Former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (
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 (
The photos printed yesterday show China's late paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (
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.
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