The sex photo scandal that has
rocked Hong Kong and publicly embarrassed celebrities,
including Edison Chen ( 陳冠希), Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐), Bobo Chan
(陳文媛) and Cecilia Cheung (張栢芝), implicated Edison's current
girlfriend Vincy Yeung (楊永晴) today. We list some newly
update photos and videos:
 |
|
A scandal over racy pictures in Hong Kong proves that obscenity laws are
ineffective
In June 2007, according to media reports, a Hong Kong actor and singer
named Edison Chen took his pink Apple Powerbook laptop into a Central
district computer shop called eLite Media to be repaired and
inadvertently set off a firestorm that has rippled across the city into
China and well beyond.
What happened next has demonstrated beyond any doubt the complete
inability of anything besides a society as closed as Burma to police the
Internet, and rendered Hong Kong’s colonial-era obscenity laws
irrelevant, as well as raising questions over everything from
intellectual property theft to police overprotection of media stars to
the morality of the territory’s Cantopop stars. Whatever else it has
done, it has preoccupied Hong Kong’s media to a remarkable degree and
presumably galvanized Internet users in one of the world’s most wired
cities into a full-on chase for celebrity smut.
The 28-year-old Chen is one of Hong Kong’s most popular entertainment
figures, having appeared in 25 motion pictures since 2000, including the
immensely popular Infernal Affairs series, and recorded seven albums. In
his naughty little pink laptop were an estimated 1,300 photos, many of
them allegedly depicting Chen in various stages of in flagrante delicto
with at least 11 female celebrities.
An employee of the shop spotted the photos, said to have been taken
between 2003 and 2005, and copied them. From there it was but a short
trip to the Internet, to the presumed embarrassment of Chen and
certainly the women, some of whom cultivate a public image of chaste
cuteness. In the process, a lesson has been delivered: be careful what
you film because it will appear on the Internet.
The pictures first started to appear on the Internet on January 26. The
story has since raced across all of Hong Kong’s newspapers and magazines
and onto the web, with the Wikipedia narrative of Chen and his friends
Cecilia Chung, Bobo Chan and others helpfully posting an extract from
Google Trends showing the popularity of Chinese-language searches
mounting into the tens of thousands for the various parties. Chen, a
Canadian-born Chinese who dropped out of Hong Kong’s International
School before starting his acting career, hurriedly decamped for Boston
while issuing public statements apologizing to his fans and pleading
with “everyone to stop forwarding the images on the Internet” so that
“the innocent can rebuild their lives.” He was reportedly dropped from
the cast of a new movie on Feb. 6 because of the scandal.
But it was the reaction of the Hong Kong police that was most startling.
In a city where casual obscenity, barely concealed prostitution and
vulgarity abound, the reaction seems more in line with busting a serial
killer or going after triad bosses. The force mobilized a team of at
least 19 officers, according to the Assistant Commissioner of Police,
and assigned them to crack down on the dissemination of the nude
pictures, going after local Internet service providers to eradicate all
traces of the photos under the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles
Ordinance, a British-era law that provides for fines of up to HK$1
million and imprisonment for three years for “Publishing or possessing
for the purpose of publishing an indecent article without complying with
the statutory requirements.” Too late. The story had already
metastasized to China, the United States and anywhere else with access
to the Internet as websites started publishing the pictures. Rangoon
might be safe, since the generals in Burma do not allow any form of free
speech. |
