OLYMPICS 08: China haul four golds, one bronze in scandal freestyle

Much about the recent Beijing Olympics has been uncomfortable; so much so that it is a cliche to say it, but not to look more closely. Take the little girl singing at the opening ceremony, who wasn’t singing at all, because the one who could was deemed ‘less attractive’ (isn’t this Gary Glitter territory?) and replaced with the doubtless delightful (and officially ‘perfect’) creature who did her best to lip sync.

Lip syncing is a familiar concept in Western culture – so are harmonisers, and powerful editing software, which can be used to shore up the ‘imperfections’ in pop groups. She can dance, she can’t sing; she can sing, she can’t dance; she’s fit, she’s not; etc. It’s audio airbrushing. Pavarotti lip-synced at the Turin games in 2006. What makes the Chinese example more disturbing is twofold:

1) the girl isn’t lipsyncing herself; even in Western pop, that has consequences (see Vanilli, Milli)
2) she’s a child.

Anything that involves children as tools in the image of state is inherently frightening. That wasn’t it, though. Aside the from home nation gymnast who just might be two years younger than she says (there may be others; here’s what looks like proof), there were the children who represented the 55 ethnic minorities within China’s sizeable borders. While dressed in the relevant garb, all of them were drawn from the Han Chinese majority, not from the remaining 108 million who form the minorities – straight from central casting, you might say. May be some of them even perform here. To their credit, the Chinese admit this (how could they not) but they may have missed a trick. The Muslim Uighur people are canny tightrope walkers; could Zhang Yimou not have tapped into this well of acrobatic talent for his ceremony? There’s always the closing ceremony.

There are other nonsenses to be ignored, in scandal; that the so-called ‘footprint’ of reworks was digitally inserted into the telecast for fear of capture issues. So be it – considering the smogs in Beijing, any paranoid producer with the budget to do it would have done so. Why not? They fired the fireworks, for chrissakes. Get over it.

There can be few scenarios in a city’s life to arouse such paranoia in planners as having four billion eyes tuned in and watching, but in China it seems to have amplified a national insecurity, coupled with what might kindly be termed a naivete; but what may actually be the sheer brass balls of being accustomed to doing things exactly how you damn well please. The ‘protest zones’ have been suspiciously quiet, despite (or because) of the bureaucracy established to serve them (Britain has protest zones, too; but people do protest.). And if people ask questions, just shut down the press conferences. Ah – that’s where it all falls down, at least in Western theory.