New video reportedly from the Shandong Province of China has shown the world an image that eerily calls back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: Chinese tanks rolling down city streets.
The video that was originally posted to Reddit arose initially from local media sources and reached NDTV where the bizarre occurrence was characterized as being due to a “system upgrade” causing a wide denial of access to bank accounts.
According to the South China Morning Post,”Deposits at four banks in Henan province and one in neighbouring Anhui have been frozen since mid-April, leading to protests from disgruntled customers.
Some savers with deposits of less than 50,000 yuan (U.S. $7,400) received their money as promised on Friday, although others encountered a string of problems while trying to register for the repayment scheme due to an overloaded system.”
According to the Associated Press’ fact-checking, the video doesn’t depict any action related to the banks but rather a “military exercise.”
AP wrote, “This video was captured in the eastern province of Shandong, China, more than 400 kilometers (248 miles) away from Henan province. It shows an annual military exercise unrelated to the bank protests, according to a front desk employee at a hotel visible in the clip.”
????Breaking news????
Tanks are being put on the streets in China to protect the banks.
This is because the Henan branch of the Bank of China declaring that people’s savings in their branch are now ‘investment products’ and can’t be withdrawn.
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— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 20, 2022
But when was the last time that a banking system error and a military deployment in a civilian area coincided anywhere else in the civilized world?
Does this look like a ‘military exercise’ to you?
More disconcerting footage from the streets of what local sources cited to be the city of Rizhao showed a column of Chinese armored vehicles rolling down the street in order to prevent protesters from reaching the bank.
The bold-faced similarity to the tragic and iconic events of 1989 that saw the Peoples Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party brutally put down protesters directly outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was not lost on observers in Western nations.
“Tiananmen square 2: electric boogaloo,” commented one user, NDTV reported.
Under the Communist nation’s arcane banking regulations, the breakdown was allegedly caused by the actions of the Henan Xincaifu Group had seized control of five rural banks through “internal and external collusion” and “illegally.”
“The action plan is to repay the principal of these customers in batches,” an unnamed official from the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission told the state-owned China Banking and Insurance News in a rare, wide-ranging interview on Sunday, the South China Morning Post reported.
The optics of the scenario are difficult to ignore, the AP even reported, “Bank customers have been harassed and attacked by police, most notably in a protest earlier in July in Zhengzhou. Multiple bank customers interviewed by the AP said they have been interrogated and threatened by police.”
These reports taken alongside reporting from the South China Morning Post and NDTV, reveal that in the uncommon situation of widespread protests spreading even despite the consequences of police action, social credit impact and even military intervention may not be sufficient to continue the coercion of Chinese people.
