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BEIJING — Gymnasts, shymnasts: As one of my colleagues remarked recently upon watching the entry of the female athletes into the stadium, "Why, it's the March of the Pygmies."
As one of them, Canada's own Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs giggled the other day, she doesn't worry about which girl is how old, because "in gymnastics everyone looks about 10 years old anyway."
It matters, of course, because the reason the minimum age has been steadily rising over the years — from 10 to the present 16, this brought in after the 1996 Olympics — is ostensibly to protect the health of very young competitors, though in that case there should be a daily caloric minimum rule too. The issue also matters because if some federations are cheating and entering underage youngsters (who may have the fearless and flexibility advantage over the merely pre-pubescent), the playing field isn't level.
Still, it's hard to get worked up into a fever of outrage, gymnastics being one of those Olympic sports that has it all — bad, melodramatic music played at full volume, glitter and eye shadow, kids with teddy bear backpacks and, most egregiously, judges. It's pretty much outrageous from start to finish.
Bottom line, in Canada the age rule means that a 14-year-old girl can have consensual sex (so long as her partner is not more than five years her senior). She just can't be an Olympic gymnast.
What is of real interest in the reporting of this story is, unusually, the reporting. Credit is due bloggers here in China, and ex-pat professor Xiao Qiang (now at the School of Journalism in Berkeley, Calif.) and his China Digital Times Internet research group for leading the way on some of the major fraud-and-fakery stories of these Olympics.
It is the Chinese who allegedly have been cheating and falsifying the ages of at least three of their girl gymnasts, most recently the sprite He Kexin, around whom the latest controversy rages.
What is really creepy about what's emerged from the reporting of the gymnastics controversy is how state-owned agencies have rewritten themselves online to "correct" the record — in other words, rewritten history and attempted to expunge any contrary evidence.
As the China Daily News reports, the story picked up by mainstream outlets, it isn't just that the Chinese government has denied the allegations and pointed to the gymnasts' passports for evidence that they are indeed old enough to be here.
It isn't just that some of those early online stories have disappeared from the web.
What the researchers also found was that in several instances, the stories which had reported the 'wrong' ages — either written before the girls in question made the Olympic team or before anyone realized age mattered so much, the numbers were simply mentions in results-driven stories about various competitions — have been corrected to reflect the 'right', or state-approved, ages.
In one example from May of this year, the online version of the China Daily newspaper cheerfully reported the dazzling arrival of a new face, the aforementioned He, and her age as 14.
Now the same edition of the story — identical in all other regards — reports He's age as 16.
Only the 'cached' version of the original story unearthed by the researchers points to the truth.
In another example, on Dec. 1 last year, Sohu Sports Online reported He's age as 13; the new corrected version, identical as the original in every other way, now gives her age as 15.
For a good capsule description of the media situation in China, see Philip P. Pan's new book, Out of Mao's Shadow. The former long-time Washington Post Beijing bureau chief left this country only late last year, so his information is up to date.
As he notes in a chapter about the brave young newspaperman Cheng Yizhong, the former editor of the upstart Southern Metropolis Daily who ended up in jail for pushing the boundaries of state authority, "Like all newspapers in China, the Daily was owned by the state and the party appointed its editors." And its journalists knew, as most do, when they printed lies.
"It pained them to participate in such deceit," Pan writes, "but that was not what set them apart from their peers in the propaganda apparatus." Where many journalists aspired to do more than repeat the party's lies, the editors of the Southern Metropolis Daily refused to drop dangerous stories (such as the truth about the SARS epidemic) and broke others (notably, the story of a college student named Sun Zhigang who was beaten to death at one of the government's notorious shourong detention centres, part of a series that led the government to close the centres).
Ultimately, party propaganda officials cracked down hard and, in the end, Cheng and two senior executives at the paper were jailed, though Cheng was released after about five months. Last time Pan saw him, late last year, he said that where he once believed the Communist Party could reform itself and that journalists would accelerate the process, he now believed the system was beyond redemption.
"The worst thing that happened to me," he told Pan, "was that I lost all hope in the system."
What must he think of this latest trend to erasing the past by altering or getting rid of the documentary evidence? It is nothing less than what George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or what Winston Smith, the main character, believed was 1984, and he wasn't sure because history was being scraped so clean, every hour of every day, that it was impossible to know.
Smith was employed at the Ministry of Truth, a cog in the huge bureaucracy devoted to rewriting and baldly changing — the minor and the important — the record of what happened, all of them busily deleting the evidence of their work even as they did it. As Smith once said, "In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place."
So, in the end, it's not the Chinese gymnasts or how old they are that counts; it's the Chinese censors propagandists and professional liars, and what they're doing, that tells the tale.
