Thousands of Chinese fans of Mandopop king Jay Chou (周杰倫) gathered on Sunday evening outside Shanghai Stadium before the final concert of the Taiwanese singer’s four-day run in the Chinese city.
Currently on the “Jay Chou Carnival World Tour 2023,” Chou has been performing at his Shanghai stop since Thursday.
Tickets to the four concerts, being held at the outdoor stadium with an 80,000 person capacity, were sold out in seconds when they became available online in the middle of last month.
Photo: CNA
Locals have described the concerts as catering to “80,000 inside [the stadium] and 100,000 outside” to express the sheer volume of “tailgaters” participating in the event around the stadium.
Those who had gathered outside the stadium were not tailgaters in the traditional sense, but were there simply to catch a glimpse of the concert’s flashing lights and hear snippets of Chou’s performance, which lasted about three hours every night.
Many of tailgaters were sporting Chou memorabilia, while others tried to gain access to commercial and residential buildings around the stadium to try and see some of the show.
The concert was one of the hottest topics on Chinese micro-blogging service Sina Weibo, with some residents around the concert venue jokingly offering their balconies as alternative nosebleed seats.
Chou’s Shanghai shows were such a big draw that local police were on high alert, setting up alternative pedestrian routes and barricades to direct traffic around the stadium.
To guarantee the rights of ticket holders, Chou’s Shanghai concert adopted a real-name system, which requires the person who purchased a set of tickets to be present when their group enters the stadium.
The system was used to try to prevent scalpers from grabbing a large number of tickets and reselling them at a profit.
On Chou’s stop in Tianjin, local media reported that tickets with a face value of 2,000 yuan (US$273.52) ended up being sold for 100,000 yuan by scalpers.
Chou is well known in countries with large Mandarin-speaking populations — including communities in the West where other Chinese languages such as Cantonese are spoken — as one of the most gifted Mandarin singer-songwriters of his generation.
Aside from creating famous songs such as Nocturne (夜曲) and Love Before BC (愛在西元前), Chou has also worked with renowned actors.
Hollywood actor Danny Trejo starred in Chou’s music video for Double Blade (雙刀), and the Taiwanese star wrote the theme song for martial arts superstar Jet Li’s (李連杰) kung fu masterpiece Fearless (霍元甲).
Many English-speaking audiences know Chou for costarring alongside Canadian comedian Seth Rogen in the 2011 The Green Hornet reboot as “Kato,” a character popularized by martial arts legend Bruce Lee (李小龍).
He also appeared in 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower (滿城盡帶黃金甲), starring Hong Kong’s Chow Yun Fat (周潤發).
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
A Philippine official has denied allegations of mistreatment of crew members during Philippine authorities’ boarding of a Taiwanese fishing vessel on Monday. Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) spokesman Nazario Briguera on Friday said that BFAR law enforcement officers “observed the proper boarding protocols” when they boarded the Taiwanese vessel Sheng Yu Feng (昇漁豐號) and towed it to Basco Port in the Philippines. Briguera’s comments came a day after the Taiwanese captain of the Sheng Yu Feng, Chen Tsung-tun (陳宗頓), held a news conference in Pingtung County and accused the Philippine authorities of mistreatment during the boarding of
88.2 PERCENT INCREASE: The variants driving the current outbreak are not causing more severe symptoms, but are ‘more contagious’ than previous variants, an expert said Number of COVID-19 cases in the nation is surging, with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describing the ongoing wave of infections as “rapid and intense,” and projecting that the outbreak would continue through the end of July. A total of 19,097 outpatient and emergency visits related to COVID-19 were reported from May 11 to Saturday last week, an 88.2 percent increase from the previous week’s 10,149 visits, CDC data showed. The nearly 90 percent surge in case numbers also marks the sixth consecutive weekly increase, although the total remains below the 23,778 recorded during the same period last year,
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the