{"id":15053,"date":"2013-03-03T04:03:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T04:03:06","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-03-03T04:03:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-03T04:03:06","slug":"Mystery-of-the-Chinese-zombie-Yalies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=15053","title":{"rendered":"Mystery of the Chinese zombie Yalies"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. universities have responded to China’s exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting.<\/strong> Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.<\/p>\n

How confounding? Consider the mystery of the Chinese Yale zombies.<\/p>\n

That’s “zombies” as in “zombie followers” on Sina Weibo \u2014 the hugely popular “weibo,” or microblogging, site that’s roughly akin to Twitter and has attracted more than 500 million followers since debuting in 2009. A common feature on Chinese social media, these zombie accounts could represent actual users who lurk inactively online. But often they’re fake, mass-produced accounts that mindlessly follow (hence the name “zombie”) and artificially boost another account’s follower numbers \u2014 and thus prestige.<\/p>\n

Since its debut in December, Yale’s new Sina Weibo account \u2014 sharing photos and other assorted items from its Ivy-covered Connecticut campus \u2014 has exploded in popularity, apparently far faster than any other U.S. institution’s.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While other prominent universities have patiently accumulated at most a few thousand followers in more than a year of operation, Yale’s been adding nearly that many daily, and has passed 140,000.<\/strong> The only other foreign university even remotely close to that figure is, oddly, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. Yale’s Weibo account is ranked 30th in popularity among educational institutions overall, better even than several well-known domestic institutions like Nanjing and Zhejiang universities.<\/p>\n

Associated Press<\/a>
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