假唱，你忍得了吗？

LW: A short video clip of a Chinese singer’s lip-syncing instead of singing on TV has gone viral online. It’s the folk singer, Sa Dingding. Here’s one of her most famous songs, ‘Wan Wu Sheng’. [Audio] LW: Chinese folk singer, Sa Dingding. It’s been found out that she was lip-syncing instead of singing. So, you know, people found out that she was lip-syncing instead of singing live. Wu You, I don’t know, what’s going on? What are people saying? I’m very concerned. Let’s hear what the people have to say. WY: So in the show, she was brandishing her microphone the wrong way around. LW: Oh no. WY: The singer was performing at the Lantern Festival Gala broadcast on China Central Television, and the video shows that Sa opened the song with a section of dance, and then she began singing. She realized that she was holding her microphone upside down. LW: Oh, my word. WY: Then, Sa smiled, and she quickly corrected her mistake before carrying on with her performances. LW: I urge everyone to have a look at exactly how she does it. It is incredible. It looks like she choreographed that thing. It looked really good. WY: It looked like part of the performance! LW: It did look like part of the performance! As far as mistakes go, I will say that that is, if you’re going to correct a mistake, that is, that almost in and of itself was a moment of brilliance to me. WY: After the broadcast ended, Sa mocked herself on her Weibo account, telling her 1.6 million followers, “Next time I will sharpen up my acting skills”. LW: I think that’s good. But are the people letting it go? Or is there actually some outrage on the back of this? WY: Some of the online comments go like this. Someone online named @Zong Zi Duo La Jiang said, “We can’t blame Sa for lip-syncing. It’s the Gala director who made this decision. As a performer, Sa had no choice but to follow orders.” LW: Do you think, actually, that that’s the case? Do you think that the Gala director said it? Either Sa said it or the Gala director said it, what do you think? WY: We don’t want to make assumptions. LW: We don’t want to make assumptions. WY: But sometimes, I should say that not long ago, we had the Spring Festival Gala. All the singers and performers on it were pushed, they were told: “you can make no mistakes”. So that means you either just need to do a pre-record, and then you perform well. But sometimes they do have their reasons because sometimes in the performances, the performers also need to dance, and need to move quickly. If they moved that quickly, it would be very difficult for them to breathe smoothly. LW: 100%. WY: And that would affect the singing. NL: It does lose something from the performance. I think in this case, they’re just focused on the perfection of the performance because of the sheer number of viewers. I think, is it the New Year Gala that bills itself as the most watched TV program in the world, or something like that? WY: It is. It’s sort of a tradition in China now, you need to watch the Spring Festival Gala when you have your family reunion in China. NL: So the sheer number of viewers means they want to get the performance right, and they feel that the best way to do that is to pre-record the song, and then have the lip-sync over it. WY: I remember a perfect example: Beyoncé. One year she was singing the national anthem. LW: That was at the inauguration for Barack Obama. WY: That was quite a serious occasion, when she was singing the national anthem. I like her, and her singing in that performance was fantastic. I almost cried. But after that, something interesting happened because people found out she was doing lip-syncing. LW: Yeah, a day later, or a couple of days later, she went to a press conference, and held a press conference. WY: To talk about that? LW: To talk about it, and she just sang a cappella, she didn’t really talk about it at all. She just kind of sang to prove that she could sing. It’s easier, to kind of control the variables, to control the things that might go wrong. I’m just saying, if you do it too much, you know, you could miss out on the things that could go spectacularly right.