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‘Cute but sad’: bored, lonely Chinese university students are making cardboard pets to relieve tedium of campus coronavirus lockdowns
- ‘A cardboard dog doesn’t get ill and always waits for me at the dormitory door,’ said one student
- Online observers split over whether paper pets craze is sign of madness or a source of spiritual comfort
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Mandy Zuoin Shanghai
Many locked-down Chinese university students have turned to making cardboard pets to cure their boredom and loneliness.
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As the Chinese government continues to enforce a zero-Covid policy, thousands of young people have been confined to campus resulting in soaring levels of tedium and isolation.
In an attempt to ease their woes, students across the nation have begun making handicraft animal companions out of recycled cardboard.
The craze has led some online commentators to speculate that the young people involved may have gone stir-crazy.
Among other practices, students place their hand-crafted pets - mainly dogs - at their dormitory doors and take them for a walk when going for lunch or PCR tests, which China is still using to identify cases of the fast-spreading Omicron variant, according to viral pictures and videos shared on mainland Chinese social media.
Inspired by different species in the real world and popular emojis online, many students have created differently designed paper animals and shared them at school and online.
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Having spent three years under the shadow of strict Covid controls, many said the latest fad could provide “spiritual comfort”.
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