If what happened to Yang Peiyi in Beijing had happened to a 7-year-old American cutie in New York, the national outcry would still be raging and heads would be rolling.

But China is a collective nation and the United States is a nation of individuals, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Yang Peiyi is the little girl whose voice you heard at the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. She was singing a Chinese patriotic anthem, “Ode to the Motherland.”

Lin Miaoke was the little girl whose face you saw lip-synching the words Peiyi was singing. Miaoke was deemed the cuter of the two, but her voice was deemed inferior to that of Peiyi. The Chinese were trying to present a perfect image to the outside world, and in the view of the communist bureaucracy, the perfect image was a composite of Peiyi’s voice and Miaoke’s face. To be honest, I found both girls equally attractive. Peiyi’s permanent teeth were just coming through, and though China’s officialdom may have seen that as a flaw, I found it a refreshing and appealing testimony to her tender years.

Americans found the last-minute switcheroo outrageous, and so did the international media. The perfect image the Chinese sought was marred by this clash of Oriental and Western cultures.

And it was a clash. On the Chinese mainland, individual achievement is downplayed; collective achievement is exalted.

I recall a story that emerged from a disastrous Chinese earthquake a generation ago. One man extricated himself from the rubble that had trapped his immediate family. His first thought was to locate the man charged with emergency planning for his village. He found him and rescued him from the rubble. The leader then organized a collective rescue effort. When his rescuer got back to his own family, it had perished.

In the United States, we would expect a true hero to rescue his own family, then take charge of organizing rescue efforts. But the Chinese man who sacrificed his own family for the collective good was recognized as a national hero.

No wonder, then, that little Peiyi and her parents didn’t launch a heated protest when they heard her voice emerging from the sound system while Miaoke’s image was flashed around the globe. No wonder Miaoke did not feel cheated when she realized that it was not her voice being heard by a global audience estimated in the billions.

This collective mindset has been drummed into the Chinese masses during nearly 60 years of communist rule over the mainland. But it is not strictly a communist trait. Asian cultures tend to place the collective good over the individual good and exalt the collective effort over the individual effort.

Students of Japanese economic success have noted that the American ideal of individual initiative is a non-starter in Japan. What we would regard as commendable assertiveness is often seen there as showboating. The leader there is not the Lone Ranger who conceives of a brilliant idea and ramrods it to success. He is the consensus builder who focuses the mind of the group on a challenge and lets the group brainstorm it to success.

This can be very puzzling to a Westerner used to being recognized and rewarded for individual performance. As an American who worked for a Japanese electronics firm once put it, “If you are narrowly brilliant — say a good circuit designer — but no ability at manipulating people, you’re going to be very frustrated. In a Japanese company, most of the work is manipulating people or getting support for your ideas. In Japan, the more you can get people to do what you want, the more brilliant you are seen to be.”

During two three-week tours of the Chinese mainland, I saw anecdotal evidence of this preference for the group over the individual.

A young woman working in a textile mill in Xian, a large city just south of Inner Mongolia, was asked what she aspired to do with her life. Her response: She would always be a textile worker because that’s what her government wanted her to be. Her individual aspirations counted for nothing. The country needed her working at a loom or a spinning frame, and that collective need trumped everything else.

I encountered a young man preparing to enter college. When I asked him what career he planned to follow, he told me matter-of-factly that the choice was not up to him; he would study what the government asked him to study and pursue the career designated by his government. There was no apparent bitterness or frustration in his response.

The party views everything — even prehistory — through a collective lens. I visited a reconstructed prehistoric village that had a large central structure obviously used for community gatherings. My guide — a translator for the Foreign Ministry — told me the structure was used for community discussions where collective decisions were made.

“Isn’t it possible that they held religious rites here?” I asked.

He looked at me sternly.

“Discussions!” he emphasized.

And so, when it came to presenting China’s best face to the world, Olympics planners took the collective course.

“There were a number of candidates to sing that song,” said Sun Weidi, a spokesman for the organizing committee for the Olympics extravaganza. “At the end of the day, the artistic performers picked the best voice and the best performer.”

Wang Wei, executive vice president of the organizing committee, said the aim was “to achieve the most theatrical effect.”

“I don’t see there’s anything wrong with it if everybody concerned agrees,” he said.

And, of course, this being China, where the collective will, as expressed by the Chinese Communist Party, is the supreme will, it’s taken for granted that “everybody concerned agrees.”

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com