Asians raise coin for quake victims
7½-hour concert held in Hong Kong
A 7½-hour Live Aid-style concert held in Hong Kong on Sunday raised some $3.97 million. Event was convened by multihyphenate Andy Lau Tak-wah and Cantopop singer-thesp Alan Tam Wing-lun. They were joined by mainland stars Zhou Xun and Hu Jun, Taiwan's multihyphenate Sylvia Chang Ai-chia and actor Richie Jen Hsien-chi.
A week earlier Singapore's Scorpio East Holdings and Novena Holdings & Unusual Prods. put together a three-hour fundraiser that aired on state-owned MediaCorp Channel 8.
With local Mandarin-language artistes including Gary Cao Ge and JJ Lin Junjie, the show raised $5.02 million. Donations continue to pour in, and Scorpio East said the figure had been revised to $7.34 million by Sunday, a record for a local TV charity show.
The Hong Kong marathon in West Kowloon's outdoor PopTV Arena kicked off at 2:28 p.m., precisely the moment the quake struck May 12, killing 69,000 people. Spectators were asked to pay $2.56 on entry, but most made extra contributions at bins around the arena or bought specially priced merchandise.
Backed by 20 film and TV guilds, the live TV event was carried from 7 p.m., uninterrupted by commercials, on all major free-to-air channels. Concert donations total was later revised to $4.5 million and, with phone-in contributions still coming in, the final figure is expected to be many times higher.
Even Taiwan's entertainment sector is getting in on the act. A special concert was put together May 17. Though the total raised by that concert is unknown, estimates hover at around $101 million with much coming from the business community. (China regards Taiwan as a rebel province, while Taiwan acts like a de facto independent state.)
The quake and its aftermath have substantially changed popular attitudes to China around the region and have largely silenced the criticism over Tibet, human rights and freedom of the press that had dogged the pre-Olympic build up.
Rather, Chinese authorities' willingness to let foreign media report from the disaster area has earned it praise.
China's open-minded approach has helped unify ethnic Chinese sympathies in a fashion that contrasts sharply with the blackout preferred by the junta in Myanmar over last month's cyclone, which the government said left 78,000 dead and 56,000 more missing.
