During a Nov. 22, 2015 appearance on the South Korean entertainment show My Little Television, then-sixteen-year-old TWICE member Chou Tzuyu (pictured, far left) made a seemingly innocuous gesture: According to Taipei Times, she simply held the Taiwanese flag (also known as the Republic of China flag.) This reportedly caught the eye of 53-year-old singer Huang An (a.k.a Michael Huang,) a Taiwan-born, China-based pop star who was about to become "the most hated man in Taiwan," according to Quartz.

On both Nov. 23, 2015 and Jan. 8, 2016, Huang reportedly took to China's microblogging site Sina Weibo and fired off several posts, accusing Tzuyu of being a separatist who promoted Taiwanese independence from mainland China. The backlash was immediate. By January 10, the Global Spring Festival Gala show (which airs on Beijing TV) reportedly scrubbed any mention of TWICE from its website (via Australia Broadcasting Corporation.) Huawei Technologies allegedly stopped airing a smartphone ad featuring Tzuyu on January 11. On January 13, China's Anhui TV reportedly withdrew a TWICE appearance scheduled for their Chinese New Year special.

As The Straits Times reports, TWICE's agency JYP Entertainment claimed they felt "extremely regretful about this controversy," promising to hold off on any of Tzuyu's scheduled engagements in China until the issue was resolved. In a statement, JYP's founder and CEO Park Jin-young vowed "to make it up to [people] by contributing to Chinese-Korean relations as well as cultural exchange" (via allkpop.) 

As Australia Broadcasting Corporation reports, JYP shares "dropped dramatically." 

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