@eswn – Until I saw the source I was inclined not to believe you, but military-related sites are classic for that kind of thing.
Nimrodsays
There is a thing called fill-flash, even before Photoshop was invented…
JXiesays
Excuse my dirty thought: will they grow up as hot as the hottest chick in the Olympic Games, Xue Chen?
MoneyBallsays
@eswn,
looks like 2 kids are inserted to the backgroud, but them hugging together is prob real.
Charles Liusays
DJ, thanks for the photo. While trying to track down the origin of this photo I found another one where Yang and Lin where together near the Birdnest – during the opening ceremoney.
I only hope the two girls will grow up to be healthy, strong, well-rounded young women. They did nothing wrong. It’s the grown-ups who made asses out of themselves. At this point, I’d say let this “scandal” rest, and let the girls be who they are, kids.
To the Photoshop noobs… in the immortal words of Snoopy, “Bleah!”
S.K. Cheungsays
Looks real to me. If the focal zone is on the foreground, the background will look a little hazy. Then factor in the “mist”.
JXiesays
Jane, you are right. My comment was inappropriate. What I should have said is, both these young girls are 美人胚子。
Xiaosays
Both girls are lovely and pretty. I would say whoever made the fake singing decision is so silly, it is just like the Chinese idiom: 画蛇添足 , adding feet when drawing snake.
yesterdayoncemoresays
“Both girls are lovely and pretty. I would say whoever made the fake singing decision is so silly, it is just like the Chinese idiom: 画蛇添足 , adding feet when drawing snake.”
i agree with you.
Bensonsays
They are quite hot for 16 year olds.
ChinkTalksays
What does “adding feet when drawing snake” mean
eswnsays
“adding feet when drawing snake”
a painter has drawn the perfect snake.
but he could not leave it alone.
he had time on hand and he had too fertile an imagination.
so he had to add feet for the snake as embellishment.
that totally ruined the effect because who has ever seen snakes with feet?
sometimes people should learn to leave things alone.
the extra push can actually be detrimental.
wumingsays
I have wrote this before, but let me repeat here.
Lip sync was necessary as long as they let a 7-9 year-old to perform the song. Singing live in front of such a large audience, at such a weighty occasion is much too heavy a burden to put on the shoulders of 7-9 year-old. Miaoke was chosen to be on stage in large part due to her stage presence (which she got through her acting experience)
Just imagine if they had let Peiyi or Miaoke sang live and mistake were made, then everyone will condemning the producers and China for wanton disregard of children’s welfare.
Gan Lusays
I have no problem with the lip synching. I don’t care if the singers are 7 or 77, lip synching is probably the only safe way to go when you’re dealing with something like the opening ceremony of the Olympics. That said, Liu Huan (the Chinese man who sang the awful, cheesy duet “You and Me” with Sarah Brightman) is way, way uglier than Yang Peiyi and they let him show his face in front of everyone. In fact, you could run Yang Peiyi over with a truck and she’d still be better looking than Liu Huan. While not as pretty as Lin Miaoke, she is still an attractive child. This is truly a case of our friends in the Standing Committee getting a bug up their ass for no reason at all.
wumingsays
“This is truly a case of our friends in the Standing Committee getting a bug up their ass for no reason at all.”
Well, this is just another well rebutted myth. The said Poliburo friend of yours did not replace Peiyi by Miaoke, instead he insisted that somebody other than Miaoke’s voice has to be used. Do people read the original post anymore?
