Houston Community News >> Chinese Backstreet Boys
10/13/2006-- One of China's biggest celebrity exports is two Chinese art students who lip-sync to Backstreet Boys songs.
Thanks to the Internet, Huang Yixin and Wei Wei's homemade music videos have become immensely popular worldwide.
On the Web, they're known as "two Chinese boys," as their English fan site is called. But as Wei and Huang told The Associated Press, they were two bored Chinese boys who turned to lip-syncing videos for entertainment -- and spawned a pop-culture phenomenon.
It all started with the relocation of their school, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, from downtown to the outskirts of the Chinese city of Guangzhou, once known as Canton.
"There wasn't much in the way of facilities or entertainment. Our only connection to the outside world was the Internet and computers. When we have free time outside of classes, we'd play around with this kind of stuff," Wei said in a phone interview.
He said the pair, high school friends who ended up as roommates at the academy, saw a video of foreigners lip-syncing to a rock song on the Internet and decided to follow suit. They mouthed along to "As Long as You Love Me" in early March last year and uploaded it onto an internal Web site at their school.
Soon fans put the video onto the Internet, and their lives haven't been the same.
The pair, who graduated from college recently, have signed with the Chinese record company Taihe Rye.
(Contributed by MercuryNews.com)