Poor old KMT presidential hopeful Lien Chan (
The DPP also proved itself prone to being lampooned over the past week with its latest series of newspaper and billboard advertisements that are trying to boost the vote rate for the referendum set to take place at the same time as the presidential election. Pop Stop was waiting for the MRT and noticed people giggling and pointing at a DPP billboard, which features an attractive model of about 30 dressed in a school uniform that makes her look suspiciously like someone out of a Japanese fetish magazine with a slogan that reads: "My first time. The whole world is watching." The same ad ran as a full front-page on Sunday's The Great Daily News
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The DPP has also jumped on the Infernal Affairs
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
And in non-political news, two weeks ago, Pop Stop reported that Taiwan's boy band 5566 had ripped off the cover of Japanese band SMAP album for their own album. This week, Next Magazine (壹週刊) has uncovered yet another case of blatant cover-art copying, this time by the boy band R&B. The picture in question shows the five boys showering together at a sauna and is almost a photocopy of a photo used by Japanese boy band V6 for their own photo collection. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, though. When planning Mando-pop albums, it's standard practice for producers to hand songwriters Western pop music CDs and essentially tell them to copy certain songs for local singers. It seems logical that this practice would spill over into the cover art.
Chinese business news Web site icxo.com and the World Human Resources Laboratory released a list last week of the top stars in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to personal worth. Among the men, Jackie Chan
On the women's side, Zhang Ziyi
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
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