Controversy has erupted this week over the fakery used during last Friday's Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. My response is a big "ho hum."

Chinese Olympic officials have fessed up that the little girl singing a solo at the start of the ceremony was in fact lip synching and that footage of fireworks shown on TV was enhanced with computer-generated explosions.

While the revelations set off chatter in the Chinese blog world and among some U.S. media, they were no surprise to me.

I was at the ceremony and if what television viewers saw what was shown on the giant screens in the Bird's Nest stadium, I would guess that every single second of fireworks footage was fake.

In fact, I suspect that every aerial shot of the Bird's Nest and the city that I saw inside the stadium was prerecorded and digitally prettied up.

The night of the ceremony was a heavily smoggy one, with visibility all of about a mile and the stadium covered in a gray pall.

Yet the supposedly live aerial footage of the stadium they showed on the video screens revealed crystal clear night skies, with the city lights shining like a chandelier. In fact, I did a double-take when I saw that footage but quickly figured out it was phony.

At the very least, the ceremony wizards must have run the video through some heavy filtering although I don't know if there are any filters that can remove smog and haze and general gunk.

Ditto for the opening aerial footage traveling from the Forbidden City and following firework "footprints" across town. Was that on TV? It was shown in the stadium and it was so artificial looking, I didn't think it was even pretending to be live footage.

It would have been pretty difficult to fly a helicopter or plane that quickly and precisely over Beijing and shoot the "footprints" just as they were sent up in front of the camera.

But all the fakery fits the logic of Beijing at the moment, which has been turned into a huge stage for China's strangely subdued "coming-out" party.

With freshly planted flowers and trees in every corner and rainbow-hued lights flashing into the fuzzy night sky, authenticity has clearly been the first thing to go.

Hence, big "One World One Dream" billboards all over the city covering construction sites, weedy parking lots, decrepit apartment buildings, basically anything resembling real city life.

Likewise for the army of volunteers stalking the venues encouraging fans to chant and cheer during listless games (like the U.S.-Angola men's basketball game I saw on Tuesday. (One volunteer even had a canned USA cheer complete with arm motions that he was unsuccessfully trying to persuade some bored American fans to perform.))

If you leave Beijing, though, all the Olympic clutter falls away, and normal, industrial China reappears.

A China where the girl who sings the best may not be the cutest and where you might not be able to see the fireworks for all the smog. This is the China you TV viewers won't find. It's not perfect and "Olympic" enough, I suppose.

In fact, all the flash and glitz of modern Beijing is a big front. China, despite all the economic gains of the past three decades, is not Beijing skyscrapers and Louis Vuitton stores. It is fundamentally a largely poor country.

The most recent U.N. Human Development Index, which measure countries on education, income, health and other factors, ranked China 81st out of 177 countries, between Belize and Grenada.

This is the country Chinese will return to after the Olympics. And no amount of lip-synching and fake fireworks can change that.

-Jack Chang