https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48EojfCjQhk&t=00m23s
Days after it made history for being the first city to host the summer and winter editions of the Olympics, Beijing is already facing controversy.
One of the 10 official songs for the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics has earned the ire of netizens from within China and abroad after they say that it sounds similar to the hit Disney ballad “Let It Go.”
The song in question is “The Snow and Ice Dance,” sung by the duo Sun Nan and Tan Jing.
Netizens’ comments on the song’s YouTube page assailed China for “lacking originality.”
YouTube user Nirotix said: “Nice rip off, do you Chinese have ANY originality at all? Or do you just copy everything everyone else makes/produces and do it much cheaper? Sad… To the folks that produced this garbage all I can say is, way to embarrass your country.”
Another user named William Hawkins said that the song was a “shameless, unoriginal, unapologetic theft.”
Caijing Online, a popular Chinese business magazine, said that “both songs employ a piano as the major instrument, have similar prelude chords and an eight-beat introduction, and they run at almost exactly the same tempo,” the New York Times reported.
Beijing Games’ organizing committee spokesman Xiao Junfeng declined to comment on the issue to the New York Times due to lack of authority to speak on the matter.
Disney has not yet issued a statement.
Beijing narrowly beat out Almaty, Kazakhstan to host the 2022 Winter Games despite its lack of natural snow and dissent from human rights and environment groups. It last hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008. AJH
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