China goes "Milli Vanilli" at Olympic Opening Ceremony

[Porsche-O-Phile]

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-china-lip-synchedsong&prov=ap&type=lgns

- - - - -


Olympic opening uses girl’s voice, not face

By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 28 minutes ago

BEIJING (AP)—One little girl had the looks. The other had the voice.

So in a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, the two were put together for the Olympic opening ceremony, with one lip-synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the other’s singing.

The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio.

So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke, a veteran of television ads, mouthed the words with a pixie smile for a stadium of 91,000 and a worldwide TV audience. “I felt so beautiful in my red dress,” the tiny 9-year-old told the China Daily newspaper.

Peiyi later told China Central Television that just having her voice used was an honor.

It was the latest example of the lengths the image-obsessed China is taking to create a perfect Summer Games.

In a brief phone interview with AP Television News on Tuesday night, the music director, Chen Qigang, said he spoke about the switch with Beijing Radio “to come out with the truth.”

“The little girl is a magnificent singer,” Chen said. “She doesn’t deserve to be hidden.” He said the ceremony’s director, film director Zhang Yimou, knew of the change. He declined to speak further about it.

China has been eager to present a flawless Olympics face to the world, shooing thousands of migrant workers from the city and shutting down any sign of protest.

The country’s quest for perfection apparently includes its children.

A member of China’s Politburo asked for the last-minute change during a live rehearsal shortly before the ceremony, Chen said in the Beijing Radio interview, posted online Sunday night. He didn’t name the official.

During the live rehearsal, the Politburo member said Miaoke’s voice “must change,” Chen said.

“We had to make that choice. It was fair both for Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi,” Chen told Beijing Radio. “We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance.”

“The audience will understand that it’s in the national interest,” Chen added.

He said he felt a responsibility to explain to the country what happened but on Tuesday the link to the video on the Beijing Radio Web site no longer worked.

Miaoke’s performance Friday night, like the ceremony itself, was an immediate hit. “Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke becomes instant star with patriotic song,” the China Daily newspaper headline said.

Zhang, China’s most famous film director, was asked at a post-ceremony news conference about the little girl who swung on wires high above the Bird’s Nest National Stadium during the performance.

“She is a lovely girl and she sings well,” Zhang said, according to a transcript posted on the Beijing organizing committee’s web site.

The switch became a hot topic among Chinese and raced across the country’s blogosphere.

“The organizers really messed up on this one,” Luo Shaoyang, 34, a retail worker in Beijing, said Tuesday. “This is like a voiceover for a cartoon character. Why couldn’t they pick a kid who is both cute and a good singer? This damages the reputation of both kids for their future, especially the one lip-synching. Now everyone knows she’s a fraud, who cares if she’s cute?”
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, Lin Miaoke, a nine-year-old Chinese girl who performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on the day before, returns to the Xizhongjie Primary School of Dongcheng District in Beijing on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2008. A 7-year-old Chinese girl's face was "not suitable" for the Olympics opening ceremony, so Lin lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland", the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games.

Others disagreed.

“They want the best-looking people to represent the face of China. I don’t blame the organizers for picking a prettier-looking kid over the not-so-pretty one,” said Xia Xiaotao, 30, an engineer.

“It’s the unfortunate reality that these sort of things turn political,” said marketing worker Zhang Xinyi, 22.

It was not the first time an Olympics opening ceremony involved lip-synching.

At the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Luciano Pavarotti’s performance was prerecorded. The maestro who conducted the aria, Leone Magiera, said this year that the bitter cold made a live performance impossible for Pavarotti, who was in severe pain months before his cancer diagnosis. Pavarotti died in 2007 at age 71.

Also Tuesday, Beijing organizers confirmed that some of the opening ceremony’s fireworks display—29 gigantic footprints shown “walking” toward the National Stadium—featured prerecorded footage. The footage was provided to broadcasters “for convenience and theatrical effects,” said Wang Wei, vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizing committee.

(NBC also has augmented its Olympic coverage in the past to set the right mood. That fire in the studio fireplace during the 2002 Salt Lake Games? It was just a video.)

Neither of the two little girls involved could be reached by The Associated Press on Tuesday, and it was not clear how the ceremony—or the controversy— might change their lives.

Peiyi is a first-grader at the Primary School affiliated to Peking University. Her tutor, Wang Liping, wrote in her blog that Peiyi is both cute and well-behaved, with a love for Peking opera.

“She doesn’t like to show off. She’s easygoing,” Wang wrote. She and other school officials couldn’t be reached Tuesday.

Miaoke, however, was a minor celebrity even before the opening ceremony. The third-grader appeared in a TV ad last year with China’s biggest gold medal hope, hurdling champion Liu Xiang, and she was in an Olympics ad earlier this year, China Daily reported.

Her father, Lin Hui, told China Daily he learned Miaoke would be “singing” only 15 minutes before the opening ceremony began.

Lin “still cannot believe his daughter has become an international singing sensation,” the report said.

Chi-Chi Zhang and Isolda Morillo in Beijing contributed to this report.

[71T Targa]

I can't find the link right now, but they faked the fireworks during the opening too.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Really?

How do you fake fireworks?

And with a $300M budget, why would you need to?

[slodave]

Here's the link to the fake fireworks.

EDIT: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/12/fake.fireworks.ap/index.html

I don't think it was appropriate to have a girl lip sync, especially when it's for the "national interest".

[slodave]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Really?

How do you fake fireworks?

And with a $300M budget, why would you need to?

The fireworks were faked for the T.V. audience.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Ahh. That they could do. Makes sense.

[71T Targa]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Really?

How do you fake fireworks?

And with a $300M budget, why would you need to?

Apparently they were added in during the broadcast.

Here's one link: http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/Some-Opening-Ceremony-fireworks-were-faked?urn=oly,99745

[URY914]

There are over a billion of them and they all look alike to me.

[scottmandue]

IMHO the less than perfect looking little girl that sang the song would have made for better TV, The whole thing looked a little too slick and I sensed something was fishy in little China.

I was a little disappointed to hear about the fireworks, when I watched it I was impressed at their ability to synchronize the fireworks for blocks in every direction (not).

[3.2 CAB]

That must be a hell of a deal to happen to you at only 7yrs old, the government telling you that you are already a two bagger.

[nostatic]

They did synchronize the fireworks. The simulation (which was alluded to on the broadcast) was done to "get the shot".

As for the girl singing - I assumed that *everyone* was lip synching. That is the norm these days for large scale events (and not so large as well).

[scottmandue]

Maybe England can upstage China by having live performers at their Olympics