UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has the goods — actual documents! — on the 14-year-old Chinese gymnast (the girl named “He,” not to be confused with A Boy Named Sue) who competed this week as a 16-year-old.

Good Lord … Is anything in Beijing what it seems?

I’ve already dissected China’s use of a lip-synching 9-year-old “singer” for its national anthem, the computer-generated “footstep” fireworks display, NBC’s omission of Chairman Mao from its analysis of Chinese history, the network’s quiet habit of inserting play-by-play commentary hours after the fact, and the possibility that some of China’s gymnasts may still be young enough to watch the Backyardigans.

And now this from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

In the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, a procession of children bore a large Chinese flag into the Bird’s Nest stadium, each child wearing a costume representing one of China’s ethnic minorities.

However, the children actually were members of the Han majority, an arts official said in an interview. Yuan Zhifeng, deputy director of Galaxy Children’s Art Troupe, said the children were drawn from the all-Han Chinese troupe. “I assume they think the kids were very natural looking and nice,” Ms. Yuan said …

China’s 55 minority groups are officially celebrated, often as curios in pageants to the country’s self-image as a harmonious, multiethnic society. But many live on the margins of the mainstream, poorer and less-educated than their Han countrymen.

From the time babies are born in China, they are assigned an ethnic identifier, a single word printed below their names on their national identification cards. Interethnic couples in China must choose to register their babies as one ethnicity only.

The London Times has the real smoking gun:

Olympic organisers had previously insisted that the children, dressed in minority costumes and paraded into the Bird’s Nest stadium carrying the Chinese flag in a moment that represented national unity, were the real thing.

“Fifty-six children from 56 Chinese ethnic groups cluster around the Chinese national flag,” read the ceremony programme.

That tears it. I think it’s time to go all Tonya Harding on the Chinese Politburo. Can you imagine the ca-ca hitting the fan if a similar ceremony in America used cute Caucasian children in blackface to simulate old-timey Negroes? Or little white Girl Scouts with Indian headdresses?

I’m in favor of bridging cultural divides and all that jazz, but vetting your stuff to avoid offending people is a two-way street. China is looking more and more like it’s not ready to partner with the Western world on much of anything — other than making tire-pressure gauges for our presidential candidates to use as props, of course.