leesays
I have to agree with wuming. In fact I was always under the impression that most performers, regardless of age, lipsynch at big performances such as the Olympics. I recall watching the opening ceremony of the 2002 world cup, and it was obvious that the singers were lipsynching, because the song sounded exactly like the studio version. And it is not easy to perform in front of thousands, even more so for a little kid. How many adults – let alone kids – would have the guts to do that? Not just to sing (or mime) without getting a panic attack, but to perform the song with emotion and sincerity so she could connect with the audience on a much deeper level than say, Paris Hilton? It’s not easy. Most pop singers can’t do it. So when you find a little girl who can do it, of course you want her to perform. She would definitely deliver the performance of a lifetime. But her performance could be made even better if she were to lipsynch to another little girl’s flawless singing. What exactly is wrong with this? Why is it so wrong to strive for perfection in everything we do? Both girls were given credit for the performance. It would not have been as wonderful as it was if one of them was left out. It was a team effort, and the media should have portrayed it as such right from the beginning, instead of bawling about how one of them was ‘sidelined’ because she was ‘too ugly’. Yang Peiyi was not left out of the ceremony because she was too ugly. Yang Peiyi was chosen to record the song because she had the best voice of all the girls who auditioned. Lin Miaoke wasn’t asked to lipsynch because her voice was horrible. She was asked to perform the song because she was the best at expressing her feelings and connecting with the audience.
spring2007says
“Bloggers in China and Hong Kong, notably Roland Song at EastSouthWestNorth, have combed through transcripts of all the comments by the important players in the opening ceremony and found that none of them have publicly said anything of the sort.”
I hope DJ won’t mind :-). It is good to see this opinion got published, although I think it is still too mild.
Charles Liusays
Thank you Spring. I wonder where Kathleen Park’s “Nazi deceit” parallel should really be drawn…
DJsays
Oh I certainly don’t mind. It’s nice to see something like this coming up.
S.K. Cheungsays
To Wuming #17:
no one, I don’t think, objects to lip-synching per se, especially at something as huge as Olympic opening ceremonies…Britney Spears and countless others do it at awards shows all the time. But they’re doing it to their own voice. On the other hand, this is Milli Vanilli style lip synching. I think that is the difference.
Charles Liusays
Earth to SK – none of the Disney characters lip sync to their own voice during the parade. And Ariel is a fake mermaid.
S.K. Cheungsays
Disneyland To Charles:
glad you’re comparing the Olympic Opening Ceremonies to the Parade of Dreams. If that’s the standard, then you’re all over it. Having said that, the Disney characters aren’t real, and no one is lead to believe that the voices belong to the actors; I suspect these 2 little girls are real, but we were lead to believe the voice belonged to the face, until it was found to be otherwise.
Edit: The above link no longer works, here is a replacement:
It is an interesting picture. It was likely taken on the day of the ceremony because Lin was in her red dress. Imagine if Lin caught a flu that day, maybe Yang would be on the stage. I wonder if anyone had found the picture of Lei Cixin.
leesays
@SK: Yang Peiyi was credited in the opening ceremony programme handout. I really don’t see what is wrong with being ‘led to believe the voice belonged to the face’. It’s a show – there will always be ‘artificial elements’ in any show, be it live or prerecorded, to enhance the audience’s enjoyment of it. By your own reasoning, we should refuse to watch any action movies in which the actors don’t perform dangerous stunts themselves, because the poor stunt men aren’t given due credit and the audience are being ‘led to believe’ that Tom Cruise or whoever is really jumping off a fifty storey building! Or we should refuse to read Alan Greenspan’s book because it was ghostwritten, and the poor ghostwriter is not even credited in it!
S.K. Cheungsays
To Lee:
you should refuse to read ghostwritten books.
Stunt men are always credited in movies. Does anyone actually think Tom Cruise jumped out of the blown out side of the building in Mission Impossible 2? I think most adults would realize that Tom jumped off a contraption in front of a green screen, and everything was filled in by CG later. We know the deal, and we willingly suspend our disbelief for the escapism of the movies. And if you asked Tom: did you really jump out of a hole in the side of a building, i suspect he would readily tell you how the shot was done, without you having to show raw footage as proof first.
I thought the Opening Ceremonies were supposed to be artistic (and they were), but I didn’t think it was supposed to be escapism or required the suspension of disbelief.
BEIJING–The girl who sang a song lip-synched by another girl at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, has become depressed, according to her teacher.
Yang Peiyi, 7, of Beijing, sang a patriotic song at the Aug. 8 ceremony, but it was Lin Miaoke, 9, also of the city, who appeared in front of the audience.
