A scene from a 2019 Chinese drama is viral with a false claim that it shows several houses in Lungler, Myanmar being bombed in the ongoing airstrikes by the Myanmar Army.
According to a The Times of India report published on September 11, 2021, Lungler village saw clashes between Myanmar Army and armed civilians called Chinland Defense Force on September 10. The report stated that the armed encounter resulted in fresh entry of around 100 refugees from Thantlang township to Mizoram crossing the Mizoram-Myanmar border river Tiau. Incidentally, Lungler village shares a border with Thingsai village in Mizoram.
The viral video has been captioned on Facebook as, "Lunglerh village in #Myanmar's Chin State bordering Thingsai of #Mizoram being bombed on September 10; civil war-like situation forced at least 150 Myanmar nationals to cross over to #India".
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Fact Check
BOOM found that the video is a scene from a Chinese TV series called Glory of the Special Forces released in 2019.
An inital reverse image search on one of the keyframes from the viral video led us to a YouTube upload from August 2019 which showed that the video is old and not recent.
A further search showed results for links to stories from 2019 published by Chinese media outlets, with images matching scenes from the same viral video. An article published by Chinese site, Zjol.com on September 30, 2019, the same video was earlier viral with a similar fake claim that it showed a scene from August 16, 2019 clashes in Northern Myanmar.
The article had in 2019 debunked the video and said, "The Shanghai Rumour Refusal Platform found that the video was actually a filming scene of a film and television series. It was originally posted on his personal Weibo account by director Xu Jizhou." It further added, "Judging from Xu Jizhou's recent Weibo, this video is a clip from the TV series "Glory of Special Warfare".
We then reached out to Taiwan FactCheck Center, a factchecking website in Taiwan who having access to Chinese social media site, Weibo, confirmed that the same video had been uploaded by the series director on his official account.
The Taiwan FactCheck Center also sent us a screenshot of a post from September 2019 posted by Piyao on their Weibo account to debunk the same video. The post by Piyao said, that it was a scene from a Chinese drama series. Piyao is a platform launched by China to debunk fake news on social media sites in the country.
We used Google lens to translate the text seen in the Weibo screenshot and found that it says, "The video of 'the scene of the terrorist bombing of the war in northern Myanmar' is viral. It is actually a filming. Recently a video purported to be the "scene of the terrorist bombing of the war in northern Myanmar" went viral on the internet. Some netizens after watching it exclaimed how happy they are to live in China! However, the video is actually a film and television drama..."
We further found an article published by Piyao on Septmeber 30, 2019 about the video which says the the video clip shows a scene from a TV series called Glory of the Special Forces directed by Xu Jizhou. Piyao in their story carried a Weibo post by director Jizhou, where he had uploaded the same video with the caption "finished another scene".
The details of the TV series can be found on IMDb's site.
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