This article examines one of the most crucial yet often-overlooked links in global film processes: piracy. It does so within the context of a changing digital media environment that calls for a reassessment of key dimensions: networks, globalization, technology, space and the state. More specifically, it focuses on the operation of film piracy networks in Greater China that includes the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. By zooming in on `Greater China', this article presents empirical accounts of specific links and connections (...) on and between the intersecting distribution and piracy networks. In sum, distribution and piracy in China highlight some of the most interesting and intricate insights into issues of power, control, technology, network, speed, global-regional-national dynamics, subjectivities and reflexivity. Given the complexity of the issues, this study argues for a spatial, network and process-oriented theoretical framework. (shrink)

Politics in the 1990s was characterized by the state versus globalization dichotomy, but there are also other possible futures. Concrete initiatives such as the Tobin tax seem to promise a new phase in the politics of globalization. The idea of a low rate tax on financial transactions questions both the laissez-faire capitalism justified by mainstream economics and the laissez-faire globalization mystified and reified by an increasing number of philosophers and sociologists. The global financial markets have become an established, powerful structure. (...) The Tobin tax may well be the political response that will make that structure vulnerable to collective conflict and deliberate revision. It is also innovative because it simultaneously defends the autonomy of states and opens up new, path-breaking global ethico-political problems of governance. Suddenly, politics of globalization seems to be also about authority, democracy, social responsibility and justice. (shrink)