The Little Tigers: Bought Melodies, Filled with Our Own Youth

30-Second Overview: The Little Tigers were almost a machine assembled from imported parts: the talent show model copied Japan's Shonentai, the hit song "Apple Green Paradise" was the original Shonentai tune with Chinese lyrics filled in, and even the stage performance benchmarked American styles. But in 1989, their compilation album sold 250,000 copies in less than a month¹. Taiwan forcibly metabolized this imported idol group into the most solid youth memory of an entire generation. Thirty years later, Wu Qi-long, Su You-peng, and Chen Zhi-peng’s career centers are all on the other side of the Strait. Thus, "whether The Little Tigers are still Taiwan’s" has become a question no one can answer decisively.

In front of the camera for the Chinese variety show Infinite Overpass Season 3, Chen Zhi-peng was asked why he had never mentioned The Little Tigers in recent years. He did not dodge the question, but answered quietly: "Actually, it’s not that I don’t want to mention it; I truly feel that I am now doing my own things, and I don’t want others to pull me back in."²

The weight of this sentence can only be heard when rewinding thirty-plus years. Because in 1989 Taiwan, thousands of young girls were desperately trying to "pull" these three boys into their own lives: buying cassettes, cutting out posters, guarding the radio, and chasing the tour from one city to another. One of the people who should have owned this symbol the most later chose to let it go; and the island that wanted to grasp it the most back then is still asking today whether it counts as its own.

This article aims to deconstruct this paradox: how could an idol group whose parts were almost entirely imported become the collective memory that Taiwanese people are most reluctant to let go of?

A Show Looking for Three Boys to Accompany the Little Cats

The starting point of the story is not romantic; it is even somewhat functional. On July 9, 1988, CTV launched a variety show called Youth Grand Showdown, produced by Chang Hsiao-yen and hosted by Cao Lan and Tang Chih-wei³. The show first featured a girl group called "Little Cats"; initially large in number, it was later reduced to three girls, one of whom was Hsu Shu-chuan, who later became famous as Vivian Hsu³.

With the "Little Cats," they wanted to find "Little Tigers" to pair with them. The show’s organizers selected three boys through a talent show process to form a male group to sing and dance with the Little Cats. These three faces were a combination pieced together by a TV program for visual needs; they were never stars falling from the sky. The team chant was loud: "Little Tigers, Little Tigers, full of spirit"³, but behind these four words lay the market intuition calculated by the management company and the TV station together.

The division of labor behind the scenes was equally industrial. In 1987, Chang Hsiao-yen and Miao Xiu-li formed the management company "Kaili Creative Group," responsible for artist management; record distribution was handed to Flying Disc Records, which was then at the height of its momentum⁴. One managed packaging, the other managed records; this division of labor itself explained that The Little Tigers were a designed, produced product from day one, not a group of friends getting together to play music.

💡 Did You Know: The male group Hong Hai'er, often mistakenly thought to be a "senior" to The Little Tigers, actually came a step later: Hong Hai'er was launched by the same Kaili in 1989, effectively making them "The Little Tigers' Second Team." Putting the timeline in order, the position of "Taiwan's first (successful) male idol group" truly fell to The Little Tigers. Before them, the Urban Girls in 1985 were Taiwan's first idol girl group, but in the line of male groups, The Little Tigers started it.

Bought Melodies, Filled with Our Own Lyrics

If you want to find the most naked evidence of The Little Tigers' "imported" nature, listen to their most popular song.

_Happy New Year Compilation Album (1989-01-10) cover. Taiwan's girls' most familiar "Apple Green Paradise" is included in this album, and its melody comes from Japan's Shonentai. Image is Universal Music 2025 Reissue. © Universal Music (originally released by Flying Disc Records), fair use editorial commentary.*

The synthesizer intro of "Apple Green Paradise" can be hummed by almost every Taiwanese person who experienced that era. But it was actually the melody from the eleventh single "What's Your Name?" by the Japanese Johnny & Associates idol group Shonentai in 1988⁵. The original song was composed by Koji Maikumo and Jimmy Johnson; after Flying Disc bought the copyright, they asked Ding Xiao-wen to rewrite the Chinese lyrics⁵. In other words, the youth theme song that Taiwanese girls sang by their bedsides had a Japanese skeleton; only that layer of Chinese skin was grown out by Taiwan itself.

