AI-Generated 'Foreign Shanhaijing' Videos Target Chinese Minors with Violent and Sexual Content
AI-generated videos called 'Foreign Shanhaijing' became viral among Chinese minors in 2025, featuring absurd AI-combined creatures with nonsensical names. The videos contain violent and sexual content that distracted children from studies and led them to mistake the foreign content for China's classical Shanhaijing text, according to CCTV reporting and Beijing's Cyberspace Administration.
What happened
AI-generated short videos known as 'Foreign Shanhaijing' became widely popular among Chinese minors starting in 2025. The videos originate from overseas 'brain-rot meme' videos that use AI technology to randomly combine animal, object and human characteristics to create absurd creature forms, paired with distorted audio and invented story backgrounds.
These videos were reposted from overseas platforms to domestic Chinese short-video platforms beginning in early 2025, sparking large-scale secondary creation and transmission. Related merchandise including toys, stationery, comic books and small games based on these AI-generated images have been mass-produced and sold on online shopping platforms and in school neighbourhood shops.
Reported impact
Children have become intensely absorbed in memorizing nonsensical names from the videos, with some learning them faster than school curriculum. Parents report children do not know China's actual Shanhaijing classical text and mistakenly believe Shanhaijing is foreign.
Videos contain AI-animated characters depicting violent scenes including mass killings, beatings and cutting, and some related games embed soft pornography content. The content risks normalizing violence and sexual material to minors and disrupting their studies.
Index analysis
AI image generation tools require only a few keywords to produce animation content in seconds, lowering technical barriers to creation. Platform recommendation algorithms amplify reach by continuously promoting videos to users who view even briefly, creating a cycle of continued exposure.
The videos use exaggerated, sensational and high-impact visuals designed to capture minors' attention. According to Beijing's Cyberspace Administration, primary and secondary school students treat knowledge of the images as social currency, creating peer competition.
Governance controls
Law experts note that under the Regulation on Network Information Content Ecology Governance, platforms are responsible for content review, filtering and removal, and should prioritize healthy and beneficial content in recommendation weights.
Beijing's Cyberspace Administration identified the technical threshold decline and algorithmic promotion as drivers of the spread. Manual human review of reported content involves delays measured in minutes to days, while algorithm-driven recommendations are instantaneous.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.