He says 16, We say 14. Web says Chinese can’t count.
It took a thousand years to build a 4,000 mile wall to keep the foreigners out of China. Its taken just a few days for the World Wide Web to teach the Chinese to count.
The We Media movement has thoroughly exposed the confusion, dare we say cheating, by the Chinese to qualify a world class, pre-pubescent Chinese gymnast for Olympic competition. The gymnast, He Kexin, won an individual gold medial on the uneven bars and was one of the gymnasts who lead the Chinese team to a gold medal in the team competition. Competitors must be at least 16-years-old by the end of the Olympics year to participate.
He doesn’t look the part, but insists she’s 16. But records uncovered by bloggers and news organizations tell a different story:
— Huffington Post blogger David Flumenbaum posts documents from China’s state-run newspapers and news agencies showing that He’s age has been adapted for various competitions.
— A cached page, now changed, from a China Daily page on He.
— The New York Times first looked into the age of China’s gymnasts with a story on July 27 that focused primarily on He, whose birthdate on numerous online records was listed as January 1, 1994, making her 14 when the Games began and ineligible to compete.
— Global Voices blogger Oiwan Lam weighs into the debate, a “cold war double-standard,” on the GV network by observing that Chinese parents often change the age of their children.
— Blogger Stryde Hax, a security expert, looks at He’s passport, searches Chinese web sites and caches of google pages, some of which have been removed.
— Fool’s Mountain, a collaborative of writers focused on Chinese issues, shows discrepancies between China’s local athletic bureaus (He is from Wuhan) and the central athletic bureau.
— And if you read pinyin there’s Niubo, a forum by disaffected Chinese, on the situation. The photo of the Lincoln Memorial may throw you, though.
Age falsification is an age-old problem in China, especially in gymnastics competition. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, three years after the minimum age was raised to 16 in gymnastics, Chinese gymnast Yang Yun competed and won a bronze medal in the uneven bars (coincidentally this event is also He’s specialty). Yang’s passport said she was born on December 24, 1984 and turning 16 in the year of the Games, making her eligible. She later confessed in a television interview that she was only 14 at the time of the competition and that she and her coaches had lied about her age.
