Yang Peiyi: Beijing's Milli Vanilli Moment

From FOX News:

A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synced "Ode to the Motherland," a ceremony official said — the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games.

A member of China's Politburo asked for the last-minute change to match one girl's face with another's voice, the ceremony's chief music director, Chen Qigang, said in an interview with Beijing Radio.

"The audience will understand that it's in the national interest," Chen said in a video of the interview posted online Sunday night.

..."Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke becomes instant star with patriotic song," the China Daily newspaper headline said Tuesday.

But the real voice behind the tiny, pigtailed girl in the red dress who wowed 91,000 spectators at the National Stadium on opening night really belonged to 7-year-old Yang Peiyi. Her looks apparently failed the cuteness test with officials organizing the ceremony, but Chen said her voice was judged the most beautiful.

"The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen," Chen said. "Lin Miaoke was the best in this. And Yang Peiyi's voice was the most outstanding."

During a live rehearsal soon before the ceremony, the Politburo member said Miaoke's voice "must change," Chen said in the radio interview. He didn't name the official.

So Peiyi's voice was matched with Miaoke's face.

"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."

In my opinion, Yang Peiyi IS cute. She's an adorable little girl. There was no need to replace her. Her voice matches her face by virtue of the fact that it's her voice.

Lin Miaoke was put in the difficult position of being sold to the public as the singer, not just the face.

Miaoke has her own blog, and one of the latest photos posted since the ceremony shows her looking up nervously at the ceremony's director, film director Zhang Yimou. "Giving the child encouragement," the caption says.

Her father, Lin Hui, told China Daily he learned Miaoke would be "singing" only 15 minutes before the opening ceremony began. The newspaper wrote Lin "still cannot believe his daughter has become an international singing sensation."

She was part of a lie, not a good lesson for a little girl.

The lie is the real problem.

What's amazing to me is not that there was a Milli Vanilli moment in the opening ceremony. I think it's incredible that the ceremony's chief music director, Chen Qigang, had the audacity to come clean.

Good for him.

The Olympics are about ability, not looks. Athletic talent is celebrated, not cuteness.

Participants have to pass a battery of drug tests, even gender tests. Cuteness test? I don't think so.

I'm glad the truth is out. Yang Peiyi is getting the credit she deserves for her talent.
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UPDATE, August 13, 2008: "Chinese defend Olympic ceremony lip-synch"

She is a cutie, an extremely talented cutie.