First there were reports of fake fireworks during the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Now we learn that the young girl who sang during the same ceremonies was actually a fake. Pigtailed Lin Miaoke appeared on stage in a red dress and lip synched for the real singer, seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who was not considered attractive enough for the job.

“The reason why little Yang was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation,” [Chen Qigang, the general music designer of the ceremony,] said in an interview that appeared briefly on the news website Sina.com before it was apparently wiped from the Internet in China.

The decision to stage the event, Chen said, resulted after a senior member of China’s ruling Communist Party politburo attended a rehearsal and said “there was a problem that we needed to fix it, so we did.” According to Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet project at the University of California at Berkeley and former dissident, the incident illustrates an important aspect of the Beijing games: “It is all about projecting the right image of China with no respect for honesty or for the audience. I do not think the Chinese state realizes how unethical this is, they don’t understand what kind of values they are reflecting.”