Misleading: Video of PLA soldiers pushing armored vehicles shows drill, not malfunction
A video of the open day event held by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Macao Garrison circulated in late May with a claim that two armored vehicles broke down during a demonstration. The footage shows soldiers pushing them in front of the crowd.
Posts ridiculed the army’s supposed incompetence over the “embarrassing” moment during the three-day event at its Taipa base between April 30 and May 2.
The video appeared to have spread in Chinese first and then in other languages such as English (here and here), Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, and German. Each post has hundreds of likes and comments at the time of writing. A still photograph showing the same scene has also been widely shared with the same narrative.
However, the claim is misleading. While the viral clip only shows soldiers pushing the vehicles, other videos taken at the same event indicate that this was part of a training demonstration and a competition between two teams.
In the longer footage, one of the vehicles is seen driving off normally after the competition, with no sign of a breakdown.
Videos taken by visitors
Annie Lab found video recordings from the same event posted on the Chinese platform Bilibili and also on the messaging app WeChat.
The competition demonstration took place on April 30, when the garrison opened exclusively to school children. Young audiences in school uniforms seated in the front row in the viral video match the group seen in a Bilibili video recorded on that day this year.
The pushing segment appears to be part of an annual military training demonstration.
Similar scenes were featured not only this year (April 30 and May 1) but also in 2018 and 2024, as reported by Xinhua, local online media UTV, and Lotus TV Macau on WeChat (archived here and here).
(Note: Lotus TV’s WeChat post can only be viewed in the app and has no external link.)
Some of the videos we found also featured live commentary from the event announcers on the competition between a blue team and a red team.
For example, eleven seconds into the Xiaohongshu video, a male commentator is heard in Mandarin saying, “Nice! The Blue Team has taken the lead and finished their training first, clocking five minutes and 59 seconds. Let’s all cheer on the Red Team.” (漂亮，蓝队实现反超，率先完成训练。他们的用时是5分59秒，我们一起为红队加油。)
In the viral video, music added in post-production is louder than the original sound at the event and drowns out the announcer’s voice and ambient noise, obscuring the nature of the demonstration.
A 2024 video by Lotus TV recorded an announcer who explained that the training event simulates an armored vehicle experiencing a mechanical failure during a mission.
Soldiers are competing to push the vehicle 30 meters to a designated safe zone before repairs can be carried out.
This original report can only be viewed on WeChat, but Annie Lab obtained and reviewed a screen recording for this fact check.