And this was not an isolated case. "Red Dragonfly" was covered from Chang Yuan-gang's "Tonbo," with lyrics by Li Zi-heng; "Star's Date" came from Wink's "Lonely Tropical Fish"; "Colorful Sky Colorful Dream" was adapted from British singer Nick Heyward's "You Are My World"⁶. In one album, the hit songs that carried the popularity were mostly tunes written by others.

This approach was completely legal: Flying Disc indeed bought the copyright from the Japanese side; it was formal commercial licensing, followed by rewriting the Chinese lyrics⁶. But legality and originality are two different things. The fact that a melody remembered by listeners did not belong to this island made the common saying "The Little Tigers are Taiwan's own idols" stand on shaky ground.

📝 Curator's Note
The common nostalgic narrative says that The Little Tigers are a "Taiwanese own" youth symbol. But if you flip open the album credits to look at the composer column, this statement loosens: the talent show model benchmarked Shonentai, the hit songs were Japanese melodies, stage moves referenced American performances, and parts were almost entirely imported. What truly belonged to Taiwan was the act of "metabolism" itself: an island taking in external materials, filling them with its own lyrics, its own memories, its own tears, and finally growing something that even the place of origin could not recognize. This ability to "make the external one's own" is actually the very microcosm of Taiwan's pop culture, and even of Taiwan as an island, repeating itself again and again.

What was imported was not just the hit songs. Even the entire idol model was borrowed: the three-person lineup, uniform styling, and synchronized dance steps were almost a corresponding copy of Japan's Shonentai (Kazuki Nishizawa, Katsuhide Uekusa, Noriyuki Higashiyama). Taiwan's Taiwan Panorama English edition later looked back and wrote a rather unkind comment: The Little Tigers were "a copy of Japan's Shonentai in virtually every respect"⁷.

However, stopping at "imitation" would be too simple. There are no records of any official authorization or public response from Johnny & Associates regarding The Little Tigers⁶. That is to say, The Little Tigers were stuck in an ambiguous middle ground: they bought Japan's "songs," but did not buy Japan's "idol model"; the latter was moved over entirely and assembled by themselves. Melodies that could be bought were paid for; models that could not be bought were imitated. This was a pragmatic, almost naked learning method.

Of course, not every song was borrowed. Original songs like "Carefree Journey" (lyrics by Chen Le-rong, music by Chen Zhi-yuan), "Butterfly Flies Away" (lyrics and music by Li Zi-heng), and Happy New Year⁶ proved that Flying Disc's lyricist/composer team had its own strength. But when the greatest common denominator of public memory is a cover of "Apple Green Paradise," the word "imported" becomes an entry point for understanding The Little Tigers that cannot be bypassed.

霹雳 (Thunder), 小帥 (Handsome), 乖乖 (Obedient): The Three Tigers Were Designed

Even the question of "who" these three boys were was designed.

Wu Qi-long, Chen Zhi-peng, and Su You-peng were respectively given the nicknames "Thunder Tiger," "Handsome Tiger," and "Obedient Tiger," and this naming came from the management company⁸. Each name precisely corresponded to a sellable persona: Wu Qi-long had a sports background and could do backflips, so he was the dynamic "Thunder Tiger"; Chen Zhi-peng had a dance foundation and his looks were said to resemble Leslie Cheung, so he was the "Handsome Tiger"; Su You-peng was a student at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School and was good at studying, so he was the gentle and likable "Obedient Tiger"⁸.

📝 Curator's Note
Looking at these three personas side by side, you will find they are actually a checklist of demands: you need one handsome, one dynamic, one that makes parents feel at ease. Rather than picking the "best three people," it was more like picking "the three people most suitable for packaging as a group." Fans thought they fell in love with three personalities, but behind these three personalities lay an unspoken choice: the group's appearance was determined less by the three people's true personalities and more by the three templates the market wanted pieced together. What was designed was not just the songs; even who to like and why to like them were pre-planned into the product.

The effort on the production side was concentrated on Flying Disc's gold-medal team later known as "Five Chens and Two Lis." The producer of the entire Carefree Journey album was Flying Disc Vice President Assistant and Domestic Division Manager Chen Xiu-nan⁹, arrangement was handed to Chen Zhi-yuan, styling planning was handled by Chen Da-li, lyrics were by Chen Le-rong, music by Chen Yao-chuan, plus Li Shou-quan and Li Zi-heng⁹. The general public today can hardly name these people, but the melodies and images that made girls scream in 1989 were drawn stroke by stroke by them in recording studios and planning meetings.

