The latest revelation from the Chinese Olympics has emerged. The little girl in the red dress I mentioned in a previous article has returned to haunt us, but in a very different form. Like the ghost of innocence in Schindler's List and the un-shakeable presence of the Don't Look Now kid, she was one of the focal points of the entire four-hour ceremony. I went on and on, as I'm sure many of us did, how perfectly her neat and practised behavior stood in perfect synthesis with her gilded notes of her crystalline tones. It turns out she was miming: The voice and the face are not one and the same.
Despite my clear ability to be duped, I am only half-surprised by this. The ever-benevolent Chinese government decided that the girl who actually sang the song was not considered aesthetically pleasing enough to be the latest face of nu-Communism. And so, in the 'interest of the state' (that old chestnut is beginning to crack) she was replaced by a prettier girl, minus the talent (stop me if you've heard this one before.)
This new scrap of forced-hand Chinese honesty strongly undermines the myriad of voices from the press, Olympic athletes, and by implied murmur, the Chinese government themselves, that we should always keep politics and sport separate (there is a similar claim often made regarding the ethics of an author and the reception of their artworks; but I'll talk about that in part 2) Attempting to deny the debate about the relation between human rights and what has been popularly hailed as one of the best Olympics EVER, has blown up in the faces of all concerned, no pun, because it has only served to raise awareness of many political issues in the combined minds of a multi-million global audience. And like a simple cut left to fester the damage has already been done. If China, for one, had been more open about its past and the modern realities of its human rights situation, they might have avoided such an embarrassing, and self-inflicted, injury.
China has suffered for its botched deceptions; the murder of the American volleyball coach, two bomb attacks (despite widespread security precautions), the very public waving of several Tibetan flags, and now, the sheer artifice of the perfect, miming Child in Red. In isolation these minor events could, perhaps, be shrugged off, but when taken together they provide a damning testament to the reputation of a highly-secretive country trying to appear something that its not, an enlightened and free state, now having to patch up the cracks. The Olympics must go on!
With distinctly Orwellian tones, this causes one to remember many naughty things: China's attempts to erase its past through the strict filtering of information and restrictions upon internet access (Googling Tianeman Sq. in China mentions nothing about the massacre), it has tried to divert the attention of its critics, and quickly fold away all of those wrong flags, and stamping down any occasions of protest (the right to free speech that we can take for granted). As I have stated before, the seeming gullability of a world audience who allow themselves to be strung along the yellow-brick road of Olympic celebration, eager to see only what they want to see, implicates us in a united state of political complacency and so we cannot just blame China for forgetting the skeletons under the Birds Nest, as we too remember these things not-happening.
Another striking example of the consistent ability of politics and ethics to intrude upon the public domain is the rising conflict in Southern Ossetia; now titled the "Russian Five-day War" (a dubious claim seeing as it's not over by a long shot.) The first fighting between Russia and Georgia went largely unreported on Saturday morning. In a few of the newspapers it was given only a brief mention, several pages in. Daily Mail reporters, of all people, being the only publication to mention S.Ossetia on the front page.
This came to a head with the rise of the Irony curtain as a Russian and a Georgian athlete won Olympic medals in the women's badminton finals. The two girls hugged one another, seemingly in a show of solidarity, and nobly stated that politics had no place in sports (China won the gold medal but the poor girl was sidelined by the political significance of the bronze and silver medallists' embrace). It was a fine statement but I'm not convinced that their amiable gesture was in fact a rejection of the influence of politics in sports. In stating their renunciation of the aggressive divide between their two countries, the girls were in fact acknowledging its significance upon current affairs. If their intent was to claim a permanent distinction between sport and politics then the amount of press attention they recieved as a result of "not" saying or doing anything remotely political, quickly dissolved this notion in the minds of everyone else who watched them. In effect, they've given us a compelling doublethink: A contradictory statement; whereby one deceives one's-self into believing exactly what they don't think they do believe.
In trying to be apolitical, the girls have actually made a highly political statement. And have in turn served to raise further doubt as to the validity of China's claim that is necessary for them, and us, to keep their authoritarian reality apart from the neon-wonderland of the Beijing Olympics. However, their free use of deception has only increased the glare of the foreign media spotlight into the truths surrounded the murky smog of Chinese illusion.
End of part One.
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