The insatiable thirst for VCDs in China. Reminds me of drug smuggling in the U.S....................
Guangzhou breaks CD smuggling cases
GUANGZHOU -- The country's two largest cases of compact disc (CD) smuggling were
unearthed in this city, the capital of South China's Guangdong Province.
Local police arrested a group of 12 suspects and confiscated more than 900,000 video CDs
last week, said officials from the Public Security Bureau of Guangdong (PSBG) yesterday.
And last Friday, a second smuggling case, involving 910,000 CDs, was uncovered by
Shantou Customs in eastern Guangdong.
"These record cases mark another victory for the province in this year's campaign against CD
smuggling," said Deng Pufeng, director of the Fifth Department of PSBG.
Coveting the high profits to be found in smuggling video CDs, lawbreaking merchants at home
and abroad have ganged up to sneak CDs into Guangdong, a province bordering Hong Kong
and Macao.
Bought or made abroad, these video CDs are mostly karaoke videos or western and Hong
Kong movies.
Determined to crack down the rampant bootlegging, the provincial government kicked off its
anti-CD-smuggling campaign early this year by taking a series of strict measures.
So far, at least 3.6 million units of smuggled video CDs have been seized in the province,
according to statistics from Guangdong Customs.
In one of the Guangzhou cases, three of the suspects are from Taiwan. Officials believe they
started their illegal operation in 1996.
In just the past five months, this group is believed to have smuggled more than 1.5 million CDs
into Guangdong.
Date: 11/07/97
Author: Wang Rong
Copyrightc by China Daily |
