Wu Bai (伍佰) and China Blue, who made live, guitar-oriented rock 'n' roll popular in Taiwan, kick off a four-city tour starting at the end of this month and tickets are expected to sell out quickly. Labeled "the king of live music," Wu Bai is one of the biggest pop music stars in East and Southeast Asia, though he has also maintained a measure of local street credibility as the epitome of taike (台客) chic. Once a derogative appellation used to refer to someone with a low-class attitude or style, taike has now been subverted and has gained street credibility
With his distinctive helmet hair, powerful blues-oriented chords and lyrics in Hoklo and Mandarin, Wu Bai emerged in the mid-1990s as the figurehead of Taiwanese rock 'n' roll, packing stadiums with crowds of up to 100,000 and generating record sales of more than 600,000 copies for his most popular albums. Along with May Day (五月天) and Back Quarter (四分衛), Wu Bai and his band - bassist Ju Jian-hui (朱劍輝), drummer Dean "Dino" Zavolta and keyboard player Yu Dai-ho (余大豪) - are one of the few big-time local acts with garage-band roots.
At 39, Wu Bai, whose monikers include the "cult master" and the "king of Chinese rock," has released a dozen studio albums with China Blue. He's also acted in four movies and served as a spokesman for Taiwan Beer. "I pursue light and heat. I like this kind of beautiful lavish life. So I push myself, burn myself, and see how far I can go," he wrote in his biography/photo album retrospective Moonlight Symphony (月光交響曲).
With his Taiwanese-accented Mandarin and rock star looks, Wu Bai, whose real name is Wu Chun-lin (吳俊霖), projects the image of the archetypical taike. Since the first TK Rock concert (台客搖滾嘉年華) in 2005, he has enjoyed new popularity as Taiwanese who are proud of their heritage embrace elements of the country's working-class culture.
Wu Bai and China Blue have a uniquely Taiwanese take on rock 'n' roll, with influences like puppet theater (布袋戲) and old TV variety shows. Zavolta said they favor "more of an Asian pop rock 'n' roll style" that combines power chords with groovy bubble gum pop. "We try to stay on the cutting edge musically and try to keep it real, but still have a certain sound," he said. China Blue was formed in 1991 by Zavolta and Ju, who soon met a then-pudgy young guitarist named Wu Bai. They got their first big break in 1992, when they wrote two songs for a movie soundtrack. Their most popular album, 1996's The End of Love (愛情的盡頭), has sold more than 600,000 copies.
Fans can expect some new material mixed with old hits at the band's upcoming concerts, Zavolta said, but a new album is currently not in the works. "I don't know what we're coming up with next," he said. "I don't know what Wu Bai has up his sleeve."
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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