Holding a pirated VCD copy of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2003) that he found on a Beijing street, U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans solemnly warned the Chinese government in his Beijing press conference: “We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin.”1 Evans was on the mission to coerce the Chinese government to further open its markets for American products and services; this economic mission was a crucial item in George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, and Evans chose to attract media’s attention and solicit the American people’s identification by picking up on a pirated Hollywood film as the ultimate symbol of China’s disrespect of fair trade in general and the country’s robbery of American wealth specifically. The VCD copy, according to Evans, was found all over Beijing, yet the film had begun its first run in movie theaters in the United States just two weeks before and was not available in U.S. stores in video or DVD format. Evans told members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing that “it didn’t take long. In the last twenty-four hours, I was able to purchase a CD on the streets of Beijing.”2 As Evans had arrived in Beijing only the afternoon before, his assertion simply implies that hitting the streets of the capital to locate a bootlegged version of a recent big-hit Hollywood film was the first, and probably the most important, task for this high-profile China visit. With a pirated film in hand, Evans could praise American creativity, criticize protectionism, defend globalization, celebrate market liberalization, and curse political authoritarianism all at the same time. The bootlegged Kill Bill VCD effectively condensed a basket of capitalist ideology into one sublime object.
