this is totally WRONG - it's 1000km away. It's like saying "Microsoft is headquartered in San Francisco" to make Seattle easily place-able in the mind of the reader.
no my point is that the author most likely got the wrong information than having done it on purpose. I can understand a person not being fluent in a foreign language, but I can't understand a person misrepresenting a distance of 1000km on purpose.
Most likely it was just bad editing/bad writing - and it's unconscionable to explain it away as "on purpose".
And by the way, the original article now has the corrected location: Changsha
