Jacky Cheung gives up on opportunity to appear on CCTV’s Chinese New Year Gala

Every year, CCTV’s CNY Spring Festival Gala show is an event that many artists from across Asia hope to get the chance to attend, since ‘appearing’ on the show usually means an ‘increase’ in an artist’s worth. Well, for many artists this might be the case, but not for HK’s ‘God of Songs’ Jacky Cheung.

Earlier, CCTV had ‘jumped the gun’ and announced that Jacky was ‘confirmed’ to perform in the station’s upcoming Spring Festival Gala, however not long after the announcement came out, Jacky’s manager Florence Chan denied the ‘confirmation’ – she clarified that Jacky was indeed invited to attend the gala, however both sides were still in discussions and no agreement had been reached yet.

Yesterday, Florence Chan and the Spring Festival Gala’s organizers officially issued a joint statement expressing that Jacky regrettably won’t be performing at this year’s gala.

[TN: Instead of translating the paraphrased contents of the statement from news reports (which are often ‘spun’ a certain way), I decided to translate the official statement released by CCTV & Florence Chan.]

Below is the official statement in its entirety:

From the moment that this year’s Spring Festival gala committee was established, an invitation to perform at the 2013 gala event was extended to Jacky and throughout that time, the gala committee has actively been in communication with Jacky’s side on the matter. Throughout the [discussion] process, both the gala committee as well as Jacky have treated this opportunity to perform with utmost enthusiasm and sincerity: in its preparations for the event, the gala committee had reserved a spot in the rundown as well as a time slot for Jacky; meanwhile, Jacky himself also allotted time in his schedule for the event.

Jacky has always been a performing artist who possesses extremely high standards for himself. Due to the special importance placed on the Spring Festival event by both parties, active discussions continued to take place these past few months in the hopes of creating a different and worthwhile show to spend the Lunar holiday with Chinese audiences all around the world. This has also been the key focus of the discussions in the past few months.

However, with extreme regret, after months of strong mutual effort, both sides have not been able to reach an agreement on the contents and format of the Spring Festival performance. Therefore, after much careful thought and consideration, Jacky has regrettably decided to give up the chance to appear at this year’s Spring Festival Gala event. Towards the sincerity of the gala committee throughout the discussion process, Jacky is extremely grateful and will forever remember it in his heart! Jacky “sincerely wishes that one day he will be able to fully prepare himself to give a great performance at the gala.”

Towards this decision, the gala committee expresses extreme regret, however we completely understand the reason for the decision and respect it. We believe that all audiences and fans will understand as well.

Jacky Cheung’s manager Florence Chan AND
2013 CCTV Spring Festival Gala committee
(2013-1-6)