Edison Chen's celebrity sex-photo scandal tops news survey

Hongkongers are well known for being forgetful, but the escapades of Edison Chen Koon-hei are clearly still fresh in many people's minds.

The actor-cum-singer who fled Hong Kong showbiz in February after the outbreak of the celebrity sex-photo scandal has topped Yahoo's news survey of the year.

Apparently to most of the 10,000 netizens who voted, seeing Chen naked and performing sexual acts with a string of pop stars including Gillian Chung Yan-tung and Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi was a lot more shocking (and has greater news value, according to this survey) than the fatal Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympics, the toxic melamine found in mainland milk products and Barack Obama being elected as the first African-American president in the US.

The survey also revealed that Chen was the most searched personality of the year thanks to people's endless efforts to find nude photographs on the internet.

But despite such honours, Chen sincerely regretted what he did. According to his boss, tycoon Peter Lam Kin-ngok, head of the Media Asia entertainment empire, Chen, currently in the US, was facing the consequences like an adult.

'Even if you only wanted to have fun, you still have to deal with the consequences. If you rob a bank, you have to go to jail,' Lam said in a radio interview. 'Now he is taking up the responsibility like an adult, and this is the very basic thing an adult should do.'