haha, I used to live in Dongguan.. Well, actually, Changping Town, Dongguan. It was impossible to get software that wasn't pirated.
True. Poland market was so small (and so far away, relatively - that was before fast Internet connections) that no one gave a "flying fuck" what was happening here. I remember buying pirated CDs in broad daylight at the mall circa '95, no one cared. A few years later I wanted to buy Visual C++ 6.0 (standard edition) and it took me half a year to finally get it - nobody had it for sale at all. You theoretically could buy software abroad, but then it was so expensive no one really did this. The only software distribution platform was sneakernet.
Actually, I was on the phone with Microsoft once, applying for internship. I was asked what is my favourite dev software; I answered something along the way of "VS C++ 6.0, because the 200x editions kind of suck", just little more politely. I didn't get the internship eventually, but I want to believe this was for unrelated reasons.