A video featuring a flash mob of more than 100 music lovers singing traditional Taiwanese folk songs at Taipei 101 has gone viral.
The 10-minute video, titled Flash Mob Chorus in Taipei 101, Taiwan has attracted nearly 1.1 million clicks on YouTube since it was posted on July 8, said Li Chien-fu (李建復), a folk song singer and one of three people behind the event.
“We just did it for fun. We just wanted to surprise people without any commercial or political motivation,” Li said at a press conference.
Seeing so many YouTube views in such a short time, Li said he was impressed by how a video could be so widely disseminated, so quickly.
Freda Ma (馬宜中), a former folk singer and director, also thanked people for supporting the clip and said that the event had no commercial tie-ins with Taipei 101, or any other organization, and was really rewarding.
“We had been practicing since late April. I’ve been so moved by the mob’s members and the reaction of the audience,” Ma said.
The reaction of onlookers was also interesting, said James Lee (李鎮樟), the project’s other initiator: One man was standing with his arms folded at first, but then started to sing aloud and have fun with the group.
Asked if another event was in the works, the initiators said they had no present plans, but added that even if they were planning one, details would not be revealed.
“If we told people, then it wouldn’t be a surprise,” Li said.
Christina Sung (宋文琪), the chairwoman of Taipei Financial Center Corp, Taipei 101’s management company said: “I’m glad that Taipei 101 set the scene for this project, and we would like to provide this platform for other good causes.”
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift