The irony of China's "openness"

Many, many times in the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics was repeated the theme of "openness," as an ideal and as something China is supporting and striving for (or so ran the message, anyway).

The irony of this is not lost on me, after what we've seen so far, aside from the usual communist control of the message and of the people. After all, when you've invited tons of foreigners into your country, you can't muzzle them all -- they have to go home, call home, talk to outsiders, sometime.

So we have a ceremony preaching openness in which the spectacular opening fireworks (the footprints to the Bird's Nest) were digitally inserted into the TV feed, we now know. We have a message of openness given in song, a song lip-synched by one little girl because the little girl who was actually singing was dubbed not cute enough for international TV.

And of course, we have the infamous girls' gymnastics team -- I'd say "women's," but everything but their state-issued passports (including experts who've worked with gymnasts their whole lives, not to mention articles printed months ago in the country's own state-run newspaper) says they're too young to be legally competing, since the cutoff according to international gymnastics authorities is 16.

I guess we shouldn't expect miracles of openness and honesty out of a communist country. Still, they could've at least tried, at least made a good-faith effort to be as open and honest as possible and let the Games speak for themselves -- after all, how could they not put on an amazing Olympics? Have you ever seen a bad Olympics, honestly? They're always amazing, and it's because of the grand competition and unity of it all, not because of the host country's maneuvering.