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 Yunnan 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

– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin

Annual inflows of foreign direct investment rose to nearly $108 billion in 2008.

China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development.

The government has also focused on foreign trade as a major vehicle for economic growth.

The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold increase in GDP since 1978.

The disparities between the two sectors have combined to form an economic-cultural-social gap between the rural and urban areas, which is a major division in Chinese society.

The technological level and quality standards of its industry as a whole are still fairly low, notwithstanding a marked change since 2000, spurred in part by foreign investment.

China’s increasing integration with the international economy and its growing efforts to use market forces to govern the domestic allocation of goods have exacerbated this problem.

On top of this, foreign direct investment (FDI) this year was set to “surpass $100 billion”, compared to $90 billion last year, ministry officials predicted.

But “this is just a beginning.

China is aiming to be the world’s largest new energy vehicle market by 2020 with 5 million cars.

In large part as a result of economic liberalization policies, the GDP quadrupled between 1978 and 1998, and foreign investment soared during the 1990s.

Since the late 1970s, China has decollectivized agriculture, yielding tremendous gains in production.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and a major producer of sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, barley, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and potatoes.

Livestock raising on a large scale is confined to the border regions and provinces in the north and west; it is mainly of the nomadic pastoral type.

Oil fields discovered in the 1960s and after made China a net exporter, and by the early 1990s, China was the world’s fifth-ranked oil producer.

There are large deposits of uranium in the northwest, especially in Xinjiang; there are also mines in Jiangxi and Guangdong provs.

The largest completed project, Gezhouba Dam, on the Chang (Yangtze) River, opened in 1981; the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest engineering project, on the lower Chang, is scheduled for completion in 2009.
Beginning in the late 1970s, changes in economic policy, including decentralization of control and the creation of special economic zones to attract foreign investment, led to considerable industrial growth, especially in light industries that produce consumer goods.

In the northeast (Manchuria) are large cities and rail centers, notably Shenyang (Mukden), Harbin, and Changchun.

More here:
Photoshop Wizards Skewer Ham-Handed Local Government Propagandists