First, we had the fake Mickey Mouse. Then we had fake lip-synching kid at the opening ceremony. The organisers had made a decision to use a Milli Vanilli-style replacement for the real child who, with a chubby face and apparently crooked teeth, was deemed by Communist party officials to be insufficiently pretty to be the face of Communist China. And quite a few other things were apparently fake too.
On this subject AC Grayling wrote in The Guardian:
However churlish it might seem to say it, the revelation that little Lin Miaoke was miming the solo at the Olympic games opening ceremony is the perfect metaphor for today’s China: all cosmetics, masking deception. China’s self-presentation is a continuous act of fraud, which matters because the victims of the fraud include the Chinese people themselves and the future.
So well-known is this that I cannot imagine anyone is surprised to learn that Lin Miaoke was miming to the sweet tones of the even younger Yang Peiyi, deemed insufficiently pretty to take the stage. For this is just par for the Zhong Nan Hai course.
Other elements of that deceptive moment at the opening ceremony might not have registered with the watching billions. The Chinese flag was carried to the squadron of goose-stepping soldiers by a large cohort of children, all dressed in the traditional costumes of the so-called “minority peoples” of the Chinese empire – the Zhuang, the Manchu, the Hui, the Miao, the Uighur, the Yi, the Tuja, the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Buyei, the Mosuo, the Naxi, and so on – there are 55 such groups recognised officially by the Chinese government, and a number more who claim ethnic difference from the Han Chinese but are not recognised.
Well, it seems that even the “minority peoples” in the opening ceremony were fakes too.
The Telegraph reports:
The children accompanied the soldiers carrying in the national flag at the most solemn moment of the ceremony.
They were dressed in costumes associated with the country’s ethnic minorities, including those from troubled areas such as Tibet and the muslim province of Xinjiang. Such displays of “national unity” are a compulsory part of any major state occasion.
But the children were all from the Han Chinese majority, which makes up more than 90 per cent of the population and is culturally and politically dominant, according to an official with the cultural troupe from which they were selected.
To be fair, maybe the real “minority people” couldn’t make it because of the “travel restrictions“.
Update: Here’s a great article by Chris Berg in the July edition of the IPA’s Review on the subject.
6 comments ↓
Well this is what you get for rewarding totalitarian states with the Olympics with the pretence that it will help to stop human rights abuses. If anything the abuses have escalated and they now extend to supporting the abuses of other countries like Zimbabwe and Sudan. The day may come when people will miss the US brand of imperialism.
After watching the Chinese olympics, what are my thoughts on Chinese civilization? I think it would be a good idea.
Totalitarianism and the Olympics have a lot in common- a taste for complicated displays of public might, the emphasis on visual aesthetics, the importance of winning, a complete lack of humour and proportion…
Ex- IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch said of dictatorships: ‘For [the Olympics], it is much better to go to these countries. There will never be security problems.’”
..as someone once said, “The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die.”
That someone was, of course, Adolf Hitler, whose 1936 Olympics gave us the Olympic torch relay and the five interlocking rings that became the Olympic symbol.
The other thing I dislike about the Olympics (and sports in general) is how much of other people’s money gets spent training these athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport and elsewhere. They should pay their own way or seek private sponsorship/funding and not receive anything from the public purse.
If these Olympians were amateurs, as they used to be, without training provided by tax payer largesse, then the Olympics would actually be something a tad above the political circus it is currently.
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