Alpha Mummy: how would you comfort Yang Peiyi? | China imports 'cheer squads'

She warmed more than a billion hearts with her sweet and pure rendition of one of China’s favourite revolutionary anthems at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

As Lin Miaoke sang sweetly through Ode to the Motherland in the Bird’s Nest stadium on Friday night, an emerging superpower swelled with pride at their beautiful little songbird in her red dress and cute pigtails.

But as she was fêted across China yesterday for a charming performance that made her a star, the Beijing schoolgirl was exposed as a fake.

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Far from being angel-voiced, it seems Miaoke was simply angel-faced, as it emerged that she did not sing a note.

The real singer was Yang Peiyi, a seven-year-old deemed not pretty enough to be the face of China’s most watched moment in history.

Chubby-cheeked with crooked teeth, she was substituted at the eleventh hour by Communist Party officials desperate to present the best possible image of Chinese youth to a curious world.

After watching a rehearsal with Peiyi in the lead role, a senior member of the Politburo told Beijing Olympic organisers that they had an urgent problem that needed fixing.

The solution was to front Peiyi’s “perfect” voice with the more acceptable face of Miaoke, who had already appeared in a television advert.

“The reason why little Peiyi was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image. The reason was for the national interest,” said Chen Qigang, the renowned contemporary composer and French citizen who directed the music for the opening ceremony.

“The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feelings and expression. Lin Miaoke is excellent in those aspects but in terms of voice Yang Peiyi is perfect.”

The lip-synching revelation is the latest in a line of admissions by the Chinese organisers that not everything at these Games is what it seems.