Not Cute Communist Enough For Prime Time

That beautiful little Chinese girl who sang "Ode To The Motherland" during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies wasn't singing at all. She was mouthing it. Apparently the original young singer wasn't pretty enough for the ChiComs, according to AFP:

[Music Designer Chen Qigang] said the final decision to stage the event with Lin lip-synching to another girl's voice was taken after a senior member of China's ruling Communist Party politburo attended a rehearsal.

"He told us there was a problem that we needed to fix it, so we did," he said, without disclosing further details of the order.

And how much you want to bet they ordered red for the color of Lin Miaoke's dress? Did she also get coaching from Milli Vanilli? I hope Miaoke's too young to understand how she became a human propaganda poster.

People who use children as political tools chap my hide, as they say here in the west. On one hand, we have a dazzling, colorful, beautiful ceremony which also happens to be a very carefully-engineered publicity piece designed to divert our bewildered eyes away from China's various human-rights abuses and that little incident in the Square nearly two decades ago.

Film critic Roger Ebert noted on his blog:

The closest sight I have seen to Friday night's spectacle, and I mean this objectively, not with disrespect, is the sight of all those Germans marching wave upon wave before Hitler in "Triumph of the Will."

"Triumph of the Will" portrayed the Nazis in a sympathetic light. The Beijing opening ceremonies tries to make us think maybe Communism isn't all that bad... and that's not good.

As for the girl who really sang, the London Telegraph reports:

Yang Peiyi is said to have reacted well to the disappointment. "I am proud to have been chosen to sing at all," she is reported to have said.

Perhaps the ChiComs chose those words for her, too.