China's Real-Life Horror: Gamers Vote Yang Yongxin Scarier Than Fiction

Dead by Daylight, a survival horror video game, wanted to introduce a Chinese butcher character in 2017 as a thank-you to its growing fan base in China. To decide on the design, developers ran a poll on the Chinese Steam forum, asking players to choose the most terrifying figure. The result was not a mythological beast but a real person: Yang Yongxin, who ran internet addiction treatment camps.

Yang Yongxin came to prominence in the mid-2000s, a period when gaming and internet use were surging across China. Titles like The Legend of Sword and Fairy, Counter-Strike, and World of Warcraft filled internet cafés after school hours. Alongside this boom, a moral panic over internet addiction led to the emergence of private schools and medical facilities promising to "cure" young people and teach them obedience.

Inside these facilities, phones and communication devices were banned, daily routines were governed by military-style regulations, and harsh physical training was used to instill discipline. Over the years, former patients reported a range of abuses, including solitary confinement, physical abuse, and even sexual abuse.

In Dead by Daylight, the character that eventually emerged from the poll was "The Doctor," a neuroscientist known for electroshock torture and unethical human experimentation. For Chinese gamers, the fictional doctor was all too reminiscent of Yang Yongxin, except that Yang existed in real life—making him a horror that needed no fantasy.