consumers aren't complaining: they can buy even the most obscure DVD for 10 yuan in a store that allows them to return bad-quality discs.
The third issue is market potential: with an urban population of 400 million in a nation of 1.3 billion, and a growing economy, the Chinese market offers huge commercial opportunities - if it ever cracks down on pirated DVDs and allows more foreign films to be shown.