When Tourism Bureau Director-General Janice Lai (
"Allow me to keep it a secret for now," she told reporters at the time. "Let me just say that it is going to be a male entertainer and a female singer. I promise it will be a huge surprise!"
But what was meant to be a surprise turned into an unexpected cat-out-of-bag incident. Lai was upset yesterday to find out that local media had unveiled the "secret" before she did.
A report in the Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday said that Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), who won the Golden Melody Award for best female Mandarin pop singer last week, has been selected to be the bureau's new tourism spokesperson in Southeast Asia.
The report also mentioned that Tsai and film director Wu Nien-jen (
It also said that the bureau would pay Tsai NT$8 million (US$242,400) per year for the deal.
The bureau's contract with A-mei ended this year. During the past three years, the diva participated in tourism-related promotional events in Southeast Asia, from meeting with fans to leading them on an around-the-nation tour.
The momentum A-mei generated encouraged the Tourism Bureau to consider choosing another popular singer to be the new spokesperson this year.
Lai ordered her staff yesterday to investigate the leak and find out why the news was released to the media before the scheduled date, which was today.
The incident was reminiscent of the Golden Melody Awards' problems, as both events have had their lists of winners leaked to the media before the organizer could make an official announcement.
To increase tourism each year, the bureau has recruited popular idols as part of tourism promotion package. Last week, it announced that the boy-band F4 had become the bureau's emissaries in Japan and South Korea.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
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More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
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