Beijing Watch | China's Patriotic Teen Influencers Built A Business Selling Fake War Relics

A handful of underage Chinese students spent their own pocket money collecting historical items tied to Japan's wartime occupation of China, then donated the pieces to museums. Chinese state media rewarded them with glowing coverage, and police even stepped in after the teenagers said they faced threats online. In the official telling, these are young people "honoring history through action."

Chinese state outlets have spent recent weeks lavishing attention on three teenagers, Yang Yuxuan (楊宇軒), Zhou Ben (周犇) and Xu Kairui (徐凱睿), all of whom say they spent their own money collecting materials related to Japan's invasion of China.

Party outlets including The Paper reported that the three used lunar new year cash gifts and allowance money to buy historical materials, and that in May they traveled to a museum in Harbin documenting the crimes of Japan's Unit 731 to donate items including a manual for a Type 96 horse gas mask (《九六式馬防毒面具取扱法案》) and economic records tied to Unit 1855 and Unit 1875. The museum issued the trio donation certificates. Two letters Xu had purchased, purportedly written by Japanese soldiers, were even authenticated by a revolutionary military museum in Hebei province and accepted into its collection. At least some of what these teenagers collected was not simply internet hype; it genuinely entered the collections of official Chinese museums and memorial halls.

On August 6, the Zhejiang provincial Communist Party propaganda department's WeChat account, Zhejiang Publicity (浙江宣傳), ran a piece titled "'Spiritually Japanese' Sickness Must Be Cured, Harshly(《「精日」病得狠狠治》)," rushing to the three teenagers' defense. The article claimed the "patriotic teens" had been targeted with cyberbullying, doxxing and threats to shut down their accounts simply for buying and donating "evidence of Japan's wartime crimes." Its real target, though, was people the piece labeled "spiritually Japanese," language it used to call on major platforms to build dedicated mechanisms and algorithms to stamp the phenomenon out entirely.

Once "teenagers collecting wartime relics" became a viral content genre, history itself began migrating out of archives and museums and onto short video platforms, and claims like "I found rare evidence," "this is the scene of the Nanjing Massacre" and "this is an original photo I tracked down overseas" proved far more effective at generating likes, shares and followers than a dry catalog number ever could.

Relations between China and Japan have rarely been warm since anti Japan protests broke out in several Chinese cities in 2014 over the Diaoyu Islands dispute, and they have soured further since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's recent remark that a Taiwan contingency would also be a contingency for Japan, a comment that infuriated Beijing. These days, any Chinese social media user who speaks admiringly of Japan risks being branded "spiritually Japanese (精日)," shorthand for someone accused of idolizing Japan's political system, culture and way of life so thoroughly that they are said to be "Chinese in body, Japanese at heart." People given the label tend to skew toward the middle class and toward China's more developed eastern provinces.

The term carries heavy moral and political weight, often used to brand someone a traitor or a Japan sympathizer. In official and quasi official discourse, being "spiritually Japanese" is frequently described as a sickness requiring harsh treatment, and is tied to language about Japanese right wing "cognitive warfare" and hostile foreign forces. After China's legislature passed the Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law in 2018, official condemnation of people labeled "spiritually Japanese" intensified further, targeting in particular anyone who wears Japanese military uniforms, poses in ways that evoke Japanese soldiers, or denies or glorifies Japan's wartime invasion of China.

Given that charged environment, a "patriotic teenager" persona checks every box a viral influencer needs: youth, righteousness, scarcity, national memory, and an ever renewable supply of "the next piece of evidence."

The three teenagers state media has celebrated are Yang Yuxuan, who posts on Douyin under the handle Jiangyan (江厭) to roughly 800,000 followers, Zhou Ben, who has about 62,000 followers, and Xu Kairui, who posts as Kairui Xing (凱睿行) to about 23,000 followers. Their content largely consists of showing off what they describe as original wartime photographs and Republic era documents, insisting these are historical relics "tracked down overseas" and "ironclad evidence" of Japan's wartime crimes, before announcing they will donate the items free of charge to war memorial museums.

On August 19, an article signed by a writer using the pen name Chenmo Zhi Ke (沉默之克) quietly went viral on Chinese social media, investigating the three "kid influencers." The article was eventually reported and taken down.

