STORIES of people in China eating foetuses have been making their rounds lately after Wuhan’s exotic-meat eating culture was linked to the coronavirus outbreak.
Are these baby-eating rumours true? Or perhaps, how did these rumours begin?
No surprise, a photo went viral
Well, somewhere in the early 2000s photos of a Chinese man calmly eating a cooked human foetus circulated in the web. This then resulted in rumours concerning the cannibalistic culture of the Chinese. And the commentary surrounding the rumours went along the lines of ... ’Chinese eateries selling baby meat’
The photo was actually a shock-art performance
However, little known to many, the photos were of a man named Zhu Yu. And Zhu Yu is no ordinary man, he’s an avart-garde performance artist. If you’re curious about what avant-garde art is, it’s basically a form of artistic expression considered new and experimental.
In the year 2000, Zhu Yu took part in a shock-art performance titled “Eating People”, and it is from this performance that the baby-eating photos were captured. He also seemed to imply that the foetuses were of real humans and it tasted bad. His intention for the whole fiasco was to answer a question we rarely ask ... “Why can’t people eat people?”
Well, despite Zhu Yu’s claim that the foetuses were real, fact-checking organisations have claimed that it most likely was constructed from a duck’s body and a doll’s head.
It was reported that after the incident, the Chinese Government banned exhibitions involving culture, animal abuse, corpses, and overt violence and sexuality. Zhu Yu was also prosecuted for his misdeeds.
