A video of New Year celebrations in China is falsely shared as RCB fans celebrating the 2025 IPL victory

Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) clinched their first-ever IPL title on 03 June 2025, ending an 18-year wait by narrowly defeating Punjab Kings by 6 runs. Celebrations erupted nationwide, with fans in Bengaluru and other cities taking to the streets waving flags and cheering. However, the victory celebrations in Bengaluru turned tragic as a stampede caused several casualties.

Amidst this, a video going viral on social media (here, here, and here) claims to show a large crowd releasing balloons into the sky simultaneously to celebrate the RCB victory. Let’s verify the truth behind the video in this article.

The archived post can be found here.

Claim: The video shows a large crowd simultaneously releasing balloons into the sky to celebrate the RCB victory.

Fact: The video does not show celebrations of RCB’s IPL 2025 victory. It is from New Year celebrations in Nanchang, China, and was posted online on 01 January 2025. It predates RCB’s title win and has been online since then. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.

A reverse image search of the keyframes from the viral video led us to a Facebook post (archived) dated 01 January 2025, featuring the uncropped version of the same video. This confirms that the viral video predates the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s first-ever IPL title win on 03 June 2025. The video was captioned “Happy New Year from China #China.”

In the extended version, we noticed Chinese text displayed on a large screen. Using the Google Lens translate feature, we found that the text translates to “New Year.” 

We came across multiple YouTube videos uploaded from Chinese accounts, claiming that the videos were from the New Year celebrations in Nanchang, China (here, here, here, and here). We also found several videos of the same event from different angles on the Chinese website Xigua Video. 

Factly had previously debunked the uncropped version of the same video when it went viral with the false claim that a large crowd simultaneously released balloons into the sky during the 2025 Prayagraj Maha Kumbh. It was also geolocated and identified as being from Zhongshan Road in Nanchang, China.

To sum up, a video of New Year celebrations in China is falsely shared as RCB fans celebrating the 2025 IPL victory.