Hong Kong paper: China airbrushed Jiang out of picture

Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) was there, and then he wasn't -- according to pictures published in Hong Kong yesterday that suggested China's official news agency might have airbrushed him out of a historic photo.

The Standard newspaper ran three versions of a 1992 photo of Chinese leaders, saying at least two images had been doctored, and Jiang had apparently been removed for reasons that remain unclear.

Photo alterations were common in China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when propagandists would delete purged officials from pictures that had shown them next to leaders.

But political scientist James Sung (宋立功) in Hong Kong said the tactic is rarer these days. Jiang remains the powerful head of China's military.

The photos printed yesterday show China's late paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), shaking hands with Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), who in the early 1990s was a rising Communist Party star and became president early last year.

Their poses and smiles are identical, but the backdrops are different.

One picture, distributed by the state-run Xinhua News Agency on Aug. 13, shows Deng and Hu with a dimly lit audience in the background. But another version, run on Aug. 19 by Xinhua's Oriental Outlook's weekly, shows Jiang standing between Deng and Hu, the Standard said.

The picture with Jiang seems to be the "genuine article," the Standard said, asking: "So why the surgery?"

There was no clear answer.

At Xinhua's photo center in Beijing, staffer Yang Jiali said she wasn't familiar with the picture and declined to comment.

A third version of the photo, which recently appeared in Hong Kong, had a pitch-black background.