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| - False: This video does not show a firework drone light show celebrating New Year in China
A video of what appears to be a Chinese dragon drone show with fireworks over a waterfront at night was shared across the internet on the first day of 2025, allegedly showing a New Year celebration event.
One Instagram reel saying, “China celebrates the new year with this insane fireworks display,” garnered over 963,000 likes. The video has a location tag that claims it was shot in Shanghai. Another Instagram reel in Swahili reads, “China 🇨🇳 How They Celebrated New Year 2025.”
Similar posts with the same clip can be found on X (here and here), YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Sina. China’s ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, also shared it through his official X account.
However, the video is digitally manipulated. Two separate video clips featuring fireworks and a drone show were placed on another video showing the Bund in Shanghai. There was no drone show or fireworks celebration in the area on New Year’s Eve.
Annie Lab found the same video in a higher quality that was posted on Douyin on Dec. 22, 2024, days before New Year’s Eve. It gained over 82,000 likes and 86,000 shares. The post, misleadingly captioned “#TheBundNightView #NewYearCountdown,” might have been where other users took the footage from.
Shanghai Bund countdown
One of the buildings with unique architecture visible in the clip is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, a landmark that stands at the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. It is situated opposite the Bund, also known as Waitan, an area with nightclubs and bars.
Annie Lab contacted one of many New Year’s Eve revelers at the area, Wendy Lin, a student studying in Shanghai, who joined the crowd closer to midnight. She said there was “no drones, no fireworks, no countdown.”
Lin told Annie Lab that she and her friends started to walk towards the Bund from Hubei Road around 11:40 p.m. on New Year’s Eve; they eventually stopped in front of Zhong Shan Dong Yi Lu, next to the river.
She also provided her own video clip she captured on that day. The same part of the sky above the landmarks shown in the Douyin video could be seen throughout her 20-minute walk.
According to the Shanghai government’s website, no official countdown lighting events were planned that day. Some users on Chinese social media commented that no show has been organized there since a stampede incident in 2014, which happened on New Year’s Eve in the same location, with 36 killed and over 40 others injured.
Smart Shanghai, a local English online magazine, reported in 2021 that “fireworks have been banned inside Shanghai’s Inner Ring Road since 2016.” Reuters and South China Morning Post also reported about the ban.
Origin of the dragon drone show and the fireworks
A reverse image search led to a video on Instagram with a watermark that reads Hangpai Shenzhen (航拍深圳), a Douyin account posting drone videos taken in Shenzhen.
Hangpai Shenzhen uploaded the same video on Oct. 1, 2024, China’s National Day, with a caption that indicates it was a celebration show performed on the same day in Shenzhen.
Below is a comparison between the manipulated video and the original one (slowed down by Annie Lab to match the movement; note that a bright dot, possibly a helicopter flying by, appears around eight seconds into both videos):
Meanwhile, the video showing the cascading fireworks with a circle of light made by drones was found to be taken in Liuyang, in Hunan Province.
An image search without the dragon and the Bund led to an identical video posted by People’s Daily Online. The footage used in the manipulated clip appears between 0:29 and 0:33.
This show was titled “Door of Heaven” and was performed at the Sky Theater in Liuyang on Dec. 7, 2024. The official Douyin page of the Sky Theater also uploaded similar footage the next day of the show.
Tutorial on the visual effect
We also discovered videos that show the same dragon and fireworks with claims of varying locations (for example, here and here). One of the accounts, which superimposed the dragon on a different video showing the Shanghai Bund, told internet users who asked about the show that it was created with “visual effects.”
Searching on Douyin with the keywords “Liuyang fireworks” and “visual effects” led to a video tutorial teaching viewers how to digitally insert the “Door of Heaven” footage into different backgrounds in a few steps.
The tutorial uses a mobile app called Jianying. With the “Picture-in-Picture (PIP)” feature, the Liuyang fireworks video can be overlaid on top of any image or video. Adding a “linear mask” and adjusting exposure would make the fireworks and the background blend more naturally, according to the tutorial.
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