You remember Rob and Fab, don’t you? The dudes also known as Milli Vanilli came out in the late 80s with bubblegum pop crap that made the top of the charts. The fact that most of their hit singles all sounded alike didn’t seem to bother anybody.

Anyway, the party ended after they won a grammy and people found out that Rob and Fab were just lip synchers, and the real singers were other people.

Well, at the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the same scam was played out with a nine-year old girl named Lin Miaoke playing the part of Milli Vanilli and another girl Yang Peiyi playing the part of “other people”.

Beijing Olympics: Faking scandal over girl who ’sang’ in opening ceremony:

Chinese officials have admitted deceiving the public over another highlight of the Olympic opening ceremony: the picture-perfect schoolgirl who sang as the Chinese flag entered the stadium was performing to another girl’s voice.

The girl in the red dress with the pigtails, called Lin Miaoke, 9, and from a Beijing primary school, has become a national sensation since Friday night, giving interviews to all the most popular newspapers.

But the show’s musical designer felt forced to set the record straight. He gave an interview to Beijing radio saying the real singer was a seven-year-old girl who had won a grueling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called “Hymn to the Motherland”.

At the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching a rehearsal pronounced that the winner, a girl called Yang Peiyi, might have a perfect voice but was unsuited to the lead role because of her buck teeth. So, on the night, while a pre-recording of Yang Peiyi singing was played, Lin Miaoke, who has already featured in television advertisements, was seen but not heard.

Milli Vanilli on Left, Singer on Right

Officials have already admitted that the pictures of giant firework footprints which marched across Beijing towards the stadium on Friday night were prerecorded, digitally enhanced and inserted into footage beamed across the world.

“The main consideration was the national interest,” he said. “The child on the screen should be flawless in image, in her internal feelings, and in her expression. In the matter of her voice, Yang Peiyi was flawless, in the unanimous opinion of all the members of the team.”
“So we made the choice. I think it is fair to both Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi - after all, we have a perfect voice, a perfect image and a perfect show, in our team’s view, all together.”

It’s not surprising that this stuff happens in high pressure environments like the Olympics, and we don’t think this is a uniquely Chinese thing (you can blast China for more important stuff like human rights, censorship, and pollution). We think China is just copying what the entertainment industry does all the time. At the same time, China has an image problem. This was one of their tricks to get around that. So with that in mind, will the musical designer be shot in the head now for spilling the beans?

What we find more amusing is that China, motherland of fireworks, can’t get fireworks right so they have to do it digitally. That’s just embarrassing.