It is said there is a generation gap with anyone three years younger than you in China.

The claim is true if you look at the choice of entertainment out there if you listen to hard rock instead of chilled-out tunes, watch dazzling Star Wars instead of Harry Potter, you are already old in the eyes of teenagers and hipsters in their early 20s.

And the latest fashion:

Watching Harry Potter movies in English. If a Chinese person chooses the Chinese-speaking dubbed version instead of the English-speaking original with Chinese subtitles, he or she is scoffed at by the younger generation. The ongoing Shanghai Film Festival certainly follows this mode of thinking none of its more than 100 foreign movies have been dubbed.

Dubbing is expensive, arouses intellectual property issues and above all is unnecessary, as the festival is targeting the educated young, said sources with the organizers.

Here comes the generation gap:

For those Chinese above 30, movie dubbing is itself a great art and experts in the field are widely respected, probably more than the foreign actors and actresses actually in the movie.

More than 30,000 Shanghai residents reportedly lined the route of Qiu Yuefeng's funeral procession in 1980. Who's he you ask? Only one of the most famous local dubbing actors ever to put his voice to foreign films.

Qiu is remembered best for his interpretation of cinematic heroes like Mr Rochester in the British film Jane Eyre.

Dubbing actors were immensely popular among Chinese in the late 1970s and 1980s, partly because dubbed films were among the only ways for ordinary Chinese to learn about the outside world at a time when a foreigner in the street was still a rare species, according to Peng Zhichao, vice president of the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio.

"Ask a Chinese of the time what a Western man was like, he or she would probably cite Zorro, or Alan Delon," he said.

Dubbed films are an interesting hybrid of East and West: Of the two major components of a movie, namely video and audio, the audio part is "localized" in a dubbed film.

In the eyes of dubbed film fans, the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio is a Mecca of the industry.

China built two film dubbing studios in the 1950s the first in Changchun in Jilin Province in 1955 and the second in Shanghai in 1959 and both have remained State-owned, while the latter stands out for being more "international."

The studios also "dubbed" China's international relations: The first film dubbed in Shanghai was a biography of Russian botanist Michurin imported from the former Soviet Union.

China cut its film ties with the Soviet Union after the relations between the two countries soured over many issues. It began importing films from "countries of brotherhood," like Albania and Yugoslavia.

Japanese and Mexican movies were the first foreign films to make an impact in China after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), and Hollywood blockbusters later arrived including Arnold Schwarzeneger's True Lies and Keanu Reeves' Speed.

In the past five decades more than 1,000 movies from about 50 countries have been dubbed at the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio.

Meanwhile, Chinese who grew up watching the studio's dubbed films have reached their 30s, 40s or even 50s.

Boys and girls of a dating age the major customers of theatres have become used to home videos with original soundtracks and Chinese subtitles.

And they exhibited great enthusiasm for the first subtitled foreign film to be shown in China the Hollywood saga Pearl Harbour in 2001.

Since then more and more theatres in Beijing and Shanghai have been showing subtitled movies in their major cinemas and dubbed movies in the smaller ones.

For those familiar with foreign languages, seeing the original movie is a handy way to brush up on language skills whilst having a good time. But for those who are not familiar with foreign languages, reading subtitles during a foreign movie can grow tiresome.

"I know it can be tiring for my eyes to capture two parts of the screen at the same time, but it is so embarrassing to take a girl to a dubbed film," said 19-year-old Wang Chen, a freshman at Tongji University.

(China Daily June 17, 2005)