From the Telegraph blog:
Westerners are incredibly oblivious of popular trends in China, sometimes. There’s a famous story about Faye Wong (aka Wang Fei), another Beijing-born actress-cum-pop star who made her name in Hong Kong, and the time she moved into one of the new, mainly expat, luxury housing compounds near the airport.
At the time she was seeing a new boyfriend (now her husband), and when the paparazzi discovered where she was living, they swarmed on the place. All the foreign company execs, returning from work in their jeeps and Audis that evening, were baffled to find the gates barricaded by photographers.
None had any idea that China’s Madonna was living in their midst, nor, to be honest, did it mean much to them when told what it was all about.
Many of us foreigners are surprised to find that China has paparazzi at all, though press intrusion into celebrities’ lives is one of the big talking points at the moment. [Full text]