Muslims Rejoicing the Quran Ban Being Lifted in China? Fake Alert!

The video is as old as 2014 and purportedly shows Chinese Christians crying as they receive Bibles.

The video shows people rejoicing, having received books that are falsely claimed to be the Islamic religious text, the Quran.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

CLAIM

A video which shows people rejoicing as they receive books has been doing the rounds on social media with the claim that the government has lifted the Quran ban in China amid the coronavirus outbreak and people are joyful as they can read the holy book.

(An archived version of the post can be viewed here.)

(An archived version of the tweet can be found here.)

Many Facebook users have shared the video with the exact same claim.

Screenshot of the Facebook posts.(Source: Facebook)

WHAT WE FOUND

We broke down the video into several keyframes using the Google Chrome extension InVID and conducted a reverse image search using Yandex on one of the frames.

We found an article by a website called ChurchLeaders dated August 2016. According to the article, the video shows Chinese Christians receiving the Bible for the first time. On conducting Google search with keywords ‘Chinese Christians receive the Bible’ and ‘Bible for the first time China’, we came across another article which had similar details but added that the video goes back to 1980s.

We also came across the video on YouTube, titled ‘Chinese Christians Get Their First Bibles’, where it was uploaded in 2014.

The video was uploaded in 2014. (Source: YouTube)

Although The Quint has not been able to independently verify the events in the video, the aforementioned articles make clear the video is old and is now being shared with the false claim that in light of the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese government has lifted the ban on the Quran.

You can read all our fact-check stories on coronavirus here.

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