Taiwanese K-pop star Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜) left the recent flag controversy in Taiwan behind as her girl group TWICE on Monday won the Best Female Rookie award at the Philippine K-pop Awards.
Sharing a photograph of members receiving the award on Twitter, the group thanked their fans.
Also on Monday, TWICE’s debut music video, Like OOH-AHH, exceeded 3 million hits on YouTube.
The video, which was released in October last year, topped 1 million hits on YouTube on Nov. 14 and broke 2 million hits on Dec. 22.
On Thursday last week, Chou and her TWICE bandmates were also honored as the best new performer in the music disc division at the 30th Golden Disc Awards held in Seoul.
TWICE is manged by JYP Entertainment Co.
Before the ceremony, JYP Entertainment founder and CEO Park Jin-young said that he hoped TWICE would win the best new performer award. The group did not disappoint their boss.
Chou’s mother and father also attended the award ceremony in Seoul.
Speaking in Mandarin, Chou said: “I love you” to her parents on stage when the girl group received the award.
She then continued in Mandarin with a message to their fans: “We are grateful to all of you. Because of you, we are able to stand here and get such a big prize.”
“During this period, you guys kept encouraging us, pushing us to move on. Thank you very much,” she said, most likely referring to the political controversy in Taiwan.
The controversy was sparked by China-based Taiwanese singer Huang An (黃安), who accused Chou of supporting Taiwanese independence in a series of posts on his Sina Weibo microblog early this month, based on the teenager’s waving of the Republic of China (ROC) national flag on a South Korean TV show late last year.
To smooth over the situation, Chou apologized to her management company JYP Entertainment, as well as Chinese netizens, in a YouTube video on Jan. 15, saying “there is only one China... I have always felt proud of being Chinese.”
The apology infuriated many Taiwanese, who accused JYP of forcing Chou into making the apology.
Ahead of attending the music awards in Seoul, Chou, who seemed to have gradually emerged from the political controversy, appeared on the Korean Broadcasting System show Yu Huiyeol’s Sketchbook and the Munhwa Broadcasting Corp’s Idol Star Athletics Championships.
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
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
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