China furious over leaked Olympic 'opening ceremony' footage

Richard Lloyd Parry in Beijing
From The Times

July 1, 2008

The tense relations between China’s Olympic authorities and the international media took another turn for the worse yesterday after a South Korean television channel broadcast illicit footage of the secret opening ceremony of the Games.

In an embarrassing breach of security, journalists from Seoul Broadcasting System walked into the Bird’s Nest national stadium and filmed rehearsals for the ceremony, which will be attended by world leaders, including President Bush, next Friday.

The footage, which was posted on the internet before being removed from several sites at the insistence of the furious Beijing Olympic organisation, showed hundreds of dancers bedecked with ribbons, acrobats suspended from wires, musicians, actors and martial arts fighters, and vast visual projections of blue whales and an immense illuminated globe.

One section featured musicians on a square float playing crashing cymbals in the style of the Beijing Opera and another consisted of the unfolding of a giant traditional scroll painting of misty mountains on which gymnasts cavorted. Hundreds of square columns were seen to undulate like the sea and at the climax a crowd of people carrying flash cards displayed numbers in a countdown to the beginning of the Games.

One detail that was not witnessed by the film crew was the method of lighting the Olympic torch. The speculation is that it will be performed by a flying dragon or a phoenix.

The ceremony is the creation of Zhang Jigang, a choreographer and general in the People’s Liberation Army, and Zhang Yimou, the Oscar-nominated director of films such as Raise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers. The Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, who had agreed to act as a creative consultant to the ceremony, dropped out this year in protest at Chinese support for the Sudanese Government.

The organisers have not been able to hide one predictable element of the ceremony — a display of fireworks that were tested above the Bird’s Nest last week — but they have gone to elaborate lengths to prevent any other details of the show from leaking out. All participants and observers of the rehearsals have been obliged to sign a confidentiality agreement exposing them to sanction if they break its terms.

Three layers of police surround the Bird’s Nest and all the Olympic facilities have multiple check points where security staff scan bags and check accreditation. Yet the Korean television crew said that they simply walked into the stadium from the broadcasting centre and started filming.

“The purpose of the broadcast was aimed at heightening enthusiasm toward the Beijing Olympics by showing South Korean viewers the magnificence of the opening ceremony,” Park Jae Man, a spokesman for the broadcasters, said.

“We are disappointed,” a spokesman for the Beijing Organising Committee for the Games, said yesterday. “I’d like to explain that the episodes shown don’t represent the full grandeur of the opening ceremony and we still expect a fantastic occasion on August 8.”

Despite the mildness of the public reaction, staff of the organising committee appeared to have been working behind the scenes to remove the footage. Within a few hours it had been taken off sina.com, a popular Chinese web portal, as well as YouTube, which displayed the message: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party.”

It is thought that 20,000 foreign journalists will be in Beijing for the Games, and their presence — and the expectations they will bring with them — is likely to be one of the biggest challenges to the local authorities. Chinese journalists are monitored closely and controlled by the State; those who do step out of line can find themselves in prison.

China has promised that for the duration of the Games, and in the period leading up to and after them, foreign journalists will be able to travel freely in areas open to foreigners and talk to anyone who consents to be interviewed. But reporters have been repeatedly blocked and detained when attempting to access Tibetan regions of China and interview the relatives of dissidents.