But where does the fakery end?

Was there nothing genuine about the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics? The news that children from the country's dominant Han population stood in for Tibetan and other minority ethnic groups at the ceremony follows on the heels of two other totally unnecessary fakes: live fireworks that weren't, and the substitution of a little girl who was deemed too ugly to represent China on the global stage.

Worst of all are the comments defending all this prestidigitation. Beijing Olympic organising committee Vice-President Wang Wei said yesterday he saw nothing wrong with where the children came from, citing Chinese performance tradition. And the International Olympic Committee's Executive Director Gilbert Felli said having the prettier nine-year-old Lin Miaoke lip-synch to seven-year-old Yang Peiyi's voice was like being a player on a sporting team during the qualification for the Olympics, but being replaced for the main event. "You have to be sure that the performers and the song is at the highest level," Felli said. The highest level of what? A superficial standard of beauty?

Marketing experts will probably say there's nothing wrong with choosing one pretty girl over another to represent your brand – and this could be why Kate Moss wins more modelling contracts than Karolina Kurkova.

But the problem lies in not telling your audience that everything really is a show, nothing is what it seems and that nobody should expect anything more than a good time. That's the Bollywood approach, where actors routinely lip-synch to vocals laid down by professional singers. The key difference is nobody there pretends otherwise; and the singers are credited for their work.

Because when you don't, when you've obscured the truth in one area, how do we know you won't lie about something else again?

I personally believe Yang Peiyi is at least as pretty as Lin Miaoke, and I'm sure she could have performed at least as well. In fact, for all the organisers' protestations that performance skills matter, for me as a viewer, that particular part of the evening was all about the clear strong voice singing of (we're told) patriotism.

The fireworks, too, were defended on grounds of poor visibility: but again, in a live show, viewers expect those problems. Nothing's perfect in real life, nothing's perfect in art. Or commerce.

But nobody expects careless casting and a total disregard of ethics, as is now apparent was the case. And so what should have been a moment of glory demonstrating that there is indeed nothing cheap about China has only stirred up feelings of queasy distrust in the country, and by extension, it's people.

In seeking to do the best by their brand, the organising committee failed to realise that big events aren't just about spin and that sexing it up almost always backfires. And at least 57 children will forever be damned to a lifetime of feeling inadequate and not quite good enough.