CCTV Spring Festival Gala blunders

We think we'd be all right if we never, ever watched the CCTV Spring Festival gala again, but we almost regret it this time because we missed out on some real doozies, like Zhang Ziyi's terrible lip-synching episode and as well as the slight faux pas, made by one of the hosts, that China's south was in the midst of an "abundant spring" even though many of the southern provinces are facing the worst winter weather they've seen in decades.

As you can tell from the video above, it does seem like international film star Zhang is lip-synching because it's way off. Some people have defended her, saying that lip-synching is common at the gala, though that argument doesn't really explain why she had to suck at it. The director of the gala, Chen Linchun, stuck up for Zhang as well, going as far as to say "She is the pride of the Chinese people" which, again, doesn't seem to offer a valid reason as to why she sucked. Oh well. Oh yeah, and there was another video news report that said that her dress and make-up cost around 1 million RMB.

The remark about springtime in the south wasn't taken as an ordinary gaffe but as something of an outrage against the thousands of people that have been affected by the sever winter weather in the southern provinces. Millions of hectares of agricultural land have been affected, thousands of houses collapsed, thousands of people couldn't get home, and thousands had to be relocated. The "南方春意盎然" (nanfang chunyi angran) remark came right after a line about how lovely and snowy and wintry the north was. In other words it was one of those stock phrases that you expect to hear in situations like this, though this time it ended up sounding not too poetic and very much insulting to those who are still being inconvenienced by Mother Nature. Things have gotten so bad that China's even accepted some disaster-relief materials and supplies from the US Dept. of Defense.