Cold and nasty

This morning I was trawling through the ABC News recent news archive to find some story about cold and nasty weather conditions in Victoria. Instead I was quite incensed to find a story about the cold and nasty organisers of the Olympics Opening Ceremony.

Remember that gorgeous little girl in red who was dubbed the Nikki Webster of Beijing. (For those of you not Aussie enough to remember, Webster was the cherubic child singer at the Sydney Olympics in 2000). I remember us commenting on her magnificent voice, but it's lucky I'm not a lip-synching expert or I might have noticed the truth. The girl we saw, Lin Miaoke, was chosen for her good looks not her voice. The voice was a recording of another Chinese girl, Yang Peiyi, apparently plumper and with uneven teeth.

...Chen said the girl whose voice was actually heard by the 91,000 capacity crowd at the main Olympic stadium was in fact seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who has a chubby face and uneven teeth.

"The reason why little Yang was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation," Chen said in the interview that appeared briefly on the popular news website Sina.com on Tuesday before it was wiped from the Internet.^[source]

How cruel. I really feel sorry for little Yang. I hope she won't be depressed with an eating disorder in ten years time, but an international superstar who's defected from China, because her voice was exquisite and she deserves the credit!

Apparently this news was broken (quite by accident no doubt) in an interview published on Sina.com, but disappeared from the Internet a few hours later. I made quite an effort to suppress this cynical thought from popping into my head so I could really appreciate the opening ceremony and it's lovely patriotic display of Chinese culture and history (sans the foot-binding, 'cultural revolution' and other horrors, but then the Sydney ceremony didn't include the mass murder of Tasmanian aborigines either). But now I feel vindicated for noticing some parallels between the Beijing ceremony and the movie adaptation of George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Remember the opening scene at the Beijing ceremony with all the drummers, dressed identically, raising their arms in unison and shouting? Well it eerily reminded me of the opening scene of '1984'.

The same article describes other parts of the ceremony that were fakes. Some of the fireworks were actually pre-recorded animations! (more: 1, 2)

Categorised as: society
Technorati Tags: Chinese culture, Yang Peiyi, Lin Miaoke, discrimination, Nineteen Eighty-Four