Authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi have escalated their response to a viral video of a suspected rat's head found in a student's food at a Nanchang university canteen, vowing a provincial level inquiry amid widespread public disgust and online ridicule over the incident.
The provincial government said Saturday it has put together a taskforce to probe the grisly find by a student at the Jiangxi Industry Polytechnic College in the provincial capital, including education officials, market supervisors and police, state media reported.
The move comes after local market supervision officials announced that the sodden lump – which appears in the video to have eyes and rodent-like teeth – was in fact part of a "duck's neck" – a common ingredient in soups.
Food quality has long been a bone of contention for students at Chinese vocational colleges, with campus protests breaking out in the southwestern province of Sichuan in 2019 over an incident of mass food poisoning.
Nanchang market supervision bureau official Jiang Xiexue told state-run Jiangxi Radio and TV that "local law enforcement officials had arrived at the scene and confirmed the strange item as a duck neck after repeated comparison," the Global Times reported.
But public suspicions weren't so easily allayed.
"Many netizens insisted on their speculation that it was a mouse head rather than a duck neck with some questioning that how come the duck neck has teeth and what the long 'hairs' were," it said, adding that Global Times commentator Hu Xijin had called for "more convincing evidence" to prove the lump came from a duck.
‘Duckrat’ memes
Jiang's claim was backed up by a written statement from the student who posted the viral video, which has spawned a number of "duckrat" memes, in which the head of a rat is edited onto a photo of a duck and spoof videos based on the phrase "calling a rat a duck."
"Hi everyone – in today's show we're going to learn how to write the phrase 'call a rat a duck,'" says one video, in the style of a calligraphy lesson or writing tutorial, as a hand inscribes the phrase onto a dirty car door.
"Finally, the truth emerged – turns out it came from a creature engineered by researchers at the Jiangxi Industrial Polytechnic College, known as a duckrat," says a mock documentary on the topic posted to the video-sharing site Bilibili and shared on Weibo.
Later reports also emerged that a student had found a green caterpillar in their food at the same canteen, the China Daily reported on June 12.
"Although the canteen continued to operate normally after the incident, fewer people are using it," the paper reported, citing the Henan-based Top News service. "Instead, many students have been seen receiving takeout deliveries at the entrance of their dormitories."
Seeking scapegoats
Beijing-based current affairs commentator Ji Feng said he wasn't optimistic that the upscaled investigation would improve matters.
"The point of the investigation ... will be to find scapegoats ... among the management or in the contractors operating the canteen," Ji said, adding that the university canteen business is highly lucrative for contractors.
Former Jiangxi high school teacher Sun Yanru agreed, saying that the inquiry will likely seek to take the heat off local officials.
"Firstly, this investigation won't yield any substantive results, although naturally they may come up with a few scapegoats to try to calm down [public outrage]," Sun said.
"That's what they did with the woman found chained up in Xuzhou, Jiangsu,” Sun said. "This kind of investigation task force lost any credibility with the general public a long time ago."
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.