For the past two days, social media is flooded with rumours that a military coup has taken place in China and that President Xi Jinping has been placed under house arrest. These rumours gained momentum after a person shared a video on social media claiming that a large military column was heading towards Beijing. Another user claimed that all flights to and from Beijing were suspended without offering any reason. Jennifer Zeng posted some screenshots and claimed that nearly 60 per cent of flights were cancelled across China on September 21. "No reasons were offered. As of 22:35 on September 21, 16,062 flights were planned for the day, and 9,583 flights were canceled," she wrote on Twitter.
India Today investigated the claims - that the flights were cancelled on September 21 - but it did not find any unnatural drop in the number of flights at any given time. The flight operations also appeared normal over Beijing, where the bulk of the so called military actions were to take place. Not only this, flight activity was also normal on in the following days, on September 22, 23, 34, and 25. There were not even the slightest outliers in the patterns. The below snapshots have been categorized into different timeslots across the 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th of September. It shows that for each timeslot, the air traffic is very similar on all the observed days this week.
India Today's Saikiran Kannan also went through the database of Chinese flights (that took off and landed), which tracks the number of actual flights on a daily basis. The pattern showed that from 2019 to 2022, the flight numbers had seen a cyclical dip each time there had been a large cluster or spread of Covid. Hence the cancellation of flights cannot be attributed to some military intervention, as suggested by some commentators on social media. According to the civil aviation operation briefing of China, the number of flights from January this year to September has seen a decrease of 46.4 per cent when compared to the last year. The graph shows 2019 data in blue, 2021 data in grey, and 2022 data in red.
Why flight cancellation claims don't make sense The investigation found that many looked at the flight tracking data in the wrong context and at the wrong times. Firstly, China is not as symmetric as India in terms of its population ratio and demographics. China is densely populated on its Eastern and Southern sides and not so much on its central and Western sides. Hence, many of the images shared of its airspace were projected as though there were no flights over most of China. Also, many snapshots of the air space posted online were taken during the wee hours of the Chinese local time zone. Hence, there were limited takeoffs and landings at that time. This is down to people from across the globe snapshotting the airspace at different times and not necessarily looking at the peak flight hours of China. China is probably the only country in the world to still have some of the toughest Covid restrictions in place. The country still shuts its towns and cities when new clusters emerge. China still follows a zero-covid policy and hence foreigners are still not wholly welcome in the country. That's why there have been mass flight cancellations in the country owing to various internal realignments and procedures.
The reported flight cancellations could well have been due to Covid precautions in place, especially with China celebrating its national day on the 1st of October to mark the formation of the People's Republic of China. This could also be a reason why some movements of military vehicles were happening toward Beijing for the parade.