Misleading: This video shows child abuse at a Russian hospital, not in China
In mid-April, an X user posted a 14-second video showing an adult lifting a child by the hair and throwing the child onto a bed. The post, written in Traditional Chinese, claimed: “Extreme survival conditions of Chinese children.”
Similar posts featuring the same video appeared on X last August (archived here, here and here), alleging in Chinese and Japanese that this incident took place in a Chinese orphanage.
These claims received more than 3,000 likes and 1,500 shares combined. While some comments questioned the nationality of people in the video, many condemned the abuse and criticized China.
However, this video has nothing to do with China. With translation assistance from Pavel Bannikov, an editor from the fact-checking organization Provereno, we confirmed that the footage depicts child abuse in the Children’s branch of the Novosibirsk State Regional Clinical Tuberculosis Hospital in Novosibirsk, Russia, in November 2020.
A reverse image search and subsequent keyword searches in Russian led to a longer version of the video in a report by the Russian state-owned RIA Novosti (archived here) on Nov. 6, 2020.
Multiple news outlets covered this incident at the time, including BBC Russian (archived here) and TASS (archived here).
The Insider’s coverage (archived here) featured an image that matches one frame from the video in the claim.
From these reports, Annie Lab learned that the video first appeared on the Russian social media site VK (ВКонтакте) on Nov. 6, 2020, posted by a user who witnessed the incident (archived here). The original post included the video in question, which was later deleted.
We also located a press release from the investigative authority (archived here) through a BBC Russia article. The release, dated Nov. 6, 2020, details a case matching the VK post and the media reports.
Keyword searches (archived here) for “Туберкулезная больница” (Tuberculosis Hospital) and “Жестокое обращение с детьми” (child abuse) on the investigative body’s website led to five documents related to this case in the Children’s branch of the Novosibirsk State Regional Clinical Tuberculosis Hospital.
These documents detailing the investigation, legal proceedings, and the final verdict are chronologically listed as follows: Nov. 6, Nov. 12, Nov. 26, Dec. 3, Dec. 16, 2020 (archived here, here, here, here, and here).
According to the final record, the court sentenced the defendant to one year of correctional labor.
