"The World Digital Library project offers a brand-new platform for showcasing the diversity of the world's civilizations, " said Dr Furui Zhan, Chief Librarian of the NLC.
The Chinese are more likely to be this second type of buyer, according to Lingjing Zhan of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Yanqun He of Fudan University.
Later in the series, audiences can catch rare screenings of Zhan Liang's five-hour version of "Petition" and the 556-minute "West of the Tracks" (shown in two programs), Wang Bing's immersive portrait of the collapse of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeast devastated by economic erosion.