The blog Pro State in Flames has posted a gallery of photos manipulated to serve prevailing political winds in the Soviet Union and China. Captions are in Chinese, but even without any annotations it’s still fun to identify the holes and watch how Stalin comes and goes – an extensive display of cropping, airbrushing, and in the above image, badly-executed white-out.
Also: Can anyone confirm some strange behavior with the Baidu image search? As I was looking for the altered image of Hu Jintao shaking hands with Deng Xiaoping (later found here), I discovered that Baidu returns no results for the current president. Jiang Zemin too is completely filtered (a search for Wen Jiabao, however, results in pages filled with his beaming face).
The strange thing is this: the first search I made for 胡锦涛, it was Kelly Chen who turned up on the results page. Subsequent searches returned “No results,” but after a few attempts searching with extra words added, Jay Chou came up (screenshot; note that the keyword in the address bar is different from that in the status bar URL, which corresponds to the “查看更多” link). Then “A-mei”, “Shennongjia” and “Wang Yan”. Plugging in Jiang Zemin and various extra characters eventually pulled up this result page, for “spicy photos”.
This doesn’t happen every time – maybe once for every ten attempts – and it’s not reproducible for any given search. It seems completely random, but occasionally the “Sorry, no results” page will be replaced images of something completely unrelated. Is it egao, or just a bug in Baidu’s keyword filter?