AI video of Beijing ordering Japanese nationals to quit country misleads online

A TikTok video shared on November 19 appears to show a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson saying in Mandarin: "The government has decided that all Japanese citizens in China must complete their departure procedures by the end of this month."

The clip then cuts to scenes showing a group of people sitting in front of their laptops, travellers at an airport, an aeroplane taking off, and pedestrians walking on a street.

It also contains cropped chyrons that partly read "announced limit on all Japanese people in China" and "Tokyo streets filled with people that had returned to the country".

Image

Screenshot of the false post, taken on December 12, 2025 with a red X added by AFP

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi angered Beijing in November by suggesting that Japan could intervene with military force in any Chinese attack on Taiwan (archived link). 

China claims the self-ruled island as its own and has not ruled out seizing it by force. 

Beijing has urged its citizens to avoid travel to Japan and a number of cultural events within China have been hit -- including performances by Japanese artists cancelled or halted and the release of two films postponed. 

Tokyo has cautioned its citizens in China to beware of their surroundings and to stay away from large crowds (archived link). 

The false claim has also appeared elsewhere on TikTok and Facebook.

While some users question whether the video is authentic, others praised the purported announcement, saying it "should have been done a long time ago" and that all Japanese schools in China "must be closed and torn down."

A close inspection reveals many signs that the video was generated with AI -- including the watermark of Sora, a text-to-video AI model made by OpenAI, which also created ChatGPT, and people's faces that appear to be mushed together (archived link).

The video was also traced to a TikTok account that contains a disclaimer its content are not based on real events and are for entertainment only (archived link).

 TikTok has also marked the video as AI content.

Chinese characters behind the spokesperson in the false video read "Chinese Communist", compared with "Chinese" seen at genuine foreign ministry press conferences (archived link). There is also a missing "i" in the false video where the word "ministry" would be.

Image

Screenshots of the false TikTok clip with the Sora watermark highlighted by AFP

Image

Screenshots of the false TikTok clip with AI artefacts marked in red by AFP

Image

Screenshot comparison of the backdrop seen in the false video (left) and in a foreign ministry press conference (right) with the difference highlighted by AFP

The clip also identifies the man as "Zhao Jianming", but the website of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs shows there are no spokespersons with that name (archived link). 

The announcement cannot be found on the official websites of the ministry or the Embassy of Japan in China as of December 12 (archived here and here).

AFP has previously debunked claims linked to China-Japan relations.