Ok so all through the opening ceremony of the Olympics I had been teared eyed. And this little girl made me feel like adopting her; I am sure her parents don't want her anyway. But a fake?
This incident may indeed symbolize what is going on in China in a larger scope. The image they want to project to the world vs what is actually there. They want to show perfection by taking the voice of one girl and the face of another... couldn't they find a girl who could fit both roles or are they too picky with their own people? Anyways, as soon as this got out they made China look like liars, really. With something so incredibly unnecessary! How about all those things that do actually matter? For how long can they hide them? China may be a growing super power but its people remain oppressed and it is still a very developing nation.
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Woman! :) Ok, this is random but an issue close to my heart, I thought about it loads when the news broke :)
1. My initial reaction was one of slight disbelief, not for the fact that the girl was a "fake", but more because the world press decided to make a mountain out of what can only be called a miniscule molehill. I mean, lip-syncing is hardly a new thing, especially not for something this big! It got me angry about how people couldn't celebrate how wonderfully China did its opening ceremony and had to nitpick...but then I realised that I was being as biased as the people who were making a big deal about it, so I stopped :)
2. So, second reaction after calming down: why did they do it? I don't think it's a matter of deception. Of course it's a matter of image...in any country they'd want the face projected to the world to be the most perfect possible. C'est naturale. ;) But as you said, with her 1 billion people, surely China can find a girl that fits the bill? There're 2 reasons why I think they didn't...firstly, these things are as much about contacts as anything else. We don't really know whose daughter this cute girl is (I tried a shallow google search), and they can't possibly trawl through millions of young girls to find the perfect one so the selection is likely to be very contacts-based in the first place. Secondly, apparently it was a really last minute decision where someone from the top decided that the original girl had to go. It's difficult to find and train someone else at such short notice.
3. If we really think about it properly...is it that bad? :) Ok, don't shoot me here. Instinctively, I think most people's reactions will be "omg, poor girl, she's gonna have such a warped image of herself as not being pretty enough..." or "oh what sort of message is this sending out to the public about superficial beauty". It was mine...I worried for the original girl. But, at the same time, if one steps back from the emotional fray, 2 girls were glorified in the process...one for her voice (albeit not outrightly credited) and one for her image. This is as much a division of labour as anything, to put it bluntly. It's not more fake than using a body double in movies, or stuntmen. Or even photoshopping and airbrushing. Or using speechwriters. In most things, there is The Face, and The Forces Behind The Face. The only reason why we're getting our underwear in a tangle in this case is because it involves little girls and China. As I said, mountain out of a molehill. The trumpeting of superficial 'beauty' is hardly something new, nor specific to China. There are always public faces, and private faces. No country, China least of all, wants to show a less than perfect face in public if they can help it(I don't mean that that original girl has a flawed face at all!!).
3. There are always criticisms about countries that host large events. An example is in the Sydney Olympics, where they brushed past the fact that a lot of Sydney was built on convict labour, instead choosing to depict a couple of English-looking gentlemen in suits. However, no one cried out accusations of 'deception' or 'cheating' or blew things out of proportion with statements like "this shows that...". Regrettable, maybe, Poor decision-making, maybe, but whatever, let's move on. People don't give China that same benefit.
That's the problem...all eyes are on China. The world media trumpets the rise of China so prophetically and with such an underlying tone of fear and tension that such conclusions are inevitable. But imagine if you're China...it's hard to fail, hard to fall, and everyone's waiting for you to. So you make things as perfect as you can make it (and they obviously put a gargantuan amount of effort into making the opening ceremony perfect!), but then you get flak for it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly disagreeing with you that China has a long long long way ahead of it and that in the arena of human liberties and rights they still have very much more to improve upon. However, if one dissociates wealth and economic power with rights and liberties, there's no reason why China's meteoric rise should not be seen as a generally positive thing. Sure, China is rich but politically not how the west would like it to be, but give her a break...she's opened up less than 30 years ago, from one of the most oppressive regimes the world has ever seen. Western democracy as it is today took hundreds of years to develop, and not in sync with capitalistic development as well. Why should people expect anything different of China? And that is also assuming that democracy is the desirable end point for China at the moment, which is another thesis in itself!
:) Ok, I'm rambling :D Argue with me, baby ;)
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