Anhui officials under fire over epic photoshop failure of pensioner visit

Since coming to power earlier this year, China’s president, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly urged Communist Party officials to reengage with the people they serve.
 
So Wang Hun, the vice-mayor of Ningguo in Anhui province, could be forgiven for thinking a pastoral visit to a 103-year-old pensioner called Cheng Yanchun might help him burnish his grassroots credentials.
 
With a photographer in tow, Mr Wang and three colleagues travelled to the home of Mrs Cheng during a recent Chinese festival.
 
A photograph of the meeting was subsequently posted on the local government website alongside a caption that encouraged Chinese citizens to feel “the warmth of the Party and the government.”
 
But the image appears to have been the political equivalent of a high-calibre rifle shot to the foot.
 
For Mr Wang’s PR team doctored the picture in such a catastrophically slapdash way – shrinking Mrs Cheng into a ghostly miniature and enlarging her visitors so they towered over her miniscule frame - that it became the laughing stock of the Chinese internet on Wednesday.
 
"The brainless propaganda staff will probably be sacked along with these officials,” one user of the Weibo micro-blog predicted.
 
Others said the eerie image from which part of Mr Wang’s legs were missing was in fact an accurate reflection of how government officials had come to view themselves in relation to the masses.
 
"This picture really shows the distance between leaders and commoners in the eyes of your average government official,” wrote one Weibo user. “Very sad and depressing.”
 
"The people come second, the officials come first,” wrote a third micro-blogger. “The people are supporting actors, the officials are the lead actors. Supporting actors stay in the corner. Lead actors take centre stage.”
 
Even Xinhua, China’s official news agency, turned on Mr Wang’s inept team. “The officials appear to be floating in the air. In addition the woman’s proportions do not match those of the officials indicating that the photo may have been faked,” it reported.
 
Facing ridicule, Ningguo’s propaganda department was forced into damage control mode. Its gaffe-prone publicists claimed the visit to Mrs Cheng’s house had genuinely taken place and said they had simply “merged” two images in order to fit the old lady and her Communist Party guests into the same frame.
 
Xinhua said “those responsible for the photo” had been punished.
 
The Photoshop fiasco is far from China’s first. On Wednesday, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post published a hall of fame featuring 9 of the most preposterous image manipulations committed by Chinese propaganda officials.
 
Among the winning entries were photographs of a party secretary from Hebei who was pictured floating on a green field, six Shanxi officials who had been sloppily pasted onto a landfill site and two officials from Hangzhou who appeared to be growing out of the undergrowth.