Huili County Government

The photo in question.

This post has been changed since it was first posted. See below.

If there’s one tool the Chinese online mob has learned to use with devastating skill, it’s Adobe’s photo editing software Photoshop.

The propaganda department of the Huili county government, on the other hand, could use another tutorial or two.

On June 26, according to a recent report in the Southern Metropolis Daily (in Chinese), an Internet user posted a message to the popular online discussion board Tianya Forum claiming to have “almost coughed out a liter of blood” after visiting a the Huili county government website and coming upon a photo in which three local officials appeared to be floating above a newly paved road. “Even a rank amateur like myself can tell that this was a PS job,” the poster wrote.

The story, according to the Southern Metropolis report (available in partial translation at East South West North): Huili propaganda director Zhang Yongzhi and a number of other local officials went out to inspect a newly built road. A government employee photographed them making the inspection but then decided the background wasn’t impressive enough and so superimposed the image of the officials on a prettier stretch of asphalt.

The local government in Huili, a remote county in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province, eventually apologized for the transparent fakery, but not before Chinese Internet users produced a flood of their own Photoshop jobs parodying the original.

Entrants in the informal competition to mock the officials placed them in locations as varied as an Afghanistan battlefield, a Jurassic lake and the arm of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. One image imagined the officials as targets in a first-person shooter video game, while another put them in the middle of what appears to be a porn set. Yet another incorporated them into the poster for the recently released (and widely panned) propaganda film the “Building of the Party.”

In some cases, the Photoshoppers offered captions in imitation of the state-run press. “Unconcerned with their own safety, three Huili county leaders ‘personally attended’ a ‘site inspection’ at the match, discussing how to put a stop to injuries on the pitch and promote civilized soccer,” read the caption under an image showing the three officials examining Italian soccer player Marco Materazzi lying on the ground after being headbutted by French star Zinedine Zidane during the 2006 World Cup. “Friendship first, competition second!”

Among the most skillful re-imaginings placed the officials in the White House with Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates and others as they watched the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in May.

“Today, three officials personally guided Obama in completing the mission to capture or kill terrorist big shot Bin Laden, making a new contribution to the re-establishment of world peace.”

See more of the photos here

CORRECTION: The local government responsible for creating the original doctored photo was in Huili county, which is located in Sichuan Province. An earlier version of this post mistakenly placed Huili in Yunnan Province.

– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin