China's favorite war photo is a fake

PLA Major-General Huang Hong has revealed that a dramatic war photo that has gone viral online, billed at the Chinese answer to America's Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, is in fact a forgery.

In an article from last week titled "A Photograph Worth Remembering For All Chinese," Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily had previously compared the photo favorably to Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1945 and became the most reproduced photo of all time.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima

The iconic image of US marines raising the stars and stripes atop Mount Suribachi, as People's Daily rightly points out, was not a spontaneous snap from the triumphant final moments of the battle. It was in fact the second flag-raising ceremony of the day, the troops deliberately posed in historic fashion.

People's Daily then went on to say that China's 1984 picture was superior to Russia's favorite war photograph as well. Raising a flag over the Reichstag, they said, was not only staged but later edited as well. The Chinese flag-raising, on the other hand, was not staged and completely unedited.

"As a Chinese," the paper declared, "You should know: Our Chinese soldiers have a war photograph even grander and more heroics than the Americans and Soviets!"

The photograph they referred to was supposedly shot in March 1984, during the Battle of Laoshan in Yunnan Province's Malipo County, in which Chinese forced wrested the mountain from Vietnamese control.

Raising the flag at Laoshan

Major-General Huang, in his statement, explained that "the heroes of the struggle upon Laoshan peak are real, but the picture of the flag-raising is not. There were no journalists accompanying soldiers atop the main peak; the image was most likely staged by later generations."

[Images via NetEase]