The ceremony’s music director later revealed Lin’s performance had been lip-synched.
Yang “seems hurt and depressed,” the teacher wrote on her blog, adding that the young singer was somewhere “far away” because her parents do not want her to have to deal with more media attention over the incident.
According to the blog, on the night of Aug. 18 Yang watched a TV show in which Lin appeared.
The show’s host did not explain that it was Yang’s singing that was heard during the Opening Ceremony.
Yang went to bed after the show ended, looking depressed and without saying a word.
The following morning, teeth marks could be seen on her arm, suggesting that she had bitten herself.
The teacher says she thinks Yang is at a loss to understand why she keeps having to be hidden from the public. “Don’t hurt her any more,” the teacher said in the blog.
(Aug 24, 2008)
HLLsays
Revealed: Sydney Olympics faked it too
“As a result, the Sydney Symphony’s confirmation that it mimed its entire performance at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics comes as something of a shock. Even worse, it admits the backing tape was recorded, in part, by its southern rival, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.”
Lol… that’s a good one. Proves my point that when controlled for all variables, the only reason China is on the hook for any of this, is the insidious pre-existing and long-running stereotype that Chinese are producers of fakes.
Michellesays
Speaking of fakes, i wonder when the DVD stores are going to open again! (joke…)
Actually I think the reason why this was an issue is because it concerns children, not fakes. It’s probably a cultural thing. If it was an adult woman singing and it was later revealed that she was lip-synching to someone elses voice, i don’t think the story would have legs. Similarly, if this same story (with kids) happened in, say, the US, i think it would receive the same condemnation. It’s more people using the same standards they would use to judge themselves in absence of knowledge of anything different. Completely natural part of cross cultural learning, if annoying. If this happens again (lip-synching), say at the opening of the Paralympics, I’d guess no one will care because they’ll understand that it’s normal in China and no biggie.
Michellesays
I think it’s worth remembering that when you burst on the stage after 30 fast years of development, you either expect that the rest of the world’s perceptions to have kept up (tall order) or that there will be a bit of cultural lag. Unfortunatly, our ability to adapt, adopt, internalise and project new information about cultures is not as efficient as the central governments ability to develop China.
Nimrodsays
Is that a back-handed compliment for the Chinese government? Haha, seriously, I think people should visit China more. It’s not about letting them see all the glitter and gloss. I actually want people to see the worst of China, so they have a backstop on their views about how bad China actually is, instead of going on active imaginations and what they read in 1984.
As an analytical person, I’ve never understood how most people who proffer up solutions for China’s “problems” can have not even an intuitive feeling of what China is like, nevermind what China’s problems are.
Michellesays
@Nimrod
🙂 No back hand intended… I agree with you as someone who’s been here (there) (China) for a long time. I think our various countries are not on the same page *yet* culturally but we’ll get there with work. I often forget how very much my experiences have changed and broadened my way of thinking, but then i go home and get asked benign but really bizarre questions from family and friends, and it’s not a China thing, it’s just an exposure (or lack of) thing.
If I were ruler of the world, i’d make a year working abroad mandatory for all college grads.
kiransays
cute gls.no children is bad and worse they r the face of god.and they love each other long live this friendship.
Lucesays
Does anyone know where Yang Peiyi is now?
Alicesays
@Luce/everyone Yang Peiyi, Shes actually growing up to be a matur girl. Look at this video, she finally gets some hope, and most of all i would definitly get stressed if i couldn’t sing my own song, Yang Peiyi was honoured, calm, brave. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxUVCvarYzI&feature=related
image found at 世界军事论坛.
Dandan says
2 sweet sweet little angles!
eswn says
PhotoShop job? The lighting of the people is very different from the background …
FOARP says
@eswn – Until I saw the source I was inclined not to believe you, but military-related sites are classic for that kind of thing.
Nimrod says
There is a thing called fill-flash, even before Photoshop was invented…
JXie says
Excuse my dirty thought: will they grow up as hot as the hottest chick in the Olympic Games, Xue Chen?
