HIGH PRICE TO SING

On December 30, Chinese pop singer Faye Wong held a concert in Shanghai. This, in itself, is not news, but the fact that the minimum price of a ticket was 1,800 RMB ($259 USD) was sufficient to outrage Wong's legion of fans. The tickets came in three price tiers, ranging from 1,800 RMB to 5,800 RMB and 7,800 RMB.TO make matters worse, tickets at that obscenely high price sold out within the space of just 32 seconds from the official website, with scalpers and secondary agents buying them up and reselling those basic 1,800 RMB tickets for between 3,000 and 5,000 RMB. In an already outraged atmosphere, an industry insider by the name of Yang Yue claimed that there had been more dirty, diabolical, no good deeds: the official website had released just 800 tickets at an 8,000-seat venue in a naked effort to inflate prices. - D.D.