UPDATE: This post was the winner of the 2007 China Blog Awards Best Advice Post. Hooray for me!

Well, the easiest way to find pirated movies and tv shows on the Chinese internet is to come to this site (more specifically here). But if you’re looking a particular movie or show that I haven’t listed yet, you might wanna give this a try:

5 Steps to Finding Stolen Media on the Chinese Internet

(Note: you will need to have chinese character display on your computer)

1. Go to Google China, i.e. Google.cn

2. Type the name of the movie or tv show you want to find. Today I’m searching for South Park. Be sure to click the 中文网页 radio button.

If you speak/write decent Chinese, maybe you could whip up the title off the top of your head. Or you could ask a Chinese friend.

3. Find the Chinese title. If you don’t read Chinese well enough to be able to identify the title, look for some characters in double brackets (like so: 《南方公园》), that’s most likely your title.

4. Copy and paste the name of the show (without brackets) into the search bar of any Chinese video site, and click enter. The big websites are: youku, tudou, 56.com, and 6rooms.
You’ll find a more complete list fo Chinese video sites on Danwei.com, if you need.

5. You’re done! Assuming that your desired media has been pirated, you should be seeing some search results right now.

Will this work for every movie or tv show?

Unfortunately not. But if you are looking for something pretty mainstream, your chances are pretty good.

China Stolen-Media-of-the-Day: What Else? South Park

The search results for youku weren’t too plentiful, but I just tried tudou, and came up with way more full South Park episodes. Enjoy Chris! There’s also an RSS feed, though I’m having trouble with it.

Popularity: 8% [?]