It's Saturday night at a popular theater in downtown Beijing, and Chinese youngsters are lining up to grab tickets for the U.S. movie "Rise of the Planet of Apes."

Liu Xing, a 26-year-old sales manager at a home appliance store in Beijing, said he has come to see the movie because of his growing interest in U.S.-made films and TV drama in recent years. He said the special techniques, good storytelling and dynamic pictures of U.S. action movies are highly attractive to him.

As China's opening-up and reform policies have expanded, so has access to foreign cultural products, including movies and sitcoms. The Chinese public's interest in these products has grown along with their ability to obtain them, especially in the era of the Internet.

Last year, the U.S. hit film "Avatar" grossed nearly 1.3 billion yuan (about 205 million U.S. dollars) in China, a historical high for a foreign movie. Total box office revenues that year stood at 10.1 billion yuan. When China first entered the WTO in 2001, box office revenues were no more than 2 billion yuan.

Over the past decade since China joined the WTO, China has become the the world' s largest exporter and second-largest trader. Its foreign trade shot up to 2.97 trillion U.S. dollars last year, almost six times the amount recorded in 2001. Boosted by trade, its gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of more than 10 percent during the period, reaching nearly 40 trillion yuan last year.

The expansion of China's economy has allowed more people to experience the luxuries of foreign brands. Ten years ago in the city of Kunming, the capital of south China's Yunnan province, luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton (LV) did not even exist.