Resident Evil stunt sees China accused of selling human meat

The Chinese government angered after misappropriated image goes viral four years later.

We've seen footage from Call of Duty making the news as real life footage before, but this one takes the cake.

Four years ago Capcom decided to create a PR stunt for Resident Evil by shaping meat into human form. As you can see at the end of this news piece, it was a rather grizzly affair in order to promote Resident Evil 6. However, someone has been using the images to tell a rather different story.

Recently there's been rumours that China was exporting cans of human meat, marked as animal meat, to African supermarkets. Then, two weeks ago, a woman named Barbara Akosua Aboagye shared this post on Facebook:

See those images to the right? Those are two of Eurogamer's pictures from the Resident Evil stunt. Unfortunately, most of those who saw the post didn't know the pictures' origin, and therefore started spreading this "evidence". The post was shared more than 26K times. and it didn't take long for it to reach South African outlets Msanzi Live and Daily Post. Of course they reported on it, which fuelled the allegation even further. In fact, they gained so much steam that the Chinese government decided to issue a statement on the matter:

"Today a local tabloid newspaper is openly spreading a rumour, claiming that the Chinese use human meat to make corned beef and sell it to Africa. This is completely a malicious slandering and vilification which is absolutely unacceptable to us. We hereby express our utmost anger and the strongest condemnation over such an act."

It didn't take long to reach Zambia's government either. Zambia's deputy defence minister, Christopher Mulenga, has announced that they'll launch an investigation of their own.

We'll admit, that figure looks impressive, but wouldn't the pose make the process overly difficult. Either way, with graphics getting close to photorealistic and internet access spreading all over the world this won't be the first time incidents like this happen.

Check out even more pics from the PR stunt below, and let's hope nobody else misappropriates them for their own slanderous means.

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Thanks, Eurogamer.