As for "why these three people," there is no complete record. Who made the final call to "make an idol male group," who designed the uniforms, who choreographed the dance, these specific decision-makers' names are almost impossible to find in public records⁸. What is remembered are the three faces on stage; what is forgotten is the whole group behind the scenes. This is the norm of the idol industry: the product is shiny, the production line is invisible.

⚠️ Controversial Viewpoint: There is a saying that The Little Tigers became popular because Flying Disc and CTV monopolized prime-time exposure; it was the channel that created the god, not that they had such great popularity. This doubt cannot be said to be entirely wrong; exposure was indeed an accelerant. But purely relying on channels cannot produce market responses of selling nearly 200,000 copies in five days and compilation albums reaching 250,000 in less than a month¹¹⁰. Exposure can make people "see," but it cannot force people to "spend money again and again." A more honest way to put it is: Flying Disc provided the firewood, but for the fire to really burn, it relied on Taiwan society's collective hunger for new things like idols at that time.

Chasing All the Way from Taipei to Kaohsiung

A designed product met a society just preparing to go crazy.

On April 8, 1989, a signing and singing event outside the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei completely lost control. The surging crowd was estimated to be between 20,000 and nearly 90,000 people¹¹. The organizers completely lost control of the scene. For many people, that was Taiwan's first time seeing with their own eyes what "going crazy for three teenage boys" would look like, and it was also the first time an island realized that it originally had this kind of collective, almost religious youth energy.

More标志性 (iconic) is the birth of the word "chasing stars" (fan chasing idols). It is said that in 1989, The Little Tigers toured from Taipei all the way to Kaohsiung, and crazy fans followed station by station, so the media coined the word "chasing stars" to describe this phenomenon¹². Although this etymology is the media's saying and a single source, it may not withstand strict verification, but it precisely captured that scene: youth really would chase after a car, a train, a dream, running from north to south.

For those who could not afford cassettes, chasing stars had another version. Radio broadcasting was the poor child's ticket to entry: guarding the radio waiting for the DJ to play "Apple Green Paradise," recording that synthesizer intro onto a blank tape, and repeatedly rewinding. Cassettes and radio were the two parallel channels through which that generation accessed idols; one required money, the other only required patience.

💡 Did You Know: The Little Tigers' popularity extended far beyond Taiwan. It is said that including pirated copies, their album cumulative sales reached 15 million copies; just the pre-order volume for Carefree Journey in mainland China was reported to be 4 million copies¹⁰. The songs flowed into the entire Chinese-speaking circle through both legitimate and pirated cassettes, reaching as far as rural Southeast Asia. But as these songs drifted further, the "Taiwan" origin label became lighter. Many overseas listeners humming "Apple Green Paradise" did not even know the singers were Taiwanese.

Youth True Colors, Crossing to the Other Side of the Strait

In 1991, The Little Tigers brought this youth energy across a line that was then very sensitive.

_Love (1991) is the album released the year The Little Tigers crossed the sea to tour China, incorporating public welfare themes into idol dance music. Image is Universal Music 2025 Reissue. © Universal Music (originally released by Flying Disc Records), fair use editorial commentary.*

In September of that year, the three went to China. First, they participated in three performances at the "China Film Industry Disaster Relief Charity Show" held in Beijing (the background was the 1991 East China floods), followed by a tour named "Youth True Colors · Happy World," with stops in Shanghai, Wuhan, and other places, holding over ten shows, and even appearing on the stage of the Xi'an First Ancient Culture and Art Festival¹³. In the cross-Strait atmosphere at that time, this made The Little Tigers "one of the first Taiwanese artists to hold concerts in mainland China"¹³.

To understand how sensitive this step was at the time, one must look at the cross-Strait clock of 1991. The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) was established in March of that year; in May, the government abolished the Interim Regulations for Period of Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion; the Straits Exchange Association (SEA) would not be listed until the end of the year¹⁴. The "Three Links" (direct trade, shipping, postal links) had not yet been opened; artists going to the other side to perform had to detour through Hong Kong¹⁴. In other words, when The Little Tigers stepped onto the other side's stage, they were exactly in that window where "ice was just beginning to melt, but the road was not yet open."

