Hard to swallow...?

I suspect, but cannot prove, that this story -- now gaining wide circulation on the net -- is a hoax. If so, the photographs were put together by a Photoshopper whose stomach is stronger than mine. I've published extremely gruesome images in the past, but I have no desire to publish these, real or otherwise.

The story comes from the Seoul Times, which claims that there's a new trend in Cantonese cuisine: Soup made from boiled human fetuses. Since the Chinese authorities fine couples who have a second child, the main ingredient is easily acquired. The soup supposedly increases sexual stamina.

The strongest indication of fraudulence, aside from the mind-boggling ickiness of the very idea, lies in the fact that Dame Rumor has often accused the Chinese of fetusphagia (if I may be allowed to coin such a word). Here's Snopes on the subject.

In America, a Chinese "baby chow" urban legend made the rounds back in the mid-1990s. The story spread via James Dobson, the Rutherford Institute and other evangelical sources. No evidence ever backed up the accusation.

This article discusses a Chinese conceptual artist named Zhu Yu who, in 2001, put together a rather debauched cannibalism exhibit. Zhu probably faked up the whole thing, despite his claim to have used real fetuses. At any rate, the photographs were circulated as real, and...well, you know how the net is.

Those photos were not the present photos. This is a different affair.

The Seoul Times acquired their photos via email; they do not give any more details as to their sourcing. A little research reveals that these same disgusting images have been published before. They may have originally appeared in a Malaysian newspaper. In 2003, they appeared in a Hong Kong publication, as documented here.

Some observers have ascribed this recurrent accusation to American racism. While bigotry may have aided the spread of such stories in the mid-1990s, the photographs now under discussion first appeared in Asian publications. When published in Hong Kong, the pictures bore a legend reading "23kb.com," indicating that they had once appeared on a fairly popular Chinese web site. (It looks pretty sedate right now.) Although the images lack provenance and are thus unlikely to be real, no-one has proven them to be fakes.

I'll leave the analysis to others.