Last week, the results of the 2009 Miss Asia Pageant were announced and the dust is yet to settle over the upset that saw favorite Erica Liu (劉伊心) relegated to fourth place. To add insult to injury, she was pipped to the post for a top-three place by rival Hsu Chia-huei ( 許嘉惠), who took third. Hsu, 21 years old and still a student, had been defeated by Liu in the Taiwan district qualifiers.
Liu, a professional model and winner of the 2007 International Bikini Queen competition, wept when the results were read out. Apple Daily quoted her as saying, “I have always won first or second in the past.”
First place was taken by Chinese contestant Xu Ying (許瑩), with second place taken by 26-year-old Hong Kong/Macau contestant Wang Xiyao (王希瑤). Allegations of breast enhancement surgery have been made against Wang, in response to which Liu said her own 34Ds were the real deal.
Both the first and third place winners were less well endowed than Liu, a fact that seems to have utterly bowled over Taiwanese media. Could it be that cup size isn’t the ultimate arbiter of beauty?
Last week, Taipei councilman Hou Kuan-chun (侯冠群) made accusations of sexual harassment against a police officer who had conducted a Breathalyzer test on a then unnamed celebrity. On Tuesday, Kelly Kuo (郭靜純) identified herself as the person whom the policeman had asked, presumably salaciously, to “get down and give it a blow” (妳先下來吹一下).
Kuo said that as a married woman she had been unwilling to be identified, but had subsequently felt that she was not the only woman to face this kind of harassment, and by getting the incident noticed in the media, she could help prevent this happening to others.
The shock waves from Mark Chao’s (趙又廷) unexpected victory at the Golden Bell Awards (金鐘獎) continue to reverberate this week with the accusation that his tearful acceptance of the award, which had been expected to go to Vic Chou (周渝民), the more experienced member of the Black & White (痞子英雄) cop shop duo, had all been an act. If so, it is tempting to suggest that it was a much better one than anything seen on set.
Rumors that Chao’s friendship with Chou had suffered following the awards ceremony and that the planned feature film version of Black & White is in jeopardy starring the two original leads only fed speculation. Midweek reports in the United Daily News and other media suggested that the two were in contact via MSN, but their relationship is under close scrutiny for any signs of further tension.
Moving from work to play, it seems that while starlet Pei Lin (裴琳), now out of rehab, might have kicked the magic dragon, Next Magazine confirms with a slew of grainy late-night photos that she’s still a girl who wants to have fun. These days, though, the high jinks are fueled by alcohol. The magazine says that she has already lost two jobs, one as a co-host for Go Go Japan and the other on the TTV drama Niang Jia (娘家), because of alcohol-related issues. Scenes of simulated sex on the roadside and a vicious physical attack against a suspected romantic rival for the attentions of Go Go Japan host Toku (李育德) have done nothing for her reputation, but certainly have ensured plenty of column inches.
Another celebrity who can’t seem to keep on the straight and narrow is Suzanne Hsiao (蕭淑慎), who is back in the news for all the wrong reasons. While many of the stars caught up in the spate of celebrity drug busts in late 2007 have bounced back to achieve even greater success in the entertainment industry, Hsiao has kept a low profile, but is now suspected of drug use once again. Next reports that the former beauty, now 11kg heavier than in her glory days, tested positive for Class 2 drugs after visiting a clinic for tests following an abortion last month. She claims the positive drug tests are the result of using anti-depressants, but if this claim proves as hollow as previous excuses, she’ll be looking at some real jail time for what would be her third drug offense.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
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