Video verification: Sent to Chinese quarantine camp
A video goes viral. Its poster claims it portrays Chinese citizens being sent off to Covid-19 quarantine camps. But how much can be verified? Open source evidence suggests the footage is real. It matches public announcements by authorities and is likely showing the case of, what the government calls, “centralized isolation”.
As a consequence of a renewed outbreak of Covid-19, Tianjin, a city in the north of China, locked down its city center. Residents of the central Heping (和平区) district were reportedly told they can't leave home or their neighborhoods.
One video sprawled across social media platforms showing long lines of people marching with masks and many with trolley bags as if they went on vacation. Neatly so, they seem to keep several feet apart. In a later scene of the footage, crowds gather near a street corner. The troupe of masked citizens are waiting in the burning sun. The final scene shows waiting buses. Some people hold bags containing food and other provisions. There is a child waiting under a pole. Two surveillance cameras loom over him and the others, who are seemingly trapped.
I stumble across this video because of a Twitter account, Songpinganq, who posted the video on May 24th. The caption reads: “Millions of Chinese people are being forcibly locked up in quarantine camps now…”.
By the time of writing, it garnered 1.720 views on Twitter. It comes after several dozen of similar videos posted by the account over the past months. Most prominently, Songpinganq`s post in January, allegedly showing people and their lives quarantined in camps, set up by the government —it was viewed 2.1 million times (and it happens to be tagged in his post from May 24th, discussed here).
Verification
Where?
The writing in red font reads “天津加油”, translated as something like: “Come on Tianjin” — according to OCR readers by Yandex images search (or Google Lens).
Tianjin is a larger city in the north of China, with an urban population of nearly 14 million people. This is where I start the search for videos location.
A Google search for “天津加油” (Tianjin, the city in question) churns out a Reddit post from May 17, 2022. Posted in the Chinese community channel China_ilr, the creator claims the scene in the video took place in the village of Liu Anzhuang, allegedly showing villagers “taken to isolation”.
It's the same video, matching our 31 seconds footage we found on Twitter by Songpinganq. On Google Maps, we find the village Liu’anzhuan (刘安庄, near Xiaodian Town) as part of the Beichen District in Tianjin.
The large brown roofs in the video are a district feature on Google Earth Pro — allowing the filming to be verified at “39.24248060481699, 117.19249466501772”.
Provenance
If we hover over the Reddit post in the China_ILR community, we find the upload date as: “May 17, 5:25:16 PM Central European Summer Time”.
Worldtimebuddy.com allows translating time data across timezones. Tianjin is on China Standard Time, so it was posted around half past 11pm in China (if it was indeed uploaded in China, which we don't know for sure).
Our Reddit video was not the only post which published comments along with this footage. Reddit makes it relatively easy to find other channels, where this video was also published.
The button “view discussions in X other communities” offers us the option to receive a list of channels where it was discussed.
The channel discussion in R/China, according to the upload time, was posted around an hour later than our Reddit post (which received 101 comments). The instance at 5:25:16 PM on the 17th seems therefore the “earliest” one, at least on Reddit.
Context:
We identify the rest of the writing in the video (below the part in the red font). Tip: I noticed that OCR readers find it easier to work with writing with a plain background.
I fast-forward to second 26. The bus in the background allows Google Lens (or Yandex Image OCR reader) to get a clear shot of it.
The writing in white translated as following: “Tens of thousands of people go solo to kick business in Liu An disease” — The translation isn't perfect, even with deep learning translation service Deepl.com. Nonetheless, we now have a lead for subsequent searching.
A simple search for “Liu An Zhuang village” finds a number of English language news media posts, all of them from May 26. They claim the people were sent to the camp on May 16, 2022. Checking historical weather records for May 16, the cloudless sky in the video matches records for the 16th (though, there are a number of sunny days, it is hard to be absolute certain).
If we search for the exact Chinese name of the village and “Covid outbreak”, we find a notice from Chinese websites with the following note for those days (May 16/17): “Details of 2 new positive cases in Tianjin announced…”.
Both cases were found in the town where the video was filmed. The statement continues: “…after various investigations, the activity trajectories of the 4 new positive cases on May 15, 2022 were determined, and the main areas and places involved were announced”.
According to the statement, the municipal disease control department “reminds that those who have intersections with the released case track should immediately report to the community, unit or district disease control department, and cooperate with various prevention and control measures such as centralized isolation, home isolation, health monitoring, and nucleic acid testing”.
Conclusion:
There is much we don't know. From the statements released by the government, location and other details, there is a high chance that the people we witness marching and gathering in the video, are following orders by the government for centralized isolation. They were ordered “to immediately report” on May 16 —which matches the dates of the announcement and the location of filming.
Surveillance
The video drops hints of heavy surveillance. People queue under two cameras. The models of the cameras, we can't identify for certain. For that, the resolution is too low (if you recognize the exact brand in the video footage, please get in touch).
By attempting to find government contracts for surveillance cameras across the city, I come across an interactive map of listed cameras, across the district. Sadly, our cameras in the video isn't listed here.
Further, digging finds a research study on CCTV cameras by Chinese authors from 2019. A map of the distribution of surveillance camera in Tianjin, China, is presented in the paper. Though, the square is limited and south of the geolocation for our video, surveillance is dense. The author says “the surveillance cameras are widely distributed with the total number of more than 800”. Both example provide evidence of how tightly surveilled the city really is.
We try one more thing. Knowing that announcement are distributed via the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) we try searching for “Tianjin” and “outbreak”, across CCDIs website, and only over the past couple of days.
The CCDI is the highest internal control institution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its job is to enforce “internal rules and regulations and combating corruption and malfeasance in the party”.
Search: “天津疫情” site:https://www.ccdi.gov.cn/ (set date-search filter to after May 15, 2022)
In one note by the CCDI, we find further information on what happened in Tianjin Beichen District on the day in question: “On May 16, Tianjin Beichen District Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters issued a notice that due to the impact of the epidemic, dine-in in restaurants will be suspended from now on…”.
Restaurants closing, public notices of centralized isolation, heavy surveillance, these are the areas we can add open source intelligence.
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