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| - Fact Check: Video from remote Chinese village viral as Arunachal residents taking precarious journey
A video of people climbing very steep cliffs while others scaling up and down a long ladder has been making the rounds on social media, with many claiming the visuals are from a small village in Arunachal Pradesh.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from the Atulie’er village in China’s Sichuan province. The vine ladder made by the villagers seen in the video was later replaced by a safer steel ladder. It has since become a tourist spot.
“We keep complaining about the transportation facilities in our areas. This is a small village in Arunachal Pradesh. Look at the challenges people face in their daily lives,” read the caption of a video, making the rounds on social media. The video shows people climbing very steep cliffs, some on foot, while others scaling up and down a long ladder. People could also be seen carrying toddlers on their backs.
A person who shared the video on Facebook, wrote in Hindi, “We keep complaining about the facilities of aeroplane, metro, train, bus, ola, uber, auto in our city, whereas this is a small village in Arunachal Pradesh, where life is no less than a formidable challenge.”
Archived versions of such posts can be found here, here and here. AFWA found that this video does not show Arunachal Pradesh at all. It’s from a remote village in China.
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A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video led us to a tweet from April 2020. The caption written in Mandarin, loosely translates to: “This video from Daliang Mountain was shared by an Italian. The foreigner asked me if it was true. After watching it, I said it was true. The foreigner asked why China donated so much money to foreign countries, and I couldn't answer.”
We also found a 2020 Facebook post, featuring the viral clip, mentioning the name of the location as Atulier’er cliff village in the Sichuan province of China. Several others also shared the same clip, mentioning that it showed the struggle of villagers in this remote Chinese village.
With the help of this clue, we found a video from July 5, 2019 on the Facebook page of China Xinhua News, a state-controlled media outlet in the country, that featured a few shots seen in the viral video. “Residents of this ‘cliff village’ in Sichuan, China have been scaling the cliff for generations. In recent years, a steel ladder makes the 800-meter climb much easier,” the caption alongside the video said.
In another video shared by China Plus Culture in 2020, we could find some other clips of people climbing up a cliff with bare hands, followed by the clips of the long staircase that could be seen in the viral video. This post also mentioned the location as the Atulie’er village in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in China’s Sichuan province.
It further mentioned that the village is located on a cliff 1,400 meters above sea level. The villagers used to use a series of handmade ladders to scale the 800-metre-high cliff. Later, a steel staircase was built that improved the travel conditions for the locals.
Using this information, we found a CNN news report from October 26, 2016, about a steel ladder connecting the cliff-top mountain village of China with the outside world. The village reportedly started constructing the ladder in August 2016, with an investment of 1 million yuan ($147,928). The report mentioned that the decision came after the state-run Beijing News published harrowing pictures of around 15 school children, some as young as six, using an unsteady vine ladder to reach their school in the valley below, making the remote village famous on the internet.
Back in May 2020, as part of China’s poverty relief program, around 84 poor households in Atulie’er village were reportedly relocated to apartment buildings near the town centre of Zhaojue County in the province of Sichuan. Bidding farewell to their cliff-top houses, they relocated for better access to schools, medical care, and other basic services.
However, as per recent reports, the nearly three-km-long steel ladder of the village has now become a tourist spot after the steady improvement in infrastructure. Having been covered by 5G signals, the village became more widely known through live streams and saw a bump in tourism.
(Written by Sanjana Saxena)
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