The unrelenting character assassination of Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) by the Hong Kong media seems to have rubbed off on the kids who should be her fans. On Monday night she and Andy Lau (劉德華) held a press conference to publicize the new movie Big Guy (
Not long ago, Cecilia was the media's sweetheart. So what brought about this spectacular fall from grace? Pop Stop recently reported that Hong Kong paparazzi had snapped shots of her with a voodoo doll, which was presumed to represent her ex Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒). She's also been spotted dressed in bombastic clothes and made a big splash at a concert in China two weeks ago where she provocatively spread her legs in a choreographed routine not unlike Madonna's fabled Like a Virgin performance at the MTV Music Awards.
Given the chauvinistic standards of the gossip rags, her supposedly unseemly behavior has been attributed to her breakup. But the only truly odd behavior on her part, as far as Pop Stop can discern, was her retraction this week of an earlier announcement that she had a foreigner boyfriend, which was reported in Hong Kong's edition of the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) and in The Great Daily News (大成報) as yet another case of her having gone off the rails. It was all a joke, she said. Ha ha.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Gigi Leung (梁詠琪) was reported in the current edition of Next Magazine (壹週刊) as having turned down a part in the next Johnny To (杜琪峰) film after the director had openly criticized her lackluster performance in Turn Left, Turn Right (向左走向右走), which he directed.
No matter how poorly He Li-hsiu (河莉秀) acts, the sultry South Korean starlet, whose main gimmick is that she started her life as a boy [and had a sex change], always overshadows the other actresses. Her limelight snatching rubbed actress Wu Pei-tsi (吳佩慈) up so badly this week that at a press conference about the show they both star in called Honey (親愛的), Wu lashed out complaining that she was, in fact, the star. "Why are her photos always so pretty [on the promotional posters] and the other actors' just ones taken at rehearsal?" Wu said. She even snapped at He's tendency to wear revealing blouses and dresses. "Ai ya, her chest can be made as big as she wants it to be."
This weekend's major pop event will be Lee Hom Wang's (
PHOTO: MAX WOODWORTH, TAIPEI TIMES
Tonight in front of the Presidential Office Shunza (順子) is billed to take the stage as part of the Double Ten Day celebrations. The selection of singers for any event related to celebrating Taiwan has been sensitive ever since A-mei (阿妹) was barred for a year from performances and product endorsements in China after she sang the national anthem at President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) inauguration in 2000. But Shunza was quoted in local papers as saying she's "not scared at all" of any repercussions from across the strait. Easy for her to say, she has an American passport.
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
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
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
Jade Mountain (玉山) — Taiwan’s highest peak — is the ultimate goal for those attempting a through-hike of the Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道), and that’s precisely where we’re headed in this final installment of a quartet of articles covering the Greenway. Picking up the trail at the Tsou tribal villages of Dabang and Tefuye, it’s worth stocking up on provisions before setting off, since — aside from the scant offerings available on the mountain’s Dongpu Lodge (東埔山莊) and Paiyun Lodge’s (排雲山莊) meal service — there’s nowhere to get food from here on out. TEFUYE HISTORIC TRAIL The journey recommences with
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