Promotion material of The 30th China TV Golden Eagle Awards Photo: Sina Weibo

The 30th China TV Golden Eagle Awards were held on Sunday night, during which the winners of the Audience's Choice for Actor and Actress awards were revealed. 

Chinese actor Wang Yibo, star of the hit drama The Untamed, and actress Zhao Liying, lead actress in the drama The Story of Minglan, took home the honors, which were awarded through an audience vote. 

The hashtag "Golden Eagle Awards" had earned 1.33 billion views as of Monday afternoon on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo.

Many Chinese netizens took to social media to pay the two winners high compliments and praise their popularity and acting. 

The two winners just finished shooting a Chinese fantasy costume drama Legend of Fei in April.

Yet the year 2020's award ceremony was not all sunshine and rainbows, as it was caught up in something of a controversy caused by suspected improper voting. 

While voting was underway, the official voting system sent out successive warnings for data abnormalities. With the guidance and assistance of relevant cybersecurity departments, the committee's technical staff collected and analyzed the data and verified that there were ballots with obvious anomalies.

On Thursday, the committee of the 30th Golden Eagle Award released a statement declaring it would move to strike all improper votes from the records and move to prevent further improper voting activities including "swiping votes."

The committee's move won applause from many Chinese netizens, who praised the organization for ensuring the authority and credibility of the awards. 

Song Qian, better known as Victoria Song, originally ranked the first in line for the actress award but dropped to the third after 540,000 suspect votes were struck from her tally, leaving Zhao the final winner with 860,000 votes. 

Nearly 740,000 votes were removed from Wang's tally, but he still took the first place with 2.58 million votes, followed by actors Yi Yangqianxi, better known as Jackson Yee, and Zhu Yilong with 1.52 million and 1.02 million respectively.