Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times
A sign in Suangfeng County attacked the use of Photoshop to forge compromising images of officials for use in extortion.
SHUANGFENG, China — The photograph usually arrives as an e-mail attachment or the old-fashioned way, in an envelope with no return address.
It is rarely a pretty picture.
Often the image captures a well-fed, middle-aged bureaucrat engaged in a sordid encounter with a woman who is not his wife. Or it could be a fully clothed official but one wearing an expensive timepiece that his government salary could never afford.
Then comes the demand: Pay up, or become the next online viral sensation.
A recent spate of Chinese officials have found themselves ensnared by extortion schemes that leverage the public’s mounting disgust for wayward behavior. But even those who have resisted wrongdoing are not immune. Aided by computer software, blackmailers sometimes copy and paste their quarry’s likeness into not-safe-for-work images that are synonymous with excesses of power.
The extortion boom comes at a time when many Communist Party members are begrudgingly enduring a government austerity campaign, pushed by President Xi Jinping himself, that has denied them the expensive, taxpayer-financed banquets and chauffeured sedans once considered the birthright of Chinese officialdom. More than 2,000 officials have been investigated and punished for violations from the campaign’s launch at the end of 2012 through the end of April, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s top anticorruption agency.
Now, in addition to looking over their shoulders for antigraft inspectors, civil servants must contend with blackmailers armed with honey traps, video cameras or worse: Photoshop.
Here in Shuangfeng, a rural county in Hunan Province, the authorities have arrested dozens of blackmailers, some of whom have used officials’ actual transgressions to demand payments and some of whom have simply used electronic manipulation to make misdeeds up.
“Being a government official is a really high-risk profession,” said the deputy head of a provincial-level department in the central province of Shaanxi, who asked not to be identified to avoid scrutiny.
Paranoia is a way of life, the official said, and many colleagues live in dread that their faces, appearing in flagrante delicto, will surface online and doom their careers.
Those involved in the shadowy industry of forged photography, he said, range from brazen crime syndicates seeking easy money to individuals seeking advantageous business contracts, though power-hungry officials extorting political gain from comrades are also “pretty common.”
“The scariest thing is that if you’re accused, the government can’t say anything,” the official said. “No one really cares if it’s true or false at the end of the day.”
Such fears have been heightened by a string of high-profile blackmail cases.
The Zhengzhou Daily newspaper reported last month that police in Hebei Province broke up a crime ring of 80 fake journalists who made 1.1 million renminbi, or about $180,000, over the past five years threatening officials and companies with publishing negative news.
In April, three former officials in China’s central Hunan Province were indicted after they were caught attaching a bug and hidden camera to a water cooler in the office of the local party chief, Hu Jiawu. According to prosecutors, the three recorded Mr. Hu “violating party discipline” — usually a euphemism for bribery — and then threatened to expose him unless they were promoted. Rather than oblige, Mr. Hu reported them. He remains in his post.
The government in Shuangfeng has gone on the offensive against the blackmail scourge. For years, nobody seemed to mind the telephone fraudsters who gave the region a bad name. That is, until 2011, when local con artists upgraded their game with Photoshop and started targeting officialdom.
In March, the local authorities began posting billboards and banners that framed the crackdown with language traditionally employed for family planning campaigns and exhortations to venerate the Communist Party.
“The whole society must take action! Let’s engage a massive people’s war against blackmail crimes using Photoshopped obscene pictures,” they blared.
Visit Source: NYT > Global Home http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/world/asia/true-or-faked-dirt-on-chinese-fuels-blackmail.html?partner=rss&emc=rss