Letters | 23 August 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Bombast in Beijing

Sir: David Tang is right (Diary, 16 August) that Zhang Yimou, the choreographer of the Olympic ceremony, produced ‘maniacal… bombast…’. Mr Tang suggested Pyongyang as a model. But years ago Mr Zhang told me that he could get his films on screen in China, where they were hardly shown, if he made one like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will about the 1936 Nazi Olympics.

Mr Tang mentions the ‘sleight of hand’ of the faked fireworks — which would have got a similarly faking athlete sent home. But that is only one example of the ceremonial Potemkin. The Chinese internet sites admitted everything, afterwards. There was the little girl singer, miming because according to a Politburo member the real singer wasn’t pretty enough; but Zhang Yimou said the little girl on our screens ‘sang pretty well’. The poor thing didn’t know until her father told her after the ceremony that she had been dubbed.