Mark Godfrey posted on July 03, 2007 20:13
One of the joys of traveling in China is that you can pick up CDs and DVDs you won’t get in the capital. Like yesterday evening, on Kunming’s Wen Lin Jie shopping/café area I found a treasure trove of recent releases, including the Kaiser Chief’s latest for RMB10, about a euro. The packaging varies between provinces too. This place had some of the neatest packaging, CD cases in paper casing with nice rounded corners. There’s the mystery of the yellow sticker on CDs. Does that mean they’re the real deal, licensed imports? Technically yes.
So why the different packaging?
A pleasant high-altitude city in the country’s southwest, not far from the Burmese border, Kunming has a thriving backpacker culture and plenty of cafes for travelers who’ve just buses or flown up from southeast Asia. Fakes CDs abound in Vietnam but tend to be poorly packaged by comparison, using paper photo copies of the original sleeves.
There are certifiably real CDs in the shop. Not as nicely packaged as the other albums, there’s Guns N Roses’ Appetite For Destruction and Coldplay’s Rush Of Blood to the head. Many other, mostly pop and lite classics (Cliff Richard is in that section) come with a “Special For China” label applied.
The choice of real albums in Chinese book store chain, Xinhua, is always curious: a lot of Sting, some Tori Amos, Roxette, and always some U2 – curiously prevalent is the lackluster seller Pop.
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