Pai Ping-ping

Biography

Pai Hsueh-hua (born 17 May 1955), born Pai Yueh-o, better known by her stage name Pai Bing-bing (also spelled Pai Ping-ping), is a Taiwanese singer, actress, media personality and social activist.

Early life

Born to an impoverished family in Keelung, Pai dropped out of formal education in her teenage years.

Career

In 1973, she won a prize in a singing contest held by Taiwan Television and following this success she pursued a career in the local entertainment business. Since mid-1980s, Pai gained popularity for her bantering style, becoming one of the best-known Taiwanese entertainers. Richard Lloyd-Parry of The Independent described Pai as the "Cilla Black of Taiwan".
Besides her entertainment career, Pai also had significant investments in local catering service industry.

Personal life and social activism

In 1975, she moved to Japan to study singing and acting. At this time she had a relationship with Japanese comics writer Ikki Kajiwara and they later married. Their daughter Pai Hsiao-yen was born in 1980 but their marriage was quickly dissolved the next year after Kajiwara engaged in an extramarital affair and committed domestic violence. Pai Bing-bing had to return to Taiwan and raised Hsiao-yen as a single mother. In 1997, Hsiao-yen, 16 year old at the time, was kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered. This event made the elder Pai into a social activist advocating the use of death penalty; Pai founded the Swallow Foundation and chaired it to date to advocate capital punishment as well as provide legal support to local crime victims. Lloyd-Parry described the attention around the murder of Pai's daughter as giving Pai "a greater, though more terrible, fame than she had as an entertainer." In 2010, in the wake of the global anti-capital punishment movement, Pai successfully held a protest against former Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng, resulting in Wang's resignation and the resumption of executions in Taiwan.
Pai has a four-storey property in Linkou District.