Considering the dearth of live music happening in Shanghai proper this week, we're suggesting you head out of town to either of the two music festivals happening this weekend: Ocean MiDi and Zebra Festival! Ocean MiDi will likely be far and away the better choice, the only problem being it's in Rizhao, possibly one of the least convenient places to get to (no trains or planes go directly to Rizhao, and you'll probably have to combine with buses). The best solution we've found to this problem is renting a vehicle and road tripping, but we'll leave that up to you. Zebra fest is just a hop and skip away in the Shanghai suburb of Jinshan, more info on that here (with bus info). Now if only the weather holds, it looks like a weekend full of beach parties! We'll list the highlights for each day of each festival below. If you're not feeling the festivals, there are some other things happening on Shanghai stages as well, mostly on Saturday and Sunday this week. Read on, or head over to our calendar for more! more ›

Life's not easy if you're Edison Chen (陈冠希), the Hong Kong singer-actor that was embroiled in the Chinese world's biggest sex scandal ever. There are always new sex scandals to fend off, pesky reporters to deal with and people blaming you for other people's divorce. more ›

"I once had to hide in the trunk of a car like an illegal immigrant. I had no choice but to avoid the reporters... Once, my car was surrounded by 500 policemen and was told the police would arrest me. I also experienced spending 5-6 days in a police station without sleeping... I once hid in the trunk of a cab all the way to the outskirts of Shenzhen so I could leave Hong Kong, the next time I take this kind of car trip, I'll bring sandwiches and drinks. That was a long and nervous breakdown-inducing ride" more ›

Poor Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶). Seems like the Chinese diving queen just can’t catch a break. We thought she had put her controversies behind her but, alas, a few new videos have surfaced with her front and center. And by front and center we mean FRONT AND CENTER. These are not just any videos, these are videos only the likes of Superman and his x-ray vision should be able to record. more ›

Not content to stage his comeback in fashion and on the movie screens, accidental porn star Edison Chen will be aurally assaulting us as well. The star is planning on an album that will be mostly in Mandarin (perhaps to appeal to the mainland Chinese audience) with a sprinkling of Cantonese songs. He'll be writing the Cantonese songs himself. The Mandarin songs will also be his lyrics, but translated from English by Taiwanese rapper MC Hotdog. Why the authorship? Because "he needs to write it himself, or he may be misinterpreted." more ›

Shanghaiist's inhouse sex scandals specialist Kenneth Tan writes about the six sex scandals that have rocked China over the last few years and given our readers a super hardon. It should perhaps be of no surprise that some of these scandals count among this website's most trafficked stories. This post promises to end your year with a blast, so read on: more ›

We went to Asia Uncut yesterday. Yep, on the Asia-based late night talk show's season premier (its set has now been moved from Singapore to Shanghai), we were in the audience and we've decided to tell you the one thing you should know about this fun new thing to do on a Wednesday Thursday night: Asia Uncut's host, Jon Niermann, looks uncannily like Shanghaiist's founding editor. more ›

Not only is Edison Chen breaking the silence on his sex scandal, promoting his pre-sex scandal movies, and starring again in post-sex scandal films, the boy-you-can't-keep-down-no-matter-how-many-scandalous-pictures-get-released-onto-the-net is also adding to his fashion empire. Earlier this year, he returned to Hong Kong to find sponsors for his clothing empire, managing to land a "wealthy female tycoon" who'll be helping him open his 5th franchise store in Shanghai. No word on where the store will be, but according to reports, it'll open in December and it's gonna be big. more ›

Edison Chen is putting his infamous sex scandal behind him and starring in movies again, to the chagrin of all of us who willfully believed he would in fact quit showbiz. The 28-year-old star will feature in an English-language comedy "Almost Perfect" alongside Chinese-American actress Kelly Hu (of Sammo Hung's Martial Law fame). more ›

Edison Chen has REALLY broken his silence this time around to appear on CNN's Talk Asia to chat about the sex scandal that ruined his life (though, perhaps, not for as long as the more schadenfraude-prone of us would like) and the lives of countless female starlets in Hong Kong. more ›

The computer worker who allegedly distributed the 1300 sex photos of Hong Kong film star Edison Chen has now been declared guilty! Sze Ho-Chun is expected to be sentenced in two weeks at Hong Kong's Kowloon City Court. He was convicted on three charges of obtaining access to a computer in order to make dishonest gain. Sze gained access to Edison Chen's photo collection when the actor brought in his Macbook for repairs. The pictures, which surfaced on the internet in Feb 2008, caused Edison to quit showbiz (at least for a while) and many actresses to do teary shame-faced interviews. Source: BBC more ›

Hong Kong actor turned scandalous sexy picture taker Edison Chan has braved death threats to promote his new movie, The Sniper, in public - despite being a “little bit afraid.” Edison, who appeared in public in Singapore on Sunday gave AFP a bunch of quotable quotes: more ›

We'd heard rumors of Edison Chen receiving death threats over sexy picture-gate last year, but this is the first time we've actually seen real evidence of it. The Hong Kong star was threatened with a gold-colored bullet, sent to a Hong Kong television station on Thursday with a typed letter warning Edison not to appear in public after April 4. "We hope Edison Chen will take this warning seriously, otherwise his personal safety will be threatened,” the letter allegedly said. Not quite as dramatic as a decapitated horse head, but we do like the gilded touch. Source: The Standard more ›

