Despite what appeared to be clear photographic evidence published earlier this month on a Chinese government Web site, China has admitted that, in fact, its officials cannot levitate.
As Peter Walker explained in The Guardian, the possibility that officials in China’s Huili county, a rural part of Sichuan Province, might have special powers was raised by the publication of this photograph, showing local leaders inspecting a new patch of road:
XinhuaA doctored photograph of provincial officials inspecting a new road in China, released this week.According to a post on the blog EastSouthWestNorth, after the image of the apparently hovering officials was published online, a Huili resident drew attention to it in a post on a Web forum headlined, “Too fake.” The unnamed Chinese “netizen” explained:
I had nothing to do today so I visited the Web site for our county government. The headline story was about the upgrade for the road to the countryside. I looked at the photo and I almost coughed out half a liter of blood! Even a rank amateur like myself can tell that this was a Photoshop job, and they had the nerve to put this on the home page!
That reader’s post drove so much traffic to the county’s Web site that the site was knocked offline for a while. The next day, the site was restored, but the poorly doctored photograph was gone.
Huili officials then took to a Chinese microblogging site, Weibo, where they posted an apology. They also explained that the altered image was the work of a government photographer who thought that none of his pictures did justice to the scene, and so took it upon himself to improve on nature by combining parts of three photographs to create the new image that captured the attention of the nation.
These two images, from the microblogging site Weibo, appear to be two of the original photographs used to create the more captivating image:
Photographs posted on a Chinese social-networking site by the government of Huili county, Sichuan Province, in western China.China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, reported that the officials acknowledged the “error” and said, “The county government understands the wide attention, and hope to apologize for and clarify the matter.”
Before the image of the floating officials was removed from the rural county’s Web site, however, it was copied and altered by dozens of bloggers, who inserted the three men into a wide variety of backdrops — including the moon landing, the World Cup final, a popular video game and several compromising scenes.
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