In movies, TV and music, last year was characterized by only a few innovations and too many tragedies. There were some bright moments, for sure, but even these only seemed great against the gloomy background of sad news and pop-culture industries in general decline.
Below, Pop Stop revisits the good, the bad and the ugly stories that kept Chinese pop culture chugging along last year.
1) Taiwan Thunderbolt Fire (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
2) Hong Kong's movie industry kept its stride with the star-studded trilogy Infernal Affairs(
3) On April 1, one of Hong Kong's brightest stars, Leslie Cheung (
4) Another sad event came when Taiwan's own Evel Knievel and adored actor and singer Ke Shou-liang (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
5) Mayday (
6) Taiwan saw the underground release of its first hard-core porno, called Taiwan Plumber (
7) The black metal band Chthonic (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
8) Tsai Ming-liang's (蔡明亮) protegee, Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) came perilously close this fall to parodying his and his mentor's filmmaking style in an advertisement he made for Family Mart (全家便利商店) that featured the cast of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散) and The Missing (不見) moping about in the convenience store contemplating their beverage purchases in tiresome longshots.
9) If imitation is the best form of flattery, then Next Magazine (壹週刊) can take some pride in its invented term -- "doing the splits" -- (劈腿), used to describe someone who is two-timing their significant other. It become common usage in all the major Chinese-language papers after exposing Hsu Shao-yang (許紹洋) as the on-the-side lover of Lin Wei-jun (林韋君), who was the girlfriend of pop singer Lin You-wei (林佑威). Subsequently, affairs in all the major media have been referred to as a "splits event"
(
PHOTOS: TAIPEI TIMES
10) And finally, another of Hong Kong's pop legends, Anita Mui (
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
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