Editor's note: Li Yang is a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

When a retired Japanese civil servant who has never set foot in China and may never have had any real contact with the Chinese sits at his computer and uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate a fake video of "Chinese tourists trampling cherry blossoms," he may think he has found a shortcut to online traffic and easy money. What he has really produced, however, is not a stream of income, but another warning bell for a society sinking deeper into decline.

According to the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, a black-market chain has emerged in Japan that uses AI to mass-produce fake anti-China videos. Recruitment sites openly seek creators who "love Japan and hate China" to produce fabricated content depicting the Chinese as disruptive or uncivilized. Videos generated by AI in minutes are repackaged as "eyewitness footage" or "news reports," and can attract hundreds of thousands of views. While ordinary videos earn only about 300 yen ($1.89) per thousand views, "anti-China" content can bring in three times as much, with some creators reportedly earning 600,000 yen a month.

This is not merely a business. It is also a form of political manipulation. The historical parallel is hard to ignore.

In 1931, Japan's Kwantung Army blew up a section of railway near Liutiaohu in northeast China and blamed Chinese troops, using the incident to inflame war fever and create a pretext for invading China. Today, Japan's right-wing forces are using AI to reproduce a similar playbook: Manufacture a sense of crisis, stir up public sentiment and use that pressure to push constitutional revision. By feeding the public a daily diet of "China threat" narratives, they are trying to create a collective anxiety that says Japan will not survive unless it rearms and rewrites its pacifist constitution.

After Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's erroneous remarks on Taiwan last year, orders for "China-critical" content surged on recruitment platforms. The 2026 edition of Japan's Diplomatic Bluebook downgraded Japan's framing of China from "one of the most important bilateral relationships" to just "an important neighbor," creating an even more hostile environment in which online fabrications can spread.

Unable to hold back China's growing strength, these forces are inventing a virtual world in which China is ugly, chaotic and inferior. They are trying to trap their own citizens inside a disinformation cocoon and bind the entire country to an anti-China chariot.

But lies cannot be turned into truth, and hatred cannot be turned into security. A healthy country does not need to invent ugly neighbors to hold itself together. Only a society riddled with internal problems and unable to see a way out would put so much of its energy into manufacturing an external enemy.

Japan's own economic data tells the story. The International Monetary Fund expects Japan's economy to grow by only 0.7% in 2026. Japan's government debt has exceeded 260% of GDP. Nearly one quarter of the 122.3 trillion yen annual budget depends on newly issued government bonds. The yen has fallen past 160 against the US dollar. More than 90% of Japan's crude oil is imported. A shrinking and aging population is straining the social security system and the labor market, while manufacturing continues to move offshore.

Yet the Japanese government is still channeling a 9-trillion-yen defense budget into long-range missiles and offensive weapons, while openly beating the drum for constitutional revision and military expansion. With debt piling up and growth stagnant, it is pouring public money into a bottomless military pit. This is the last frantic struggle of a country moving toward collapse.

In 1931, Japan relied on lies to march on the road to militarism, a road from which there was no return. In 2026, it is using new AI tools to mass-produce old lies once again. But today's China is not the China of 1931. AI may help Japan fabricate an enemy, but it cannot rescue Japan's economy. A country that lives on "spiritual manipulation" is bound to lose in the real world. The signs of Japan's deeper collapse are not hard to find. They are there in every AI-generated anti-China video.

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