Beijing’s Olympic Games have left the world enamored with China. Yet corruption and shame blanketed its venues as thickly as the smog that will soon return to harry its inhabitants and visitors.

For all of the hyperbole and praise, you would think China had stopped providing arms to a genocidal regime in Sudan. You would think China had allowed the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet and assured Tibetans basic human rights. You would think China’s communist leadership had sent a signal to an enthralled and giddy world audience that it had turned a new leaf in its oppressive policies towards its own citizens.

Hardly.

It wasn’t freedom or a decisive blow to the genocidal regime it supports that China delivered. It was an admittedly impressive and incredibly enjoyable Olympic farce. Democracies, take note: An upside of totalitarianism, it appears, is the ability to conduct massive, state-sponsored and protest-free global events. One must simply lie, imprison and deceive, while satisfying an audience with pageantry and opulence.

“These were truly exceptional games,” International Olympic Committee Chairman Jacques Rogge said at the end of the games, games that saw as many promises broken as world records.

Seven years ago, China made sweeping assurances that being granted the Olympic Games would ensure a shift in its attitude toward its place in the world and the human rights of those under its control.

Not so.

Most emblematic of this Olympic farce was the discovery that Lin Miaoke, the pretty nine-year-old girl in the red dress who sang China’s “Ode to the Motherland” during the opening ceremony’s most powerful moment, did not, indeed, sing China’s “Ode to the Motherland” during the opening ceremony’s most powerful moment. Instead, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, safely offscreen and invisible to viewers, sang the ode to a global audience while Lin sang or lip-synched into what has been assumed to be a muted microphone.

Chinese organizers, it was said, eschewed Yang’s reportedly “crooked teeth” and “chubby face” for the prettier though less vocally talented Lin. Yang’s voice would be heard, but it was Lin’s pretty face the world would see.

Try explaining that one to your prom date. “I was deemed too ugly by Olympic organizers to sing in front of a billion people.”

But isn’t this deception, this slight of hand, just like China? While the world is enamored with its meteoric rise to superpower status, China is suppressing the religious freedoms of its citizens and visitors. While the world gapes, eyes transfixed upon an Olympic Games unmatched in grandeur, viewership, money spent and records broken, China quietly and faithfully continues to arm and train a regime that has committed and continues to oversee the 21st century’s first genocide.

While businesses around the globe revel in the cheap labor provided by China’s distended population, China presides over a human rights record in Tibet, especially, that would make the Bush administration blush with shame. While the International Olympic Committee slapped itself on the back for completing what it assumed was its most successful Olympics, China presided over a string of broken promises and lies.

A spectacular Olympic Games covers a host of sins.

China promised unfettered access to the Internet for foreign journalists. Journalists, upon arriving in Beijing to cover the games, were shocked to find their access to web topics pertaining to contentious issues within China subject to the same strict controls they were assured would not be in place. As the IOC watched anxiously to see how China would honor its commitment to improve human rights, China enacted a deadly and violent crackdown in Tibet in the months leading up to the games and engaged in a flurry of visa revocations and dissident relocations within China.

China promised the right to protest, albeit in one of three designated protest zones. Not one of the reported 77 protest applications was approved by Chinese authorities, and not a single protest was undertaken at any of the zones. But two elderly Chinese women were arrested and sentenced to “reeducation through labor” for trying.

Promises, promises.

And don’t get me started on those underage Chinese gymnasts — I have a word limit, after all.

China is proving itself to be a nation dangerously intent on hiding not only what the world thinks of it, but what it thinks of itself. It would seem that behind every “Smiling Angel,” as the Chinese press has dubbed the lip synching Lin, is a crooked-toothed Chinese secret.

Let’s hope that, like Yang, China grows out of its awkward stage.

Preferably into something a lot less inclined to support genocide.

Gerald Cox ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.