China’s shameful conduct at the Olympics

The little girl was pretty as a picture in her white shoes and perfect red dress, performing China's unofficial anthem, ‘Ode to the Motherland.’ Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke's stunning performance at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games warmed the hearts of a billion viewers around the world and made her a superstar in China overnight. When I watched her on TV, I said to myself, “What a beautiful talented nine-year-old girl she is." Her voice was so pure. The announcer said that she had been chosen out of thousands of girls who auditioned for the honour to sing at the Olympics.

But revelations by officials that the voice that sang that song was not hers – but was dubbed by another, younger girl – has brought shame to the people of China. Beijing Olympic and international Olympic officials at a daily joint press conference found themselves under siege by reporters seeking a fuller explanation as to why the real voice of the girl who performed on stage was not used and the voice of the younger girl was substituted.

The music director for the ceremonies, Chen Qigang, revealed in a radio interview that a member of the Politburo – the highest ranking body of China's ruling Communist Party – decided Lin was pretty, but her voice wasn't good enough. Organizers had already decided the girl with the ‘perfect’ voice, 7 1/2 -year-old Yang Peiyi, was not pretty enough to sing the song herself, hence the sham. He said "that a change then had to be made in the national interest for the perception of the country."

Barbra Streisand is not a beautiful woman by any stretch of one’s imagination but she has one of the finest voices that has ever been recorded. Would the Americans place a beautiful woman on stage at their Olympics and have her lip-sync Ms. Streisand’s voice? I doubt it. The flack that would follow would be enormous if the switch was discovered.

On the other hand, a Beijing official confirmed that the song was pre-recorded and said that organizers had, "just picked the best voice and the best performer." Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympic official, said bluntly, "I don't think there's anything wrong with it."

So while Lin took the stage and organizers piped in audio of Yang's voice, little nine-year-old Lin was unaware that the voice that filled the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest National Stadium wasn't her own. Now that she knows that this is so, she surely must feel terribly embarrassed. Imagine the ribbing she will get from her school mates who originally thought it was her who had the magnificent voice.

The scandal is among a growing number of problems that have plagued Beijing's determination to present the perfect Olympics. Those include: the faking of fireworks in televised clips shown during last Friday's opening ceremony, acres of empty seats at venues filled by volunteers despite China's insistence that tickets for the Games had been sold out for months and charges that some of China's gymnasts are underage. The word, counterfeit comes to mind and China is renown for counterfeiting goods and pawning them off on unsuspecting countries. It appears, nothing has changed.

Many will find it surprising that organizers felt it necessary to fake elements of an opening ceremony that was praised worldwide as being the best in the history of the Games. But the desire to produce a ‘perfect’ product proved to be an overwhelming disaster. The excuse given was that this was done in the nation's interest. "The child on camera should be flawless," Chen explained. Well, we all know now that the ceremony was not flawless and switching the girls was a terrible blunder.

Beijing tried to quell some of the controversy surrounding the singing scandal yesterday by removing video links on the Web showing Lin's lip-syncing and many online discussion entries were deleted.

State-run CCTV news ran a brief interview Monday night with Yang Peiyi, the real anthem singer, calling her ‘the little hero behind the scene.’ During the segment, the Grade 1 student told her interviewer she was ‘okay’ with the situation, and it was ‘enough’ that her voice was used in the show. If those were her words, then there is hope for some of the young people of that nation.

A high school student, writing on a popular forum later, sided with the organizers of the event. “What does it matter if it's a fake thing?" the student rhetorically asked. "It was such an important opening (ceremony) that the director's team just didn't want to make any mistakes." That statement is evidence that we can expect more of this shameful behavior when young people like him grow up in China.