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| - Misleading: Military truck video is old, unrelated to recent China-India border agreement
A video uploaded on X on Oct. 27 purportedly shows the People’s Liberation Army withdrawing from Tibet after China “ceded the territory to India.” In the 16-second video, a convoy of trucks travels on a winding highway in a mountainous area.
The same video posted on X one day later came with a claim that it shows the PLA withdrawing from Ladakh, a Tibetan-speaking region administered by India but contested by China and Pakistan.
These X posts circulated a few days after China and India agreed on patrolling rights in eastern Ladakh along the disputed Himalayan border. The Oct. 21 agreement was made on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia.
Both India and China have a military presence along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), a de facto border that stretches more than 3,300 kilometers long in Ladakh, which has been a source of conflicts since a bloody war between the two countries in 1962.
At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died in a skirmish in the border area in June 2020. A clash in January 2021 left troops on both sides injured, and eight months later, China and India blamed each other for firing shots.
As of this writing, the two X posts have more than 4,700 likes and 1,700 reposts.
However, the claim is misleading. The video is at least one year old. It shows military vehicles moving toward Tibet on the Sichuan-Tibet National Highway 318.
Geolocation
Through a reverse image search on Google, Annie Lab found an image showing the same location on Douyin Baike, an encyclopedia website run by ByteDance that owns Douyin. The Chinese overlay text reads, “The Road to Tibet seeking medical treatment.”
A reverse image search on Yandex found similar pictures appeared in articles about Daocheng Yading (稻城亚丁), a scenic tourist spot situated in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province.
We found that many travel blogs (for example, here and here) mentioned visiting Daocheng Yading by taking National Highway 318 (G318), which goes from east to west, from Shanghai to Sichuan province and ends in Tibet Autonomous Region.
On Baidu Maps, we geolocated the winding road; called “18 Bends of the Heavenly Road” (天路十八弯), it is part of G318, and stretches between Yajiang (雅江) and Litang (理塘) counties in Garze.
We also geolocate the observation deck on Baidu Maps.
The area around the “18 Bends” is known for its high altitude and winding mountain roads. A travel post on Xiaohongshu also confirms the location shown in the video.
Old video
Annie Lab learned that the video is at least one year old by tracing the area’s development with old images.
We noticed a red signboard in the clip, but photos posted on Xiaohongshu in May and November this year show a blue signboard instead.
Another clue in the video was a slope on the side of the road. We learned that before late July 2023, this area had undergone construction for landslide control. Lattice anchor protection can be seen fully covering the slope next to the bend in recent images and videos, but not in the video circulated online with the misleading claim.
We gathered photos and videos on different platforms showing the construction progress in 2024 (Nov. 11, Aug. 6, April 6) and 2023 (Oct. 8, July 25, June 13, and May 24).
While we cannot independently verify when the video was taken, this visual evidence indicates that the video in question was taken before late July 2023, more than a year before the recent agreement between China and India.
Vehicles’ direction
China’s state media frequently report PLA vehicles travelling on the 18 Bends of the Heavenly Road.
For example, China Youth Magazine and China Military Network reported the difficulties Chinese military personnel encountered while driving between Sichuan and Tibet.
Geolocation shows that the military cars in the video are traveling from east to west towards Tibet – not moving away from Tibet, as opposed to the claims in the X post.
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