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| - Fact Check: This man was not imprisoned for being a Muslim in China
A picture of a man with his wrists and ankles manacled to the infamous "tiger chair" is circulating on social media with the false claim that he was imprisoned for practising Islam in China.
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India Today Fact Check
This man was interrogated for allegedly criticising Chinese police on social media. However, human rights bodies have often called out atrocities against Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
The Uyghur Muslim community in China has for long complained of human rights abuses by authorities. Social media too has highlighted their plight time and again.
More recently, a picture of a man with his wrists and ankles manacled to the infamous “tiger chair”, a contraption used by Chinese police for interrogation, is circulating on social media with the claim that he was imprisoned for practising Islam in China.
The archived version of the post can be seen here.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim along with the image to be misleading. The man was detained for allegedly criticising police on social media platforms.
AFWA probe
With the help of Russian search engine Yandex, we found an interrogation video of the same man, uploaded in 2018 via a Chinese YouTube channel.
According to the video description in Chinese, the man is Zhui Feng Luhua, who was being interrogated for allegedly criticising traffic police on a WeChat group for arresting motorcyclists.
A further search led us to the same video uploaded on a verified YouTube channel called “Lieutenants Loft”. This video has English subtitles of the interrogation.
According to the video subtitles, the police ask him, “Do you know why you are here?” The man, who identifies himself as Luhua, says, “I drank a bit too much and spoke nonsense.”
The interrogators further ask, “Why did you complain about the police on QQ and WeChat?” To this, the man says he commented on an image of someone riding a motorcycle. The police then ask him, “Why did you talk about the traffic police online? What’s wrong with police confiscating motorcycles? Why did you badmouth the police? Do you hate the police?”
AFWA contacted two Chinese language experts for verification of the video content. They confirmed that the conversation is indeed about online abuse of police and there was no mention of any religion in the entire proceedings.
Over the years, the same video was shared by journalists and netizens criticising the Chinese government for curbing freedom of speech.
We also found several media reports of the incident, confirming that the man was arrested for criticising the police on a social media group.
China has been facing severe criticism across the world over the ill-treatment of the Muslim Uyghur community in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Quoting a new research by a Uyghur rights group, a BBC report published in May 2021 said at least 630 imams and other Muslim religious figures have been imprisoned or detained since 2014 in a Chinese crackdown on the Xinjiang region.
However, it is clear that the picture in question is of a man who was questioned for allegedly criticising the Chinese police on social media.
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