The highlighted headline on the mock front page of the Yangjiang Daily saying "the city government will introduce a two-wife policy"

(Beijing) – Legal experts say police in one southern city overstepped their bounds when they detained a man for spoofing a local newspaper by creating a fake front page that said officials were preparing a "two-wife policy."

The website of Yangjiang Daily reported on January 22 that police in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, detained a man for "spreading rumors" because he created a mock front page of the state-run newspaper.

The Communist Party-run paper cited police as saying that an office worker admitted he made a copy of the front of the newspaper's January 14 edition and replaced an article about the agenda for an annual session of the city's government political advisory body with one about a purported plan by city officials to introduce a two-wife policy.

The man sent the fake front page to friends on the popular instant messaging service WeChat, and it began to spread to other social media platforms.

The newspaper put copies of the original front page and the man's version on its official account on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, on January 19, and said it had reported the incident to police.

Police said they took the office worker into custody on January 22. They did not say what other punishment he might face.

It is unclear what prompted the man to create with the fake page, but many in the public are disillusioned about the behavior of government officials. About one-fifth of the 214 top officials that were the subject of corruption investigations from December 2012 to August 2014 kept a mistress or had relationships with women other than their wives, the Beijing Times has reported.

The office worker's detention has triggered an online uproar, with many Net users saying the police overreacted. Two legal experts have also said police went too far by detaining the man.

Zhang Qingsong, a lawyer at Beijing Shangquan Law Firm, said police should not have acted unless they had proof the fake news led to widespread confusion and serious disruption of society.

"Anyone with a sense of humor would not take it seriously as it was obviously a prank," he said.

Zhan Jiang, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University's School of International Journalism and Communication, said the "two-wife" joke was in poor taste, but did not break the law. The newspaper could have handled the matter by telling its readers the fake front page spreading online was a prank.

(Rewritten by Li Rongde)