If you had to select one single cause that brings Hong Kong people together, what would it be? Hope of full democracy by 2012? A plunging stock market? South China Morning Post closing its Chinese publishing house? Well, you'll be damned. The number one blog/news story emerging out of Hong Kong as of late yesterday is probably the city's worst sex scandal to date. Since Sunday, photos of some of Hong Kong's most prominent young artistes, including now Edison Chen, Gillian Chung (of Twins fame), Bobo Chan and Cecilia Cheung have surfaced unmercifully on internet forums. Emperor Entertainment Group (EEG), one of Hong Kong's leading record labels and some of the artistes' agent, seek to file lawsuits against those who doctored the pictures, although whether the pictures were in fact doctored is still under dispute. For more, we turn to Day 3 reporting by EastSouthWestNorth and CoolSmurf.
"27th January (Day 1)
8:30pm - Photos of Edison and Gillian bedroom antics posted
9:00pm - Posted message saying Bobo Chan and Cecilla Cheung sex photos coming soon
28th January (Day 2)
3:00pm - Bobo Chan & Edison oral sex photo published, poster says something big will happen tomorrow afternoon at 4pm
29th January (Day 3)
12:30am - Photo of Cecilia touching herself published
3:30pm - 5 screencaps of Edison and Gillian in a sexual act published and is believed to be identical to the initially published photo
6:00pm - Photo of Cecilia exposing her butt published. Many posts on various forum promised that a sex clip believed to be Edison and Gillian will be next."
The photographs was reportedly first seen at an overseas internet forum (bcoms.net), but became widely circulated when it reached Hong Kong Golden Forum and Hong Kong Discussion Forum, two of the largest internet forums in Hong Kong. Within a period of five hours, more than 2,000 people have posted comments to the photos. In fact, so many netizens from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China who were eagerly waiting all day and night on these forums led to significant slowdown and bandwidth overload (certain forums were unreachable on Day 2). A post at China's Tianya forum drew as many as 2,500,000 page views and more than 13,000 comments covering 72 pages before being taken down by moderators.
Hong Kong's leading Chinese newspapers, including Oriental Daily, The Sun, Apple Daily, AM 730, Headline Daily, Ming Pao and Sing Pao, were quick to capture the story and printed cropped versions of the pictures, descriptions, in-depth comparisons. In fact, this story was front page for two consecutive days, making the event more important than New Year festivities.
A lot of thought and reasoning has been put to determine whether the photos in question are real or a hoax. Initially, many news outlets claimed the hard position that these photos were all doctored, but have soften their positions as evidence points to the contary. Netizens have compared the background of one of the first photos with Gillian and Edison to the background of a YouTube video in which Edison was interviewed at his home sitting his bed. Uncanny similarities? Yes. Also, experts, such as experienced photographers and Photoshop gurus, pointed out that the sex photos were hard to fake, largely due to the grainy noise background and everyone's inability to find the "original image," from which the head is (if the photos are really doctored) purportedly cut and pasted onto the fake body photo.
In a counter argument, Gillian's fans noted that one of the photos contain the same head shot as one of her old movies. Some people even claim that the photos were originally high-resolution hoaxs that were then glazed over by white noise as to make them authentic. But that doesn't seem likely. At best, some of the photos were doctored, especially the later higher resolution pictures of Cecilia that emerged, but the majority of them are real. Their origin? Possibly from Edison's phone, which was lost and may have been picked up by the person releasing the images. It is said that the original poster may have initially visited major Hong Kong newspapers in hopes of selling the images but was rejected.
Anyhow, EEG has issued a statement that read as follows: "We are chasing the source of the circulation, the circulator and the downloader. Any distribution, downloading, transference or publication of the image is illegal. We have already passed the case to lawyers to follow up. If the distributor or upload person [of the image] is confirmed, we will seek court action." The chase got so intense that Hong Kong Police had to enlist the help of Interpol to track down the identity of the initial poster who used a computer terminal in an unspecified Southeast Asian country. Sounds like bit of a drama, as did last time when semi-nude pictures of Gillian Chung surfaced from a Malaysian magazine in 2006 (an EEG employee later admitted that that was in fact a marketing ploy).
What do you make of all this? Definitely the biggest story of 2008 in Hong Kong. A final question you may ask: where are the pictures that you are talking about? Hint: try foreign blogs/forums (certain Xanga sites), as all Hong Kong ones are "harmonized."