📝 Curator's Note
It is easy to spin this tour as "after Martial Law was lifted, everything loosened, so idols could cross the sea." But this causal chain is too straight. Martial Law was indeed lifted in 1987, which did loosen the broader environment, allowing entertainment culture to become active and commercial talent shows to be established. A master's thesis from Fu Jen Catholic University studying The Little Tigers pointed out that "after Martial Law was lifted, mass entertainment culture became increasingly active," and only then did Taiwanese idol groups rise in the late 1980s¹⁵. But the direct cause of The Little Tigers themselves was the introduction of commercial talent shows plus the Japanese idol model, not the political event of "lifting Martial Law" itself. Lifting Martial Law was the background weather; the hand pressing the play button was someone else. Attributing everything to the lifting of Martial Law makes one miss what truly drove this: the market and imitation.

It is worth adding a sentence: whether the Taiwan government had explicit regulations on artists going to China to perform, specific policy records are not found in public data¹⁴. So claiming "the government banned it" or "the government opened it" cannot be lightly asserted; it was a period where institutions had not yet grown well and boundaries were blurred. The Little Tigers, in this blur, sang Taiwan's youth to the other side of the Strait for the first time.

When the Military Service Order Arrived, the Myth Stopped

What stopped The Little Tigers was less market fever breaking and more like military service orders arriving one by one.

Many people's memory of "two disbandments" is actually too decisive compared to the true situation. The Little Tigers never formally announced a disbandment¹⁶; they were diluted by reality bit by bit. In late 1991, Chen Zhi-peng first entered military service, moving from the Marine Corps to the Yu Opera Troupe, for about two years in total¹⁶. With one tiger missing, the group's operation broke at the first joint.

In late 1993, Chen Zhi-peng was discharged, and the three briefly reunited to release Starlight Still Shines Bright¹⁶—just looking at the name of this album, you can smell a hint of "wanting to prove we are still here." But the peak of the idol wave had passed. After the "Tiger Roar Dragon Roar Wild Ride 95" concert in 1995, the group naturally dissolved¹⁶; the true final breakpoint was Wu Qi-long's enlistment in 1997 (served until 1998, discharged with Class C due to shoulder injury)¹⁶. Su You-peng was exempted from service due to myopia¹⁶. Without an announcement, without the ritual sense of a farewell concert, the myth simply stopped quietly.

It was at this juncture that Chen Zhi-peng's situation was fixed. He was not the one marginalized from the beginning. Relying on his looks resembling Leslie Cheung, his early popularity was not at the bottom¹⁷. His marginalization was the result after his 1991 military service, not the starting point: when he was discharged and returned to the group, that wave that pushed idols to the sky had already receded, and the position could not be recovered¹⁷. Projecting later losses back to the beginning is a common memory displacement.

Su You-peng 2012 close-up. The "Obedient Tiger" who studied at Jianguo High School while being an idol later moved his entire entertainment career to the other side of the Strait. Photo: ASIF Photography / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Su You-peng's lookback at this youth is more complex than outsiders imagine. Years later on the variety show Call Me by Fire, he said: "I don't want to destroy the beauty in everyone's minds, so I feel quite pressured."¹⁸ But in the same speech, he also said very firmly: "Although there was no slogan of 'team soul' back then, he and Wu Qi-long, Chen Zhi-peng were naturally and sincerely loving each other, we just loved The Little Tigers very much, loved this glory, and I still do to this day."¹⁸ Pressure and love are both true at the same time; this is closer to a person's true heart than any single label of "regret" or "no regret."

💡 Did You Know: Su You-peng was a student at Jianguo High School back then; in 1991, he was admitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University (5th choice in the science group) before taking a leave of absence to engage in entertainment¹⁹. One side was star status, the other was top-tier academics; this tug-of-war led him to say in Chuang Zao Ying 2019: "At that age, suddenly starting to bear a lot of attention, although at the time there was no time to settle." He also admitted that he "could not carry The Little Tigers' light for a lifetime, and wanted to become a实力派 (strength-based) artist"²⁰. A child pushed onto a pedestal at a young age spent half his life learning how to walk down.

All Three Bodies Crossed the Strait

If you want to find the three members of The Little Tigers today, you have to look to the other side of the Strait.