According to a copy preserved by China Digital Times, the investigator ran a reverse image search and found an identical photo posted in 2022 by Fan Jianchuan, curator of the Jianchuan Museum in Sichuan province. It matched a photo Yang had repeatedly promoted as showing "Japanese forces bombing and strafing civilians in Shanghai in 1937." In fact, the photo was taken in Guangzhou in 1928, and its subjects were female Communist Party members who had been executed, not wartime civilians in Shanghai nearly a decade later.

The original photo can be found through Getty Images, credited to photographers Michael Maslan and Corbis. On the Chinese secondhand book marketplace Kongfz, an identical reprint sold for 185 yuan back in 2022, and the stamp reading "Asia Publishing Company, No. 103 Broadway Road, Shanghai" along with a handwritten catalog number on its back matched Yang's copy exactly, indicating his version was a recent laser or inkjet reproduction rather than an original.

Zhou separately displayed an old photograph showing a large group of soldiers rushing through a city gate, describing it as combat footage of Japanese troops breaking through Nanjing's Dinghuai Gate on December 13, 1937, during the Battle of Nanjing.

Citing local historical records, the investigative article noted that Dinghuai Gate had already been sealed off since 1843, after the outer Qinhuai River silted up and the waterway fell out of use, and that it was never reopened after the late Qing dynasty. If those local records are accurate, the very premise of Japanese troops "breaking through Dinghuai Gate" in 1937 is deeply questionable.

The article said the photo was actually taken at Yushan Gate in Changshu, and had previously appeared in the officially published book "Old Photos of Changshu" as well as in posts from a local history account. Zhou nonetheless tied it directly to the Nanjing Massacre, a claim that earned him nearly 30,000 likes and glowing coverage from state media. This reporter traveled to Nanjing University last year and toured several of the city's historical sites with help from a local contact; after this controversy broke, I asked that same contact about the Dinghuai Gate claim, and they said they had never even heard of it. Nanjing's city government, for its part, has not commented publicly on the matter.

Behind the three teenagers, the investigation found, sits a supplier who goes by the online handle Hanqiu Sanren (漢秋散人), real name Xu Weizhe (徐偉哲). The self-described "high school student born in 2009" first drew attention last year for pointing out a dating error in a bronze mirror on display at a Sichuan museum, then pivoted into selling what he calls "wartime materials."

Photos tied to the Nanjing Massacre, Xu has said, "definitely cost more than 1,000 yuan" apiece, while one set marketed as evidence of Japanese war crimes was listed at 388,888 yen, or roughly 17,000 yuan, not including tax or shipping. Xu himself made only one token donation before shifting into what amounts to a supplier role, providing "materials" that he sells for payment to fellow enthusiasts, who then step forward to make the donations themselves and claim the "patriotic teenager" halo for their trouble. In his own videos, he has mocked students who "can't afford" Nanjing Massacre related material.

An album Xu showed off as an "original photo album from Unit 8604" turned out, on its second page, to contain a group photo of a unit that had already appeared in China Newsweek back in 2018 and had become the cover of a published book by 2021. The same album even included two supposedly "original" prints that were identical to each other, on paper so fresh and glossy that it flatly contradicted claims the photos were at least 87 years old.

What stands out most is that Zhejiang's propaganda department and the various state outlets that wrote, published and reshared coverage of these three teenagers appear to have done no fact checking whatsoever before elevating a squabble between minors online to the level of Japanese right wing "cognitive warfare."

Yang himself admitted in an August 1 video that a police investigation found most of the people criticizing him and the others were "minors around the same age," that the matter was minor, and that the two sides had already reached a mediated resolution. Yet a provincial level propaganda department chose to write up this squabble between children as a serious social problem demanding harsh treatment.

This is far from the first time this kind of scheme has surfaced. From an American pawnshop owner named Evan Kail, to a French social media personality who went by Marcus, to Chinese middle schoolers today, "donating evidence of Japanese war crimes" has become a well worn path to online traffic and fame. Foreign influencers used fake photographs to secure state gifts and museum exhibitions; Chinese teenagers have taken it a step further, turning display into sales and turning buyers into a network of downstream sellers. The tendency of state media and memorial halls to accept donated materials as authentic without scrutiny has become the sturdiest institutional support this supply chain could ask for.

When patriotism can be sold at a price, when the authenticity of history can be so easily papered over by traffic numbers and certificates, and when officialdom chooses to see only "spiritually Japanese" critics while looking past the fabrication itself, the absurdity on display here reaches well beyond a handful of middle schoolers.

Original Article in Chinese

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