"Hero" by Zhang Yimou reaped 1.45 billion yuan (about 180 million US dollars) in box office revenue and 30 million yuan (3.75 million US dollars) in revenue in byproducts including DVDs, stamps and cartoons around the world.

A Wall Street Journal article said the film had ushered in a Chinese Blockbuster Age.

Chinese films are participating in the international competition by involving themselves in the international mainstream market, said professor Huang Shixian, with the Beijing Film Academy at a forum marking the centennial of Chinese film, which concluded in Beijing on Tuesday.

Since the mid-1980s, the Chinese movie industry has gone through a series of decentralizing and liberalizing reforms.

"During that time, market prices were consolidated, and the government moved decisively to eliminate restrictions on private ownership," said associate professor Hong Jun-Hao of the Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo.

"Meanwhile, Hollywood pictures were permitted to be released in China. The industrial structure and market practices created and practiced by Hollywood have become the new model for the Chinese movie industry," he said.

Despite having a market share of 0.9 percent of the global box office, box office revenues in China hit 1.5 billion yuan (about 183 million US dollars) in 2004, up 60 percent over the previous year, an indication of the rejuvenation of the country's film industry, experts say.

Out of the 1.5-billion-yuan box office revenue, 55 percent was generated by homemade films, with the top three also being homemade -- "Kung Fu Hustle" by Hong Kong comedy star Stephen Chow (20.3 million US dollars), "House of Flying Daggers" by Zhang Yimou (18.5 million US dollars) and "A World Without Thieves" by Feng Xiaogang (13.3 million US dollars).

Yet there is concern behind the prosperity, some experts attending the forum said.

Even though a new high of 212 films were made in China in 2004, most of them never received a theatrical release, said Stanley Rosen, from East Asian Studies and Department of Political Science University of Southern California.

Chinese films have taken off internationally, even conquering the notoriously parochial American market where filmgoers "historically have avoided movies with subtitles as if they were homework," Rosen quoted May 9, 2005, issue of Newsweek as saying.

"The most successful Chinese films have all been martial arts films, where language - and the disadvantages associated with subtitles - are less important than the action on the screen," he said.