Journalist and entrepreneur Stephen Vines writes in the South China Morning Post:
In order to ensure what only a one-party state can regard as perfection during this lavishly staged event there was no hesitation in deploying artifice to achieve. Even the applause was stage-managed by a host of strategically deployed cheer leaders and it now turns out that one of the emotional high points was, to put it bluntly, a fake. The angelic nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, portrayed as singing, was in fact doing nothing more than miming; the real singer was the immensely gifted but less photogenic Yang Peiyi.
The explanation by Chen Qigang , the general music designer of the opening ceremony, for the switch lies at the heart of the desperate quest for perfection and the demands of politics that overwhelmed all other considerations. “This is in the national interest,” he said. “It is the image of our national music, national culture.”
China’s quest for perfection is understandable but it is less easy to stomach a decision taken at the very heart of the national leadership to perpetrate a fraud. A frightening disregard for truth and a heavy-handed management of everything to do with the Games have been the hallmark of this event. It began with the ruthless destruction of neighbourhoods in Beijing to make way for the Olympics, continued with the breaking of specific promises about freedom of speech that would be allowed while the Games were taking place and is seen more or less every day with new revelations about how news is being censored, how epics like the fireworks display were misleadingly manufactured for the television cameras, and so on.
Is this listing of problems mere carping? Ask Ji Sizun, a legal rights activist from Fujian province who was arrested this week after applying to demonstrate in one of Beijing’s officially designated protest zones. His situation is real enough as is the success of the Games, but what have the hosts really succeeded in telling us about the new China?