MoneyBall says
@eswn,
looks like 2 kids are inserted to the backgroud, but them hugging together is prob real.
Charles Liu says
DJ, thanks for the photo. While trying to track down the origin of this photo I found another one where Yang and Lin where together near the Birdnest – during the opening ceremoney.
http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=%D1%EE%C5%E6%D2%CB%C1%D6%C3%EE%BF%C9&in=13325&cl=2&cm=1&sc=0&lm=-1&pn=0&rn=1&di=323568005&ln=2
Wow, Yang was not banned after all.
Jane says
@JXie,
That is an inappropriate comment.
I only hope the two girls will grow up to be healthy, strong, well-rounded young women. They did nothing wrong. It’s the grown-ups who made asses out of themselves. At this point, I’d say let this “scandal” rest, and let the girls be who they are, kids.
MutantJedi says
Very sweet!
To the Photoshop noobs… in the immortal words of Snoopy, “Bleah!”
S.K. Cheung says
Looks real to me. If the focal zone is on the foreground, the background will look a little hazy. Then factor in the “mist”.
JXie says
Jane, you are right. My comment was inappropriate. What I should have said is, both these young girls are 美人胚子。
Xiao says
Both girls are lovely and pretty. I would say whoever made the fake singing decision is so silly, it is just like the Chinese idiom: 画蛇添足 , adding feet when drawing snake.
yesterdayoncemore says
“Both girls are lovely and pretty. I would say whoever made the fake singing decision is so silly, it is just like the Chinese idiom: 画蛇添足 , adding feet when drawing snake.”
i agree with you.
Benson says
They are quite hot for 16 year olds.
ChinkTalk says
What does “adding feet when drawing snake” mean
eswn says
“adding feet when drawing snake”
a painter has drawn the perfect snake.
but he could not leave it alone.
he had time on hand and he had too fertile an imagination.
so he had to add feet for the snake as embellishment.
that totally ruined the effect because who has ever seen snakes with feet?
sometimes people should learn to leave things alone.
the extra push can actually be detrimental.
wuming says
I have wrote this before, but let me repeat here.
Lip sync was necessary as long as they let a 7-9 year-old to perform the song. Singing live in front of such a large audience, at such a weighty occasion is much too heavy a burden to put on the shoulders of 7-9 year-old. Miaoke was chosen to be on stage in large part due to her stage presence (which she got through her acting experience)
Just imagine if they had let Peiyi or Miaoke sang live and mistake were made, then everyone will condemning the producers and China for wanton disregard of children’s welfare.
Gan Lu says
I have no problem with the lip synching. I don’t care if the singers are 7 or 77, lip synching is probably the only safe way to go when you’re dealing with something like the opening ceremony of the Olympics. That said, Liu Huan (the Chinese man who sang the awful, cheesy duet “You and Me” with Sarah Brightman) is way, way uglier than Yang Peiyi and they let him show his face in front of everyone. In fact, you could run Yang Peiyi over with a truck and she’d still be better looking than Liu Huan. While not as pretty as Lin Miaoke, she is still an attractive child. This is truly a case of our friends in the Standing Committee getting a bug up their ass for no reason at all.
wuming says
“This is truly a case of our friends in the Standing Committee getting a bug up their ass for no reason at all.”
Well, this is just another well rebutted myth. The said Poliburo friend of yours did not replace Peiyi by Miaoke, instead he insisted that somebody other than Miaoke’s voice has to be used. Do people read the original post anymore?
