Word: shantou
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...knee-deep in Nirvana. He is buried in Bjork, awash in Aerosmith and mired in Moby. Li (not his real name) supplies cut-rate music CDs to storefront retailers in his home city of Guangzhou in southern China and is on one of his periodic buying trips to Shantou, a port city in Guangdong province. Here, inside a cluster of brick warehouses at the end of a dirt lane, hundreds of thousands of discs by foreign artists, both major and minor, are piled in cardboard boxes and wicker baskets stacked several meters high. Li wades through the CD sea like...
...slumping music business is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, it would appear that some of the wounds are self-inflicted. That's because the discs clogging Shantou's warehouses aren't pirated. Some of the world's largest record companies, including BMG, EMI and Universal, produced them, and retailers such as French hypermarket chain Carre-four stocked them-only to dump them when they didn't sell. But instead of being melted down by recyclers, the unloved discs are diverted through a network of scrap dealers and middlemen like Li, ultimately finding their way into stores in China...
...dakou (saw gash) because some albums have a telltale notch in the jewel box and sometimes on the disc itself. Many music buffs prefer them to pirated copies, because the prices are comparable, quality is first rate and the selection of hard-to-find foreign bands is better: choice Shantou selections include artists such as Otis Redding, Iggy Pop, Run-D.M.C., Compay Segundo and Brigitte Fontaine. On some albums, a song track or two has been rendered unplayable when the disc was notched, which is supposed to make it unsellable. The increasing majority, however, are pristine, still in their...
...Peking has also consented to let a Dallas-based firm called Leisure & Recreation Concepts, Inc., build a $1 million amusement park near the coastal town of Shantou to be named Dragon Lake, complete with Ferris wheels, swan boats and an electronic arcade...
Shenzhen is the heart of a thriving new 127-sq.-mi. Special Economic Zone where Western capitalists can do business. In addition to Shenzhen, there are two other free-enterprise zones on the southeastern coast, Shantou and Huli. Of all the economic reforms started by China in the post-Mao period, none flirts more intimately with Western-style capitalism than the SEZs...