Netizens, notably Twitterians and TikTokers, have become increasingly concerned with "Zombies in China" virally trending online.
Dozens of netizens have posted inquiries over whether such an outbreak was possible and if it had already silently began. Others uploaded videos supposed to be footage of the horrible fictional phenomenon, but really stemming from widely used movie, series and videogame scenes. Some netizens even made their own footage, cosplaying the undead.
Despite being fake, these videos appear to have got some netizens worried.
"I'm not trying to scare anyone but why are there people on TikTok saying there are zombies in China?" one netizen cautiously wondered, while another suggested that he is ready to be move to another planet, even inhospitable Mars, just to stay away from the brain-hungry infected.
Others took the trend for what it was – a big joke – humorously suggesting that a nation so proficient in building walls as China should start building a new one named the ‘Great Barbed Wire Wall’.
But Why China?
Jokes aside, the trend seems to stem from one of the aftershocks of the actual pandemic – the coronavirus one. COVID-19 spawned an array of unsubstantiated claims and theories about Beijing hideously trying to conceal the emergence of the novel disease.
One such theory took a rapid turn from COVID-19 to the fictional zombie virus in an article posted on the WeAreTheMighty.com in 2021 dubbed "This is how a zombie apocalypse is most likely to start in China". The article, for unclear reasons, resurfaced in 2022, apparently giving birth to the very social media trend that got some of the netizens concerned.
Naturally, there has been no scientific proof of the existence of a virus that turns a living being into a flesh-eating zombie (although several pathogens affecting animals in somewhat similar ways do exist).