lee says
I have to agree with wuming. In fact I was always under the impression that most performers, regardless of age, lipsynch at big performances such as the Olympics. I recall watching the opening ceremony of the 2002 world cup, and it was obvious that the singers were lipsynching, because the song sounded exactly like the studio version. And it is not easy to perform in front of thousands, even more so for a little kid. How many adults – let alone kids – would have the guts to do that? Not just to sing (or mime) without getting a panic attack, but to perform the song with emotion and sincerity so she could connect with the audience on a much deeper level than say, Paris Hilton? It’s not easy. Most pop singers can’t do it. So when you find a little girl who can do it, of course you want her to perform. She would definitely deliver the performance of a lifetime. But her performance could be made even better if she were to lipsynch to another little girl’s flawless singing. What exactly is wrong with this? Why is it so wrong to strive for perfection in everything we do? Both girls were given credit for the performance. It would not have been as wonderful as it was if one of them was left out. It was a team effort, and the media should have portrayed it as such right from the beginning, instead of bawling about how one of them was ‘sidelined’ because she was ‘too ugly’. Yang Peiyi was not left out of the ceremony because she was too ugly. Yang Peiyi was chosen to record the song because she had the best voice of all the girls who auditioned. Lin Miaoke wasn’t asked to lipsynch because her voice was horrible. She was asked to perform the song because she was the best at expressing her feelings and connecting with the audience.
spring2007 says
“Bloggers in China and Hong Kong, notably Roland Song at EastSouthWestNorth, have combed through transcripts of all the comments by the important players in the opening ceremony and found that none of them have publicly said anything of the sort.”
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/western-media-shows-its-ugly-face/2008/08/21/1219262408623.html
I hope DJ won’t mind :-). It is good to see this opinion got published, although I think it is still too mild.
Charles Liu says
Thank you Spring. I wonder where Kathleen Park’s “Nazi deceit” parallel should really be drawn…
DJ says
Oh I certainly don’t mind. It’s nice to see something like this coming up.
S.K. Cheung says
To Wuming #17:
no one, I don’t think, objects to lip-synching per se, especially at something as huge as Olympic opening ceremonies…Britney Spears and countless others do it at awards shows all the time. But they’re doing it to their own voice. On the other hand, this is Milli Vanilli style lip synching. I think that is the difference.
Charles Liu says
Earth to SK – none of the Disney characters lip sync to their own voice during the parade. And Ariel is a fake mermaid.
S.K. Cheung says
Disneyland To Charles:
glad you’re comparing the Olympic Opening Ceremonies to the Parade of Dreams. If that’s the standard, then you’re all over it. Having said that, the Disney characters aren’t real, and no one is lead to believe that the voices belong to the actors; I suspect these 2 little girls are real, but we were lead to believe the voice belonged to the face, until it was found to be otherwise.
HLL says
@Charles Liu
Here is a direct link to the photo you found:
http://hiphotos.baidu.com/nowers/pic/item/e06badfb5ede857c034f56d4.jpg
Edit: The above link no longer works, here is a replacement:
It is an interesting picture. It was likely taken on the day of the ceremony because Lin was in her red dress. Imagine if Lin caught a flu that day, maybe Yang would be on the stage. I wonder if anyone had found the picture of Lei Cixin.
lee says
@SK: Yang Peiyi was credited in the opening ceremony programme handout. I really don’t see what is wrong with being ‘led to believe the voice belonged to the face’. It’s a show – there will always be ‘artificial elements’ in any show, be it live or prerecorded, to enhance the audience’s enjoyment of it. By your own reasoning, we should refuse to watch any action movies in which the actors don’t perform dangerous stunts themselves, because the poor stunt men aren’t given due credit and the audience are being ‘led to believe’ that Tom Cruise or whoever is really jumping off a fifty storey building! Or we should refuse to read Alan Greenspan’s book because it was ghostwritten, and the poor ghostwriter is not even credited in it!
S.K. Cheung says
To Lee:
you should refuse to read ghostwritten books.
Stunt men are always credited in movies. Does anyone actually think Tom Cruise jumped out of the blown out side of the building in Mission Impossible 2? I think most adults would realize that Tom jumped off a contraption in front of a green screen, and everything was filled in by CG later. We know the deal, and we willingly suspend our disbelief for the escapism of the movies. And if you asked Tom: did you really jump out of a hole in the side of a building, i suspect he would readily tell you how the shot was done, without you having to show raw footage as proof first.
I thought the Opening Ceremonies were supposed to be artistic (and they were), but I didn’t think it was supposed to be escapism or required the suspension of disbelief.
