Image of eastern China bridge falsely shared as 'Mumbai highway' in pro-BJP posts
Social media users have repeatedly shared a photo of a bridge in China's eastern Shandong province, falsely claiming it showed a highway in the Indian megacity Mumbai built by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The posts surfaced as India held its marathon general election that the BJP is widely projected to win.
"This is not America or China, this is the highway of Mumbai, look," read part of the Hindi-language caption of a photo of a bridge posted on Facebook on April 26, 2024. The post was shared more than 600 times.
The caption included a reference to the BJP's goal of securing 400 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha -- the lower house of India's legislature -- suggesting large-scale infrastructure projects could propel the party and its allies to win a supermajority (archived link).
On April 19, 2024, nearly a billion Indians began casting their ballots in India's six-week general election -- dubbed the world's largest democratic exercise.
Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all but assured victory as a weakened opposition is pushed to the sidelines.
The image was shared alongside similar claims on Facebook and on social media site X.
But the bridge is in fact located in eastern China.
Jiaozhou Bay bridge
A reverse image search on Google, followed by a keyword search on Douyin -- the Chinese version of TikTok -- found the image in the false posts corresponds to drone footage of the bridge uploaded by a photographer on August 15, 2022.
The simplified Chinese caption reads, in part: "This is the Jiaozhou Bay bridge."
Below is a screenshot comparison of the image in the false posts (left) and the eight-second mark of the Douyin video (right):
The Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in China's eastern Shandong province spans 24 kilometres (14.9 miles) and connects the port city of Qingdao to the industrial city of Huangdao (archived link).
When the bridge opened to traffic in June of 2011, it was the longest sea bridge in the world at the time (archived link).
Further keyword searches found a similar photo of the Jiaozhou Bay bridge published in June 2011 in AFP's archives, credited to Chinese photo agency ImagineChina (archived link).
The location of the four pylons in the foreground can be seen on Baidu Maps street view imagery of the bridge here, while the tower in the background can be seen here (archived links here and here).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the Douyin video of the bridge (left) and the Baidu Maps street view imagery (centre and right), with similarities marked by AFP:
Mumbai has a sea link bridge, built in 2009, but the structure and shape of the pylons are different from the ones seen in the image in the false post (archived link).
AFP has debunked misinformation swirling around India's general election here.
