Hong Kong stars have cleaned up the major awards at the CCTV-MTV Music Honours in Beijing, but a raucous, sellout crowd at an adjacent venue seemed to disagree with the committee's selection.
Faye Wong took home the award for Pan-Asia Best Female Artist, while Jacky Cheung Hok-yau won best male artist for the region. Although Cheung is enormously popular on the mainland, the man of the moment was Taiwan's Jay Chou.
While Chou was being overlooked by the CCTV-MTV committee for the year's major award on Friday, he was in the Worker's Stadium, only a few hundred metres away from the awards ceremony, wooing a 40,000-strong crowd.
Armed with green glow-sticks and posters of their idol, the army of Chou fans had no doubt who is currently the most exciting star in Asia.
'Jay Chou was the best this year; he will always be the best,' drooled Carmel Ma, a 22-year-old office assistant from Tianjin. 'I really love Jacky Cheung too, but how can people say he's better than this?' she asked, looking around the packed stadium.
Back at the awards ceremony, Cheung gave a sparkling performance for the 6,000 guests of the two television channels. As the charismatic star belted out his hits, even some surly police officers who had spent most of the evening forcing people to stay in their seats were seen singing along.