Chicken says
Extracted from Online news :-
http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Asia/Story/A1Story20080824-83944.html
Lip-synched girl at Games ‘depressed, confused’
BEIJING–The girl who sang a song lip-synched by another girl at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, has become depressed, according to her teacher.
Yang Peiyi, 7, of Beijing, sang a patriotic song at the Aug. 8 ceremony, but it was Lin Miaoke, 9, also of the city, who appeared in front of the audience.
The ceremony’s music director later revealed Lin’s performance had been lip-synched.
Yang “seems hurt and depressed,” the teacher wrote on her blog, adding that the young singer was somewhere “far away” because her parents do not want her to have to deal with more media attention over the incident.
According to the blog, on the night of Aug. 18 Yang watched a TV show in which Lin appeared.
The show’s host did not explain that it was Yang’s singing that was heard during the Opening Ceremony.
Yang went to bed after the show ended, looking depressed and without saying a word.
The following morning, teeth marks could be seen on her arm, suggesting that she had bitten herself.
The teacher says she thinks Yang is at a loss to understand why she keeps having to be hidden from the public. “Don’t hurt her any more,” the teacher said in the blog.
(Aug 24, 2008)
HLL says
Revealed: Sydney Olympics faked it too
“As a result, the Sydney Symphony’s confirmation that it mimed its entire performance at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics comes as something of a shock. Even worse, it admits the backing tape was recorded, in part, by its southern rival, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.”
http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/sydney-olympics-faked-opening-too/2008/08/26/1219516425771.html
Nimrod says
Lol… that’s a good one. Proves my point that when controlled for all variables, the only reason China is on the hook for any of this, is the insidious pre-existing and long-running stereotype that Chinese are producers of fakes.
Michelle says
Speaking of fakes, i wonder when the DVD stores are going to open again! (joke…)
Actually I think the reason why this was an issue is because it concerns children, not fakes. It’s probably a cultural thing. If it was an adult woman singing and it was later revealed that she was lip-synching to someone elses voice, i don’t think the story would have legs. Similarly, if this same story (with kids) happened in, say, the US, i think it would receive the same condemnation. It’s more people using the same standards they would use to judge themselves in absence of knowledge of anything different. Completely natural part of cross cultural learning, if annoying. If this happens again (lip-synching), say at the opening of the Paralympics, I’d guess no one will care because they’ll understand that it’s normal in China and no biggie.
Michelle says
I think it’s worth remembering that when you burst on the stage after 30 fast years of development, you either expect that the rest of the world’s perceptions to have kept up (tall order) or that there will be a bit of cultural lag. Unfortunatly, our ability to adapt, adopt, internalise and project new information about cultures is not as efficient as the central governments ability to develop China.
Nimrod says
Is that a back-handed compliment for the Chinese government? Haha, seriously, I think people should visit China more. It’s not about letting them see all the glitter and gloss. I actually want people to see the worst of China, so they have a backstop on their views about how bad China actually is, instead of going on active imaginations and what they read in 1984.
As an analytical person, I’ve never understood how most people who proffer up solutions for China’s “problems” can have not even an intuitive feeling of what China is like, nevermind what China’s problems are.
Michelle says
@Nimrod
🙂 No back hand intended… I agree with you as someone who’s been here (there) (China) for a long time. I think our various countries are not on the same page *yet* culturally but we’ll get there with work. I often forget how very much my experiences have changed and broadened my way of thinking, but then i go home and get asked benign but really bizarre questions from family and friends, and it’s not a China thing, it’s just an exposure (or lack of) thing.
If I were ruler of the world, i’d make a year working abroad mandatory for all college grads.
kiran says
cute gls.no children is bad and worse they r the face of god.and they love each other long live this friendship.
Luce says
Does anyone know where Yang Peiyi is now?
Alice says
@Luce/everyone Yang Peiyi, Shes actually growing up to be a matur girl. Look at this video, she finally gets some hope, and most of all i would definitly get stressed if i couldn’t sing my own song, Yang Peiyi was honoured, calm, brave. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxUVCvarYzI&feature=related