Nathanel Amar*

The Lives of Dakou in China: From Waste to Nostalgia

The Chinese cultural life in the 1990s was for many observers marked by a mundane yet peculiar set of objects: dakou (打 口 ) CDs and tapes. Literally meaning “ cut” but often translated as “ saw-gashed” or “ scrapped,” the term dakou designates the foreign CDs and tapes which were sold on the Chinese black market in the 1990s. These CDs and cassette tapes arrived in China as waste to be recycled; they

Études chinoises, vol. XXXVII-2 (2018)