TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) on Tuesday (Aug. 9) announced that a photo released by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) appearing to show a Chinese warship within sight of a Taiwanese frigate and the smokestack of an eastern Taiwan power plant to be fake.

On Aug. 6, the PLA Eastern Theater Command released a photo that appeared to show a People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) sailor pointing a pair of binoculars at Taiwan's frigate Lan Yang while the smokestack of Hualien County's Hoping Power Plant can be seen in the background. The photo was allegedly taken on Aug. 5, when Chinese forces were carrying out massive military exercises and live-fire drills in six zones around Taiwan in retaliation for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

On its website and Facebook page, the TFC pointed out that the photo had widely been published by Chinese and Taiwanese media and circulated on social media platforms. However, after the TFC asked a number of experts to examine the photo, they assessed that the proportions of the objects in the photo were "unreasonable" and there were obvious traces of manipulation, indicating that this was fake news.

Senior photojournalists told the TFC that the online photo is unreasonable from the perspective of photography principles. To take a photo of the three objects, including the sailor, frigate, and smokestack, a super-telephoto lens must be used.

To make the sailor fit into the composition, the photographer would have had to stand at a great distance behind him. However, the deck of the warship is not wide enough to enable the photographer to step back enough to take such a shot, according to the experts.

Imaging experts also pointed out that the outline of the sailor and the frigate are "too clean" and the difference in resolution between the person and the ship is too large to be in the same photo. Therefore, they concluded that the image was a composite of different photos.

Number on bow of Lan Yang visible in photo on right, but disappeared in image on left. (TFC images)

Military experts said that after magnifying and viewing the photo uploaded on the internet, there was no hull number seen on the bow of the Taiwan warship. However, another photo published in the same batch clearly shows hull number 935, representing an obvious contradiction.

Earth science experts stated that if the online photo was taken on the east coast of Taiwan, the height of the coastal mountains would be about 1,200 meters and the height of the average warship above the waterline would be about 30 meters. Yet the warship in the photo appears to be quite "huge," with "unreasonable proportions" and the water was not splashing against the bow of the frigate as it normally would, which is also unusual.

The TFC emphasized that it only sought to verify whether the photo had been altered and the dynamics of the PLA's military exercises are not within the scope of the report.