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'Dragon' queen spits fire in style

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-21 09:15

Actress Qin Hailu has been making a name for herself (and not a good one) by criticizing fellow thespian Fan Bingbing, who wore a "dragon gown" for the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival last week.

On her micro-blog (China's version of Twitter) Qin claimed Fan demonstrated her overweening ambition by wearing the impressive dress at the French film event. The implication was that Fan was positioning herself as China's leading lady by wearing the typically Chinese creation on international stage.

On Sunday, Fan told Sina.com she didn't care what people were saying about the dress - though it was featured on all the red carpet fashion blogs and was almost unanimously considered a big hit. She then mocked Qin by saying the actress wouldn't dare wear such a gown, inferring she doesn't have the figure or the charisma to carry it off.

"If this has anything to do with ambition, it is her ambition, not mine," Fan said. "I just wanted to show the world where I'm from by wearing the dragon dress."

Fan picked the robe herself and said that since most Westerners think Chinese women are delicate she wanted to set the record straight and wear something bold and powerful.

At the Of Gods and Men premiere, Fan turned up in a long black dress, while Dutch supermodel Doutzen Kroes complemented her in a white gown, which again drew a lot of positive attention.

Celebrity Sauce is calling this a 2-0 victory for Fan over Qin.

As for the week's TV news, 21-year-old former model Yan Fengjiao has quit the popular dating show, If You Are the One, after a set of her nude photos were leaked on the Internet. Various reports claim she was paid just 200 yuan ($29) for the snaps and the agency promised they would never be published - but that didn't stop the photographers from uploading them. Yan says she was forced to take the photos, though some of them show her contentedly eating KFC during the "ordeal."

This is not the first whiff of scandal that has emerged from the number one rated show, which introduces a single guy to 24 female contestants, each of whom have the opportunity to compete for a date with him. It turns out that 22-year-old Xie Jia, a performance show management major at the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy was an intern at the show's producer, Jiangsu Satellite channel. She admitted she was a lesbian, but later claimed she experienced a conversion and was now straight.

"Chubby celebrity mom" Li Xiang has put on hold her plans for a quick return to acting after giving birth to her daughter in October last year. She was asked to shoot an advert for a mother-baby product in Guangzhou, but the company halted filming, saying she was too fat and not pleasing enough to look at.

Oh dear! While Li is back on her diet and feeling blue, actress Zhao Wei has attracted some withering comments over her pajama-style, post-partum wardrobe and extra pounds, just one month after giving birth.

It's tough at the top.