Los Angeles Times
Beijing, Jul 2: The photos of the South China tiger taken by a farmer seemed too good to be true. After all, no member of the endangered big cat family had been seen in the wild since the 1960s.
Over the weekend, local authorities disclosed after months of delay that the pictures had been staged using a poster cutout. Police also produced a paw made of wood they said had been used to make prints in the snow.
Zhou Zhenglong, 54, a farmer and local guide who took the photographs, has been arrested on suspicion of fraud. And 13 officials in Shaanxi province in central China have been fired or disciplined.
The revelations in the “paper tiger” case were driven by persistent Internet activists who demanded answers from Zhou and local officials.
The case also has spurred a heated debate over cover-ups, culpability, corruption and whether farmer-and-sometime-guide Zhou was forced to take the fall for powerful officials.
Zhou was paid $2,915 for the photographs by the local forestry department, which reportedly was trying to start a nature reserve, seeking more than $1 million from Beijing in funding and pushing to boost tourism. Zhou, who had acted as a guide to animal protection officials, had been led to believe the photos might be worth as much as $140,000.
“It took nine months for the government to come up with some answers amid all the vested interests,” said Hou Jingsong, a legal activist whose group repeatedly tried to file suit only to see its petitions rejected by Chinese courts. “Zhou is a scapegoat, one of the weakest players on the chess board.”
The tale of the tiger started in October when local forestry officials in Shaanxi province held a news conference and released what they said was a photo of the rare tiger. The photo shows the animal facing the camera, his mouth slightly open, peeking out from a tangle of leaves.
But the announcement immediately was greeted with much scepticism. An estimated 4,000 South China tigers were said to have been alive at the middle of the last century. A shrinking habitat and a 1950s “antipest” campaign took their toll, with the last wild sighting reported in 1964 in Shaanxi’s Qinba mountains.
By 1996, only 30 to 80 remained in the wild, the World Conservation Union estimated. Today, several remain in zoos, but inbreeding has left them with limited genetic diversity.
In the Zhou case, an Internet sleuth suspicious of the October announcement traced one of the pictures to a 2002 Chinese New Year poster. Much online discussion focused on the strange lighting, the tiger’s unrealistic colouring and features that didn’t seem to change from shot to shot.
The public suspicion led to strong denials of any wrongdoing by Zhou and local officials. “I am willing to guarantee the authenticity of this photograph with my head,” local Animal Protection Bureau director Wang Wanyun reportedly said.
But public doubts persisted, leading the state forestry administration in December to promise an investigation.
Two months later, they apologised, but stopped short of characterising the 71 photographs as fakes, a step they finally took last Sunday.
Many observers appeared to believe that Zhou was encouraged, if not directed, by local officials. One Internet poll of 64,000 respondents by QQ, a news portal, found over 86 per cent believed he was a scapegoat.
“Zhou is just one of the actors in this absurd play,” said a posting on Sohu, a Web portal. “He is neither the director nor the playwright.”