A China-based Taiwanese singer who drew public ire after criticizing a Taiwanese K-pop singer for waving a Republic of China (ROC) flag said he would hold a news conference in Taiwan on Feb. 3 to tell his side of the story.
Huang An (黃安) accused 16-year-old Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜), the Taiwanese member of the South Korean girl band TWICE, of supporting Taiwanese independence after she waved an ROC flag on a South Korean TV show.
The tip-off led to widespread criticizm of Chou in China.
An endorsement deal her group had with Chinese smartphone maker Huawei was jeopardized by Chou’s so-called pro-Taiwanese independence attitude.
Chou apologized to her management company JYP Entertainment and her Chinese and Taiwanese fans in a video released on YouTube on Friday, saying: “There is only one China... I have always felt proud of being Chinese.”
Park Jin-young, head of JYP Entertainment, also apologized.
The incident caused outrage among Taiwanese, who saw it as China bullying a teenager who was waving her nation’s flag.
The incident might have boosted president-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) votes by 1 to 2 percentage points in Saturday’s election, said Michael Hsiao (蕭新煌), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology.
Huang wrote on Weibo on Sunday that he was not the culprit in the incident, saying that he was “lucky to become” a singer who could influence “Taiwan’s election.”
He said he would explain “the whole story” behind the incident and present the truth.
Huang said in a Weibo post on Monday last week that he was not associating waving the ROC flag with Taiwan independence, but the issue was what the person waving the flag stood for.
Pro-independence Taiwanese media were using the incident to manufacture provocative headlines to incite Chinese, Huang said, adding that Chou must be working with them unless she says otherwise.
There are many people who could trigger sensitive issues between China and Taiwan, since almost everyone has a Facebook account, former Mainland Affairs Council chairman and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Lawmaker Su Chi (蘇起) said on Sunday.
People should remain calm and set their sights on the common good when dealing with issues regarding cross-strait relations, Su said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching