Video showing an argument between Chinese and Indian troops is old
A video showing a verbal argument between Indian and Chinese border forces is being shared on social media. The viral video is gaining momentum after the recent stone-pelting and fist-fighting incident between the two countries near Naku La Pass, Sikkim.
Claim: “Chinese and Indian troops talk after stone pelting in sikkim 3 days ago.”
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The video by tweeted by late Pakistani politician Mir Siraj Khan Raisani, whose tweet was viewed more than 2,30,800 times and retweeted by over 2,500 users.
Chinese and Indian troops talk after stone pelting in sikkim 3 days ago. pic.twitter.com/jF7uitro9v
— Nawabzada Jamal Khan Raisani (@SonOfShaeed) May 13, 2020
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Kashmiri journalist Baba Umar also posted the video with the same claim, crediting Reddit as its source.
https://twitter.com/BabaUmarr/status/1260594096470659076
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Truth
We ran the video through InVid to obtain keyframes, which were then reverse image searched through Yandex.
The oldest video we found that matched the viral video, was posted on YouTube by a channel called ‘YB Blog’ on January 13, 2o2o.
https://youtu.be/n2qiGehgFdA
This video clarifies that the Chinese army got into an argument with the Indo-Tibetan Border Police in Arunachal Pradesh.
Another user, 大红矛 (Red Spear), posted the same video a few days later and added subtitles. Watch it here.
We used relevant keywords to look for media reports about the incident but could not find any in English.
When using keywords in Mandarin ‘中国和印度士兵’ (Chinese and Indian Soldiers), it returned Chinese reports discussing the incident, which also have screenshots from the video. Both reports were published on January 17, four days after the video was posted on YouTube.
A Hong Kong-based news portal called ‘hk01’ wrote a report, titled ‘Online video of border confrontation; PLA officers slammed the Indian Army’.
(Translation: The territorial dispute on the border between China and India is a long-standing problem that the two countries have never been able to resolve. Although both the Chinese and Indian armies are seeking to establish a military liaison hotline to reduce misjudgements, the confrontation on the border can be said to be staged almost every time, brewing Strong sense of hostility.)
The same report was published by website ‘dwnews‘ or Duowei News, a news portal that is blocked on the Chinese mainland due to its disagreements with the State’s operations.
The headline for this article was ‘Frontier confrontation, Chinese military officers slammed the Indian army’. The lead paragraph remains the same as the article above.
Thus, this video is not from the recent conflict on May 10 between the Indian and Chinese armies in Nathu La, Sikkim, but is from an argument between the Chinese Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police in Arunachal Pradesh, earlier this year in January.
