Millions of Chinese learned about the West using subtitle sites like Renren Yingshi. That’s changing with a recent shutdown.

    IT was a sad week for China’s foreign movie fans who are used to download the latest movies and U.S. sitcoms from the Internet.

    A website that has for years been a leading provider of crowd-sourced Chinese subtitles for foreign movies, television shows, and online learning has been suddenly shut down as part of what appears to be a government effort to “mute” rampant online piracy of overseas entertainment.

    The popular 15-year-old website, Shooter.cn, announced its closure Nov. 22, the same day that another leading Chinese source of translations and pirated video, YYeTs.com, announced that it had gone temporarily offline to “clean up” its content.

    English-language China Daily attributed the news to a campaign by China’s entertainment regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, to curb domestic theft of foreign copyrighted material. Shooter.cn’s subtitle library had been created by volunteers and offered for download free of charge, making it a beloved resource on the Chinese Web. Many took to social media to vent anger at Shooter’s demise and confusion over how the site apparently came to be in government crosshairs.

    Shen Sheng, founder of Shooter.cn, wrote in a short but poignant farewell message on the Shooter homepage that he was closing down the operation after 15 years because the site had reached “the end of the road.” He made no mention of the site’s closure being linked to any pressure from officials.

    Shen launched the site in 2000 and originally intended it as a book review site. Its name is an English transliteration of shutu, meaning “book road.” It’s not clear how many people were using the site before it shuttered, but in an interview with the online tech channel of Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television in 2010, Shensaid he had 600,000 registered users and many more users who hadn’t registered. In his farewell he wrote that he hoped “the value provided by Shooter website has been to allow more people to cross national barriers and to understand the other cultures of the world.”

    Though Shen’s words may have struck some as grandiose, the public passion for Shooter is evident in the many tributes and outpourings of thanks that have piled up on Shen’s Weibo account page since the Nov. 22 closure. A netizen in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei in Central China, posted beating heart and crying face emotions and wrote: “Thank you for all the years of hard work. So grateful.” The Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald, headlined its piece about Shooter: “Tears on the keyboard: Subtitle group forced to shut site?”

    Yang Guobin, an expert on China’s Internet and an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, told U.S.-based Foreign Policy that resources like Shooter “make it possible for every Chinese” to watch foreign-language content. Yang went further to say that many people praise China’s online subtitle translation community for “inaugurating the most important ‘mental emancipation’ movement” since the late 1970s, when a wave of translated foreign literature ignited China’s collective imagination and profoundly affected people’s ways of thinking.

    What makes the subtitle movement stand out further, Yang added, is that it has been a grass-roots cultural phenomenon, not elitist or intellectual. In a Nov. 24 column for online portal Sina.com, Beijing-based tech journalist Xin Haiguang wrote that most of the contributors to Shooter had been enthusiastic young Internet surfers who have helped make Chinese language culture more vibrant and “advanced communication and understanding between China and the West.” He also wondered aloud whether foreign scriptwriters would actually mind the existence of sites like Shooter if they knew about them.

    The government view seems to be that it is indeed illegal. China Daily quoted Wang Qian, a professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai who specializes in intellectual property law, saying that “spreading privately translated subtitles” is not legal because the rights are held by the content producers and authorized distributors. When pirated videos are involved, the infringement is twofold, he said.

    While public sympathy for Shooter seems relatively unclouded by piracy concerns, YYeTs.com, the other targeted site, has become something of a poster child for China’s piracy problem, at least in the eyes of American movie studios.

    Also known as Renren Yingshi, the site was established by a group of overseas Chinese who were studying in Canada in 2004. It has since become a leading site for pirated video downloads as well as subtitle downloads. In October, the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, listed YYeTs as among the worst sources of online DVD piracy in the world. MPAA said in its report that YYeTs.com was the most popular download site in China, with more than 1.8 million unique visitors in August alone. (SD-Agencies)