The Chinese often find ingenious ways of rectifying problems, but they’ve gone too far this time. A badly doctored image of government officials inspecting a new road in Huili, a modest county in a rural corner of south-west China, has produced some exquisite viral images indicating the public’s displeasure with being lied to.

The issue began on Monday when three local officials where “shown” inspecting a newly completed road construction project earlier in the month. The photograph, at the top of this post, unquestionably showed the men, and the road, but they appear to be levitating above the tarmac.

The image was shown on Huili’s local government website and it didn’t take long before the PR department began receiving disgruntled calls about the obviously fake photo. The explanation: the unnamed photographer decided his original pictures were not suitably impressive and so he decided to stitch two together.

A Huili official explained to the state-run Xinhua news agency:

A government employee posted the edited picture out of error… The county government understands the wide attention, and hope to apologise for and clarify the matter.

Even officials hurriedly joined the hugely popular Sina Weibo social media website to post an explanation, but, alas, it was too late and a new internet meme was born.

Please enjoy some of the humour that has ensued as a result:

Huili officials inspecting.. the moon

Huili officials inspecting… soldiers

The moral of the story: if you absolutely must photoshop something, make sure you do a decent job.

[Source: TheGuardian]