Zhou Bichang - 2005 Super Girl's Voice Contest

2005 Super Girl's Voice Contest

In the spring of 2005, one of Zhou's friends at Xinghai entered Zhou without her knowledge into the 2005 Super Girls' Voice auditions held in Guangzhou, the only city picked in south China for audition purposes by the contest organizer. The then 19-year-old showed up the day of the audition in her father's old oversize jacket without a trace of makeup. In her own words, she just rolled out of bed before going to the audition and did not even get a chance to wash her face. Her boyish attire almost made the security guard stop her at the entrance because the contest was supposed to be for girls only. But her talent had no problem shining through despite her slightly unkempt appearance at the audition as she impressed the judges by singing segments from "Regular Friend” by David Tao and "Forever Love" by Leehom Wang. In the following weeks, she coasted through the subsequent elimination rounds and soon found herself among the top 10 finalists for the Guangzhou Audition Region (*only the top 3 from each region qualify for the national finals which were scheduled to start months later in July). Her fan base had also grown exponentially as she progressed through the contest.

The sincere emotions in her vocal and her interpretation of others' works was a breath of fresh air into the competition; on one particular occasion she brought one of the judges to tears during her singing and all five judges to a standing ovation when she finished the song ("Extricate"). Her voice is sultry yet extremely powerful, a rarity among Chinese female singers. She also possesses a special talent of turning everything she sings into undeniably her own signature style, known as "Bi Style Vocal" ("筆式唱腔"). Without any suspense, she was voted by viewers all the way through to the top in Guangzhou Contest Region.

In July the national finals kicked off in Changsha, Hunan Province, where the top 3 contestants from each of the 5 regions got together and went through a series of eliminations. In these rounds, she went on delivering a wide spectrum of songs, mostly by male singers she has long admired such as David Tao, Eason Chan, Jay Chou and Leehom Wang. She successfully showcased her skills in mastering hip hop, R&B and pop songs. She was one of the judges' favorites; they never voted to put her in the bottom two up for elimination, a.k.a. PK (short for Penalty Kick, a term typically used in soccer) and she was the only one throughout the entire competition that had never been through a PK. When the finale was aired on August 26, 2005, some 400 million people tuned in to find out who garnered the most SMS votes from viewers. With 3,270,840 SMS votes, Zhou ended up in the second place, only a thin margin away from winning the competition. But she was content with the result and was grateful towards the millions who had supported and voted for her.