China's Fake Tiger Photos and Its Growling Citizens

The South China tiger hasn't been seen since the 1960s. That's why photographs that emerged last year in Shaanxi Province, China, earned so much suspicion from eagle-eyed bloggers. Yesterday, an investigation confirmed that the animal was indeed a paper tiger.

These might not seem as big as say, pop star Edison Chen's stolen snaps, China's other notorious photos this year. But the fake tiger case has become a national issue, reflecting a growth in civil society, and growing concern about the environment and the fakery not just by photographers but government officials.

The controversy began last October, when photographs of the rare tiger emerged in newspapers and on the web. Zhou Zhenglong, the local farmer who produced the photos, was paid a 20,000 yuan ($2,900) reward for his "discovery."

After widespread skepticism emerged on online bulletin boards -- the tiger, with its weird lighting, unrealistic coloring and static features bore an uncanny resemblance to a 2002 Chinese New Year's poster -- Animal Protection Bureau director Wang Wanyun reportedly said, "I am willing to guarantee the authenticity of this photograph with my head."

But as public doubts persisted, an investigation began. The bureau apologized, but stopped short of calling the 71 photographs fakes. It took that step on Sunday, a move that received front page coverage across the country. The "tiger" was actually a paper cut-out, and the "tiger's footprint" made with a wooden model of a tiger's claw. Now Zhou's in police custody, and thirteen local officials, including the deputy head of the province's forestry bureau and its top wildlife official, have been sacked. Further criminal charges are expected.

This is not the first time that China has been abuzz with talk about faked photographs. Last March, a famous nature photographer admitted to Photoshopping rare Tibetan antelope into a photograph of the Qinghai-Tibet train, a railway that stirred controversy when it opened in 2006 for its environmental impact.

Both tales speak to a growing, nearly obsessive concern among China's citizens with parsing fact from fiction. Increasingly connected to each other and the world by mobile phone and internet, the Chinese are better able to question the information they get from state-run media, to share ideas and knowledge, and even build public movements--from online campaigns and boycotts to street protests.

"Our civic society is growing up and starting to have influence," Sun Guoyu, a blogger and editor of oeeee.com, told the LA Times. "This is progress."

The photo scandal also points out the difficulty of spinning bad news. The South China tiger is thought to be extinct thanks to "anti-pest" hunting, poaching and the destruction of its habitat. As William Blake famously asked in "The Tiger," "What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" The poet's warning to the poet could as easily be applied to man's attempts to "frame," or control nature.

Much suspicion over the photos has been directed at Chinese government officials, who netizens have accused of secret wrongdoing and corruption. Many appear to think that Zhou was encouraged, or even instructed by, local officials who hoped to improperly secure funding for conservation or some kind of reward. Some 64,000 respondents to an internet poll by news portal QQ found that more than 86% believed he was a scapegoat. A posting Monday on Sohu, another Web portal, read, "Zhou is just one of the actors in this absurd play. He is neither the director nor the playwright."

The plays are more often tragic, not just absurd. Cries of corruption have grown in recent years, often reaching a crescendo after environmental and natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the case of the hundreds of schools that collapsed during May's Sichuan earthquake, official corruption is to blame; at other times, it's a corrupt Communist political system that favors economic growth at the expense of nearly everything else.

That's essentially what had been going on at Lake Tai for years. An activist from the town of Wuxi named Wu Lihong tried to alert authorities to the impact that nearby factories were having on his town's -- and one of China's -- most precious water supplies.

The factories were being encouraged, or at least overlooked, by local authorities eager to keep local GDP rising. Wu's campaign was so fervent that he got a crew from the state-run TV giant CCTV to come to Wuxi to document the problem.

But his concerns went unheeded. And then in May 2007, the problem could no longer be ignored. An immense algae outbreak on the lake "sounded the alarm for us," China's premier Wen Jiabao said at the time. Though Wu was vindicated, and a massive cleanup campaign has been launched, local officials nevertheless managed to get Wu locked up on cooked charges.

His story illustrates the possibilities and limitations in China's increasingly open society. By most officials, activists are seen as a nuisance to their economic goals, which in turn are sanctioned by the national government. Communist Party officials traditionally advance based on measures of their ability to provide economic growth.

By some officials, more often in the national government, activists are seen as crucial to highlighting problems in the provinces that would otherwise escape their notice. This has happened in places like Xiamen and Chengdu, where large marches organized largely by text message have led national officials to investigate local ones and order shut downs of potentially hazardous factories. National government leaders have asked citizens to be more vigilant than ever before at policing their own leaders.

Last year, the vice-minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) Pan Yue told a conference that the public "is the most interested party when it comes to the environment and has the biggest incentive to protect it. Therefore, people should be given the right to know, to express, to participate and to supervise."

In a sense, this is at odds with China's modern tradition of censorship, which is not only the government's major tool of control, but is considered necessary to project an image of control too. But censorship relies less on apparatchiks than on the citizens who have been encouraged not to ask questions, or to self-censor. If a newspaper editor doesn't censor his own reporters, he could be ousted or worse. It's a system that works on intimidation, fear and examples.

It's important to remember that the censorship of authoritarian governments was one of the biggest promoters of modern photo fakery. Stalin and Mao would have loved Photoshop, the better to obliterate the memory of enemies of the state or to craft the triumphal images of flags and tanks so crucial to building nationalism. As Susan Sontag wrote after her trip to Beijing in the 1970s, "In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it."

But a culture of vigilance is changing that definition. When people are informed and when problems -- from badly built schools to algae-plagued lakes to animal extinction -- are too great to deny, the photograph no longer has the final word.

Suspicions of media distortion have even turned toward the Western media, at least when its in popular nationalist interests. In March, internet users across China lashed out against the Western media, which it blamed for editing photographs of the riots in Tibet to tarnish China's image. Using internet videos and websites, bloggers especially singled out BBC and China's new favorite media target CNN.

Still, an even bigger target for mistrust among China's citizens are government officials themselves, and they're feeling the brunt of it. Last weekend, protesters set fire to a police station, government offices and cars in a town in Guizhou province after an official ruling that a teenage girl whose body was found in a river had committed suicide. Internet messages said that she had been raped and killed nine days ago and that the police were trying to cover up the crime to protect the main suspect -- the son of the vice-head of the county.

When rumors began to spread in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, much effort was spent on just quelling rumors. Some rumors, like the story that officials downplayed the risk of an earthquake, weren't so clear-cut; many were false, spreading undue panic and fear. But then again, when your government is known for sugar-coating the news, you may be more likely to listen to fear mongering.

It's unclear of course how much photo-doctoring the government does. Neither the tiger nor the antelope photos were "taken" by the government, but rather by individuals eager for fame and fortune. Some have noted that the case has illustrated the lengths to which people will go to be successful in China's speedy rat race.

And yet, this fakery, awarded with money or prizes, are essentially sanctioned by officials eager to show that their leadership has ensured that most treasured thing in officialdom besides economic growth: a harmonious society.

But a harmonious society -- a more equal society, in better harmony with nature -- and sustainable economic growth will not really be possible without the kind of honesty that people are steadily demanding.

One of the more than 400,000 comments on sina.com, a news website, yesterday, read, "The credibility of our Government is really worrying!" Another: "When a local government behaves like this, people will definitely ask it to collapse as soon as possible, and capable people should take over."

In the current era, even a somewhat tame issue can become flashpoints for civic society and public unrest. Government officials would be wise to heed these signals. Ultimately, it's China's unsustainable growth that's being exposed as the real paper tiger.