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

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.