China has earned something of an international reputation as the world leader in shoddy frauds.
Online retailers such as Wish and Temu are known for selling knockoffs and counterfeit products that originated there.
But, though its consumer goods might not be wholly genuine, one would think that China’s national landmarks, at least, would be the real thing.
Well, apparently not, as a tourist found out when scaling Asia’s highest waterfall.
In a video shared by the South China Morning Post on Thursday, a hiker climbed to the top of the Yuntai Mountain waterfall in China’s Hunan province, which is more than 1,000 feet tall.
When he arrived there, he found that most of the water for the falls was provided by a series of rusty pipes, which almost no effort had been made to disguise.
The U.K.’s Independent reported that the video exposing this deception was originally posted on the Chinese social media platform Douyin, where it garnered more than 48,000 views.
In response, the park posted an apology and explanation for the deception, with a statement written in the voice of the waterfall.
“In order to enrich your visiting experience and make your visit worthwhile, I made a small enhancement during the dry season, just to meet you in a better posture,” it said.
Responses to this deception from users on Douyin and another Chinese platform Weibo, were pretty divided, according to The Independent.
Some decried the shoddiness of the deception.
“The main thing is that the water pipe is so crudely installed, others at least disguise it in a superior way,” one user said.
Others took a more moral stance: “The move does not respect the laws of nature nor the visitors.”
Another group of users found the blatant deception mostly harmless.
One said that “it is better than seeing no water at all” for the 7 million tourists every year who come to see the waterfall.
Perhaps, but this embarrassing discovery was very much in character for the Chinese government and Chinese industry.
After all, only last month a Chinese zoo was busted for painting Chow Chow dogs and presenting them as “pandas.”
A zoo in China painted dogs because they didn’t have real Pandas😂 pic.twitter.com/BUyw7M4z9q
— Gareth (@garethrichmond5) May 6, 2024
China leads the world in counterfeit and pirated goods, targets Americans with IP theft and threatens global trade by flooding the market with artificially low-priced goods.
That is on top of its blatant lies surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, from its grossly inaccurate death counts to its denial that the Wuhan lab had anything to do with the outbreak.
Will America and China’s relations continue to go downhill?
By comparison, the waterfall deception, though almost as laughably bad as the fake pandas, was relatively harmless.
Still, harmless as it might be, deceiving people about the nature of this waterfall was yet another alarming example of the ease with which the Chinese government deceives its citizens and the world on a daily basis.
As Jesus said in Luke 16:10, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.”
If China cannot tell a straight story about having real pandas or a real waterfall, how could anyone trust the communist giant when it comes to anything important?
