The city government of Ningguo, Anhui province, apologized for a doctored picture showing city-level officials visiting a centenarian resident on Wednesday.

The photo, which shows four officials, including Deputy Mayor Wang Jun and Yu Anlin, director of the Ningguo Civil Affairs Bureau, visiting a senior citizen, was discovered by netizens on Tuesday on the civil affairs bureau's website and has drawn criticism over the officials' duties.

The Photoshopped picture shows the left side of Wang's body seemingly disintegrating into the background.

The centenarian woman in the picture is seated at Wang's left and appears disproportionately small compared with the officials, who loom above her like giants.

A link called "officials visiting centenarians" was still available on the bureau's website on Wednesday, but the photos had been removed. However, they were widely spread on social networking services.

"The Photoshop skills of the bureau's staff couldn't be clumsier. Is this an insult to people's intelligence?" Internet user Katenur posted on her micro blog.

"The officials did visit 103-year-old Cheng Yanchun, the eldest resident of the city, on Oct 11, and it was also true that one of the photos was Photoshopped," reads a statement that was posted on the Ningguo city government's website on Wednesday.

The statement explains that the photographer from the bureau couldn't include the officials and Cheng in one picture, so he took two pictures, with one showing the officials and the other of Cheng.

"An employee with the bureau in charge of releasing information combined the photos and uploaded it considering only the integrity of the story that the picture intends to tell," according to the statement.

Officials have been repeatedly embroiled in such Photoshop incidents in recent years.

In June 2011, a photo of three officials from Huili county, Sichuan province, inspecting a newly built highway appeared on the county's official website, but the officials look as if they're floating over the road.

In May 2012, Internet users discovered a photo on a local government's website that showed five officials hovering over a landscape project in the Yuhang district of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Many have called the manipulated images shameful and some say the pictures send a negative message to the public concerning the job duties of the officials.

"The national mass line education campaign is going on, but some officials are still using old fashioned methods of delivering information to the public. And some subordinates' mindset of flattering their superior remains unchanged," said Qu Ting, a primary school teacher in Shanghai.

The mass line is a policy of the Communist Party of China aimed at boosting ties between Party officials and members and the public.

Some social experts said the officials involved are to blame whether they knew about the doctored pictures or not.

Xia Xueluan, professor of sociology at Peking University said, "Officials who truly care for the elderly do not need to use fake photos to show off their work."

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