Hong Kong singer Gillian Chung, one of many starlets embroiled in the Edison Chen photo scandal last year, broker her silence on Saturday. In an interview with TVB, she demanded an apology and explanation from Edison, and revealed that she had thought about killing herself when the pictures leaked. Gillian is the second star to be interviewed, after Cecilia Cheung appeared on television last week lambasting Edison for failing to protect or console the women whose lives he'd inadvertently ruined. Interest in the case was recently renewed when Edison appeared in a Canadian court to give testimony against the man who stole the photos. Source: Electric Paper more ›

Disgraced Hong Kong pop star Edison Chen, whose naked photos were leaked to the Internet last year, will be making his first appearance since February 2008 - in a Canadian courtroom. more ›

Of the 22.6% of the country that now has access to the Internet, 162 million blog, while 234 million log on to read up on the news. more ›

Edison Chen was narrowly beaten by Barack Obama for "Person of the Year 2008" in Radio Television Hong Kong's poll. The public was "cordially invited to vote for the most outstanding personality of the year at RTHK or by calling in during the program "Backchat". The results of the poll were announced on Radio 3, on Friday, January 2nd. The RTHK nominees were as follows: more ›

Warner Bros. has said in a statement last Friday that its new film The Dark Knight starring the late Heath Ledger of Brokeback Mountain fame will not be screened in mainland China because of "cultural sensitivities in some elements of the film". As usual, nobody can say for sure what these "cultural sensitivities" are so we can only play the guessing game again. According to the New York Times,

The studio may have been concerned that censors would be offended by scenes shot in Hong Kong, including those in which Batman nabs a gangster. Another potential point of conflict: the film includes a brief appearance by Edison Chen, above, the Hong Kong singer and record producer who appeared in sexually explicit photographs with several women that were posted on the Internet this year.

In the latest Google Zeitgeist rankings which aggregates billions of search queries and ranks top search queries around the world, Edison Chen and Sarah Palin took top honours in China and the world respectively. The Beijing 2008 Olympics would have been the fastest rising search term hands down but was edged out by Edison Chen in the China category, and Sarah Palin in the Global category. more ›

Unrequited love has led a young Chinese woman to create a website, and publish all the photos of her ex-boyfriend Li Pengfei (李鹏飞) in the most compromising positions (wanking in bed, performing cunnilingus on her, etc.) in a last ditch attempt to get back at him. The sexy pictures were published along with all the sordid details of how the little casanova was supposed to have tricked her out of her money and love in a website on April 17, and in just two months, the site has attracted over 2 million unique visitors. more ›

Sam Flemming, founder of the Internet word-of-mouth research firm CIC Data observes in his latest blog entry that while some of the brands that had used the stars involved in the Edison Chen sex photo scandal as spokespeople were scrambling for help (by calling up his company of course) when the scandal broke out, some netizens were “more interested in the brands in the background of the photos than the people themselves". more ›

Sorry to be giving Edison a bit more air time than he deserves, but we just COULD NOT pass this one up. Just when we were wondering when it would happen, some entrepreneurial chap in Hong Kong has already gone ahead to design some Edison Chen t-shirts, created a MySpace page for it and an online store! The t-shirts cost HK$170 a pop (not sure if they'll deliver to Shanghai) and come in 3 designs each for men and ladies, with captions that read "Edison shot me too!", "Be my friend and I'll share the other 1000 photos!" and "Edison made me naive and silly!" Ingenious, and the t-shirts aren't bad-looking at all! Now, why oh why, weren't we the first to think of this idea? more ›

China currently has no privacy laws, but that may change, if lawyer Yu Guofu from the Beijing-based Internet Society of China has his way. In an interview with the China Youth Daily 《中国青年报》, Yu made the following comments:

There is no privacy protection law in China so far, nor is there a single item in any laws and regulations that covers privacy protection... The only mention of privacy is in a judicial explanation by the Supreme Court of China that focused on the protection of the right of reputation... Moreover, there had been scarcely any research on the right of privacy for a long time in China...

"And let's not forget the bad influence those pictures have exerted on Chinese Internet users which include not only adults but children too," he said, saying that the picture would do "unredeemable damage" to children... more ›

Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) has been in the news quite a bit lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Last week, pictures of a woman with an uncanny resemblance to her surfaced during the Edison Chen scandal and this time, she refers to Hong Kong as a foreign country (国外), and talks of how she wants to gain glory for the people of Taiwan (“为台湾人争光"). Her Chinese fans are not finding it funny, and she is getting it big time on the Internet. God knows what will happen to her, but we do know the last time Zhang Huimei (张惠妹) sang the Taiwanese anthem, she was barred from performing in China.
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WARNING: If you are sick and tired of reading about Edison Chen's private parts ... stop reading now! more ›

BAIDU RAPPED FOR SPREADING THE PICTURES; CHINESE COPS ARREST 10 SUSPECTS IN SHENZHEN more ›

So much has happened since our last post on the Edison Chen photo scandal that it is about time we updated you! First, the Edison Chen saga has caught the attention of CNN. The Chinese-speaking world has never been as enraptured in a scandal as this, and its scale and magnitude is threatening to make Paris Hilton look very passé. Kristie Lu Stout reports:
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For Part 1 of this story, click HERE. more ›

RELEASE OF PICTURES OF HONG KONG STARS IN THE NUDE IN VARIOUS COMPROMISING SITUATIONS SETS TONGUES WAGGING ACROSS ASIA more ›