Synopsis

David Sylvian sits before a television as the video assembles a deliberately artificial portrait of China from symbolic images and staged tableaux. The band appear in military-style uniforms, play chess, perform with traditional instruments, and pose beneath a red flag. Lion dancing, martial-arts imagery, marching soldiers, and propaganda-like scenes are cut together with the musicians' performances. A burning fuse leads to the destruction of Chairman Mao's image, while Sylvian completes a jigsaw depicting an Asian woman before the picture shifts from black and white into color.

Factoids & Trivia

• "Visions of China" was released as a single on October 30, 1981, and appeared on Japan's album *Tin Drum*, issued the following month.

• The single reached number 32 on the UK Singles Chart.

• The video was made as a promotional film for the single and was later included on the DVD accompanying *The Very Best of Japan*, released in 2006.

• The instrument played by Mick Karn is identified as a dida, also known as a suona, a Chinese double-reed instrument.

• The promo combines staged studio material with archive footage of Chinese soldiers marching and making a collective declaration.

• The video's imagery deliberately blends Chinese and Japanese references. The final jigsaw image has been interpreted as looking more Japanese than Chinese, reinforcing the song's theme of constructing an imagined culture from incomplete impressions.

• David Sylvian later described the song as being about people using images of a culture without understanding its reality. He acknowledged that the band's own use of Eastern imagery could become gimmicky.

• Steve Jansen later criticized the video as conceptually confused and said that the military uniforms and overt Chinese cliches were poor choices.

• None of the band members had visited China when the song and video were made, making the title's "visions" deliberately secondhand and imagined.