Wu Qi-long photographed in Paris in 2012. For the Z generation who hasn't seen The Little Tigers, he is almost only the identity of "Fourth Master" in Scarlet Heart. Photo: LuvElaine / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Wu Qi-long founded Straw Bear Film in Beijing, became popular again with "Fourth Master" in Scarlet Heart, and married co-star Liu Shi-shi; for the Z generation, he is almost only the identity of "Fourth Master"²¹. Su You-peng went through My Fair Princess, transformed into an actor, and then became a director, directing The Left Ear which broke 500 million RMB in box office²². Chen Zhi-peng had the most ups and downs; in 2023 he admitted to tax evasion, and in Chinese variety shows he hardly mentions The Little Tigers²³. The career centers of all three are all in China.

Thus, the exam question floats up: when the three most popular bodies of a group have all crossed the Strait, does this symbol still count as Taiwan's?

Even the ownership of the name has become a battlefield. China's Baidu Baike labels The Little Tigers as "Chinese Taiwan male idol group"—a way of writing sovereignty claims directly into the entry name; while Taiwan's Wikipedia calls it "Taiwan Pop Male Music Group"²⁴. The same group, two names, behind them are two answers to "who it belongs to."

📝 Curator's Note
A small detail illustrates the problem well: when China later produced the teenage idol group TFBOYS, Taiwan's CNA reported it as "China's Little Tigers"²⁵. This metaphor reversely proves one thing—at that moment, at least in the language sense of Taiwan media, the prototype "Little Tigers" was still Taiwan's. For a symbol to be used as a control group for "another country's version," the premise is that everyone defaults to its place of origin. So for the question "whether Little Tigers is Taiwan's," the answer may not lie in where the three people live now, but in where the default origin is in everyone's mind every time someone uses the three words "Little Tigers."

It is worth pondering that the question "whether Little Tigers is still Taiwan's after going west" has hardly been discussed directly in past commentary and research. It is a suspended case that has always been put aside, with no one willing to make a final decision. Perhaps precisely because it is too difficult to answer: answering "yes" requires facing the fact that the three people's life trajectories have indeed moved elsewhere; answering "no" requires cutting off the real tears shed by an entire generation of Taiwanese.

So this article does not intend to answer for you. It only wants to put the question in the right place: The Little Tigers used almost entirely imported parts to assemble the most solid segment of youth for Taiwanese people; and when those three bodies later crossed the Strait, the memory did not go with them—it stayed in the cassettes, in the static of radio recordings, in the out-of-control crowd outside the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.

Chen Zhi-peng said he "doesn't want others to pull him back in." But some things, once eaten in by an island and metabolized into its own flesh and blood, are not things that leave just because the person in question says to let go. Three bodies crossed the Strait; memory stayed here.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan Pop Music — From folk songs, Mandarin pop to the idol industry, the entire context; The Little Tigers are a key link in it
• Golden Melody Awards — How Taiwan used one trophy to define what "good Mandarin pop music" is
• Jay Chou — After the idol industry, another type of Mandarin music subjectivity grown by Taiwan
• Mayday — A band that started locally and became popular across the Chinese-speaking circle, a completely different path from idol groups

Image Sources

All 4 images in this article are cached in public/article-images/music/ to avoid hotlinking to source servers. Album covers use fair use editorial commentary (17 U.S.C. § 107 / Copyright Act § 65); portrait photos use Creative Commons licenses:

• _Carefree Journey_ Album Cover (hero) — © Universal Music (originally released by Flying Disc Records), Universal Music 2025 Reissue, Fair use editorial commentary
• _Happy New Year_ Compilation Album Cover — © Universal Music (originally released by Flying Disc Records), Universal Music 2025 Reissue, Fair use editorial commentary
• _Love_ Album Cover — © Universal Music (originally released by Flying Disc Records), Universal Music 2025 Reissue, Fair use editorial commentary
• Wu Qi-long 2012 Paris Street — Photo: LuvElaine / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
• Su You-peng 2012 Close-up — Photo: ASIF Photography / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Video: The Little Tigers' official MV was released by Kingstar Entertainment on YouTube but embedding was disabled, so "Apple Green Paradise," "Red Dragonfly," "Carefree Journey," and "Butterfly Flies Away" in the text are presented via official links, not iframe embedded.

References