Not that I agree with anything he says. ;)
So I know that this blog has been mostly about the election so far, but I figured there was another issue that should be discussed.
Is anyone else beginning to notice how horribly corrupt China is? I'm not really talking about major political issues in this case (I'll get to that at some point, I promise), but all the same, the things that have been recently brought to my attention are nothing short of appalling.
First, the matter of the Chinese women's gymnastics team.
Olympic rules clearly state that any athlete competing in the games, regardless of country of origin, must be at least sixteen years of age by December 31st of the year of the games.
Now, that being said, take a look at China's women's team.
Do they all look sixteen to you? No, I didn't think so.
To anyone with half a brain, it is quite evident that more than half of China's team is underage. The problem is, China wants girls as young as possible, because the smaller and thinner their gymnasts are, the more agile and flexible they are, giving China the athletic advantage. So how are these girls being allowed to compete when they are so very obviously underage? The answer is simple, but somewhat shocking. China falsified papers for all of their underage gymnasts, altering their birthdates so that "legally" they are sixteen, or will be by the end of this year. In my opinion, China should be disqualified for these despicable actions, but two problems arise. First, there may well be no solid proof of the alterations, seeing as now the that papers have been permanently altered, the chances that there are still living copies of the originals is slim. Second, though most of us are seething and waiting for China to be punished, who is there to penalize? It isn't really fair to take the medals away from the girls on the team, after they worked so hard to earn a spot on the team in the first place. It wasn't as if they were going to turn down a spot on the Olympic team, falsified papers or no falsified papers. They shouldn't have been offered the positions in the first place, but what's done is done, and these young girls can't be charged for the actions of upper authorities. Said upper authorities should, logically, be the ones to take responsibility and be penalized for their actions, but the likelihood of that outcome is probably coupled with that of Obama choosing Hillary Clinton as a running mate.
And as if that isn't enough, there's this whole lip syncing fiasco, which I'm sure most of us have heard of by now. To save time, I'll give you the short version.
If you watched the Olympic opening ceremony, you saw the cute little girl with the pigtails, seven-year-old Lin Miaoke, do crazy stunts on the trapeze and singing "Ode To The Motherland." As it turns out, it wasn't actually her doing the singing. The girl who was actually doing the singing was nine-year-old Yang Peiyi, who, with her "chubby face and crooked baby teeth" apparently wasn't cute enough for China's opening ceremonies.
Let me give you a second to digest that.
That's right. They decided that this nine-year-old girl, who had the "perfect" voice, apparently wasn't good looking enough for their ceremonies, so they picked some other girl who they deemed cuter, and synced the voice with the face.
Anybody else want to vomit?
China is so completely obsessed with their image that they're going to unimaginable lengths to preserve it. This girl is nine years old. Honestly, this is ridiculous. I think what China doesn't realize is that their plan is sort of backfiring; the harder they try to preserve their image by doing things that the rest of us find vomit-inducing, the more they look like image-obsessed criminals, which, honestly, is what they're beginning to turn into.
Apparently, China's noble quest for perfection includes corrupted officials and hiding their less-than-perfect children.
One last thing for you to chew on before I leave you.
You know all those pretty fireworks you saw on your telly on the night of opening ceremonies?
Half of them were prerecorded and then rebroadcasted.
Three cheers for façades!
Goodnight, and good luck.
/Edit.
In interest of the subject at hand, I recently read an article by Mitch Albom in the Free Press highlighting exactly the points I wished to cover, but doing so much more eloquently than I could manage. Hopefully, this will bring a little more professional insight to this topic.
China's tiny gymnasts in service to the gold
Mitch Albom
BEIJING -- What did you expect? Any country that would lip-sync out a 7-year-old singer because she wasn't cute enough for the opening ceremony wouldn't hesitate to use underage children to capture gold medals. That's a no-brainer. There is what you see and there is what really goes on in China, and what you see at these Games, the image they project, is as precious as oxygen to the New Emperor of the Planet. Who cares if a gymnast is so young she is, as one critic charged, "missing a tooth"?
"Deng ..." a reporter, according to Reuters, asked a Chinese gymnast who looks small enough to pack in a suitcase, "what Chinese zodiac animal are you?"
"A monkey," Deng responded.
Not only was it the correct chronological answer, it was dead on in the irony department. Every four years, female gymnasts become dueling national Tinker Bells. And while we ignore their sport in between, during the Olympics it's as if our existence hangs in the balance.
China beat the U.S. for gold in the team competition, and it became a drama and a controversy. Tonight, they battle for the individual title of Olympic champion.
Brace yourself. It's barefoot war out there.
A question for the ages
America gasped when our blonde pixies slipped and stumbled. Alicia Sacramone, a 20-year-old from Boston (making her almost a grandma), fell off her balance beam mount and plopped on her rump during the floor exercise. Her teammates, at times, seemed wobbly.
Meanwhile, the Chinese girls, performing before a raucous home crowd, delivered mostly flawless performances and waved with wild exuberance before, presumably, being put down for their naps.
You must turn 16 in the Olympic year to compete in this sport. But honestly. This one girl? Deng Linlin? She's 16 the way I'm 16. All the girls are tiny: She looks up to them. Previous registrations for events suggest several Chinese gymnasts may barely be 14 (even that is hard to believe), but all you need for the Games is a valid passport, and, surprise, the team has those. Who are you going to interrogate? The Chinese president?
Instead, Deng and her teammates were grilled by journalists with: "How did you spend your 15th birthday?" "What are your memories of it?" All that was missing were the hot lights and the cops.
But they won. That's what matters here. If you're looking for outrage, remember that not long ago, with its One Child policy, little girls were in danger of being killed over here or, at the least, shipped out for adoption. Now, in service to the state, they are on a pedestal.
It's a win-or-else mentality
But then, China is not in this for the warm and fuzzies. They don't make commercials here about the joy of trying even if you fail. There is an expression you see -- I spotted it at a museum that featured the urban planning of Beijing -- and it goes "Have no best, only better."
Translation for the Olympics: Gold is the minimum. More gold after that.
It is the reason why, as of this writing, China had more gold medals than anyone, and more than three times as many golds as it had silver or bronze. America may have more total hardware, but second or third place is of little interest here. The Chinese planned for years to specialize in sports that yielded multiple medals and go for gold. East Germany did it. So did the Soviet Union.
Now the Chinese are getting their wish -- no matter what the sacrifice -- and we seem more upset over it than they are. When news broke that the darling of the opening ceremony, a cute-as-a-button, pig-tailed singer who performed "Ode to the Motherland" was actually lip-syncing, because the true singer, a 7-year-old girl, was judged by a high-ranking official as not pretty enough, the Western world was aghast. But not the hosts.
"We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance," Chen Qigang, the ceremony's chief music director, told Beijing Radio. "The audience will understand that it's in the national interest."
It may sound cruel and robotic. But Luciano Pavarotti lip-synced his Olympic aria in Torino. And Bela Karolyi, the hysterical gymnastics analyst for NBC who blasts the Chinese for age abuse, was accused of similar things when he was the "enemy" coaching Romania, remember?
Tonight, if an American finishes second, we can say she gave her all. And if a Chinese girl wins gold, her government can say "as expected." It's a barefoot war out there, with young women crying and little girls on the firing line. You can forget sometimes, here in Beijing, that sports are supposed to be fun.
Aren't they?
Edit./
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