China’s tough opening

BEIJING — BEIJING

Martial arts student Cheng Jianghua only saw the army barracks where he stayed and the stadium where he performed at the spectacular Olympics opening ceremony. His sacrifices were minor. Other performers were injured, fainted from heatstroke or were forced to wear adult diapers so the show could go on.

Filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the ceremony’s director, insisted in an interview with local media that suffering and sacrifice were required to pull off the Aug. 8 opening, which involved nearly 15,000 cast and crew members. Only North Korea could have done it better, he said.

However, some news reports have raised questions about the lengths to which Beijing went in trying to create a perfect start to the Summer Games.

Chinese officials were accused of fakery for using computer-generated images to enhance the show’s fireworks display for TV viewers.

Organizers also have been criticized for their decision to have a 9-year-old girl lip-sync “Ode to the Motherland” because the real singer was deemed not cute enough.

Performers have complained that they sustained injuries from slipping during rain-drenched rehearsals or fainting from heatstroke amid hours of training under the relentless summer sun.

Mr. Cheng and 2,200 other carefully chosen pugilist prodigies spent an average of 16 hours a day, every day, rehearsing a synchronized tai-chi routine involving high kicks, sweeping lunges and swift punches. They lived for three months in trying conditions at a restricted army camp on the outskirts of Beijing.

“We never went out during the time we were training,” Mr. Cheng, 20, said in a phone interview. “Our school is quite strict. When we stay in school, we can’t go out on our own, let alone when we’re at a military camp.”

In the most extreme case, Beijing organizers revealed last week that Liu Yan, a 26-year-old dancer, was seriously injured during a July rehearsal. Shanghai media reported that she fell from a 10-foot stage and may be permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Mr. Zhang, the ceremony’s director, visited Miss Liu in the hospital and has told Chinese media that he deeply regrets what happened to her - but he also has defended the training schedule his performers endured.

He told the popular Guangzhou weekly newspaper Southern Weekend that only communist North Korea could have done a better job getting thousands of performers to move in perfect unison.

“North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kinds of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Through hard training and strict discipline,” he said. Pyongyang’s annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lockstep.

Performers in the West, by contrast, need frequent breaks and cannot withstand criticism, Mr. Zhang said, citing his experience working on an opera performance abroad. Though he didn’t mention a specific production, he directed an opera at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006.

“In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn’t go into overtime, and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights,” Mr. Zhang said of the unidentified opera production.

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