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."
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
In an interview posted online by United Daily News (UDN) on May 26, current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) replacing him as party chair. Though not yet officially running, by the customs of Taiwan politics, Lu has been signalling she is both running for party chair and to be the party’s 2028 presidential candidate. She told an international media outlet that she was considering a run. She also gave a speech in Keelung on national priorities and foreign affairs. For details, see the May 23 edition of this column,
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing