Awesome fireworks, adorable singer

When things are too good to be true, they usually are, said my father many decades ago, in an effort to get me wise up to the ways of the world.

When the Olympics opened in Beijing on August 8, the dazzling display of fireworks was awesome. And an achingly sweet nine-year-old sang Ode to the Motherland perfectly.

Too good to be true? You bet your Mao’s Little Red Book it was.

Lin Miaoke, the pretty little girl (picture), has since been exposed as a fake. The ceremony's music director Chen Qigang said Lin was not singing but lip-synching to a recording by another girl, seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who has a chubby face and uneven teeth.

And, guess what, those amazing fireworks that spread over from Tiananmen Square to the main Olympic zone during the opening ceremony, were mostly computer-generated.

Music director Chen told Beijing People's Broadcasting Station that when the opening ceremony team began rehearsing in the Bird's Nest Stadium, top government officials came to watch, "especially a leader from the Politburo, who gave us his opinion, this has to change".

As any good Marxist knows, members of the Politburo are the real rulers of the Communist state – everyone else is just a subordinate. So, if a Politburo member (who is too paiseh to reveal his identity) suggests you change the singer because she doesn’t look pretty enough, you do it pronto.

So, after her recording, little Yang was told to stay home. Lin, on the other hand, went on stage where she looked so adorable that the state-owned China Daily described her as a "songbird" who is "already well on her way to becoming a star, thanks to her heart-warming performance".

Chen said the switch was made because "it was the image of our national music, our national culture. And especially since it accompanied the arrival of the national flag in the arena, this was an extremely serious matter". The change resulted in "a perfect voice and perfect image, merged together" which he thought was fair to both girls.

On the fakey firework display, the Beijing Times said a week after the ceremony that it was "mostly an animated three-dimensional video that was made over a year. It was not actually live footage except the final stage at the stadium itself”.

Gao Xiaolong, a worker in the video team for the opening ceremony, said a video company named Crystal Stone composed the film. "Looking at it from today, the video was a bit brighter than the real fireworks," he said. "But most viewers thought it was live, so we succeeded in the effect we had wanted."

After the revelations, the Chinese authorities maintained a stony silence, and clamped down all reports and discussions in the official media and Web sites. Strangely, it was left to a Westerner to defend the deception.

Gilbert Felli, the IOC's Olympic Games executive director, was asked if switching the singers was the right message to be sending to the children of the world – that appearance, not skill, is what matters.

All he could answer was this mumbo jumbo:

"I think that what was explained to you here is that the opening ceremony is a huge organisation and you've got many players who are giving their opinion about what should be done. And then you have to make sure that the performers and songs are at the highest level. I would say it's a casting or a technical decision by the producer to do it so.

"I think you have to put that into the context of the opening ceremony and the complexity. You've got 15,000 performers in the opening ceremony, and maybe some of them were changed during the preparations. Some got in and some didn't. That's a casting issue you have in every performance.

"Maybe on this one, some people will believe it was inappropriate, but all the others would have said ‘that was fantastic because the performance was raised."

An official of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which is in charge of the Internet in China, claimed: "We know nothing about this."

Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise, as my secondary school English Lit. teacher Mr Matthew used to say, 40 years ago.

Piaseh is a Chinese Hokkien term meaning bashful, usually describing young girls looking for love, but sometimes also red-faced politicians. Read more of paiseh in love.