Another section of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony has been exposed as faked - the children supposedly representing the country's 56 ethnic groups were in fact all from the same one, the majority Han Chinese race

The children accompanied the soldiers carrying in the national flag at the most solemn moment of the ceremony.

They were dressed in costumes associated with the country's ethnic minorities, including those from troubled areas such as Tibet and the muslim province of Xinjiang. Such displays of "national unity" are a compulsory part of any major state occasion.

But the children were all from the Han Chinese majority, which makes up more than 90 per cent of the population and is culturally and politically dominant, according to an official with the cultural troupe from which they were …