Zhejiang resident Yang Zongfu, 32, announced Saturday that he was halting sales of his "Chinese Noah's Ark," a lifeboat he invented. He wasn't halting them due to a lack of demand, but merely because he had no hope of finishing them before December 21, the final day of the Mayan calendar, which some believe represents the end of the world.

As this "doomsday" approached, customers flocked to Yang.

"I don't believe in the apocalypse but most of my customers do," Yang told the Global Times. "But it's impossible to complete those orders before the day they're afraid of."

Earlier this year, Yang started to sell "Chinese Noah's Arks" for 5 million yuan ($802,285) each.

He sold them to 26 buyers, who were mostly businessmen. The arks are giant spherical yellow vessels, which he claims are immune to earthquakes, flood and fire and "any terrible disasters you saw in the Hollywood movie 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow."

According to a survey done by Iposos, which included more than 16,000 interviewees across 21 countries, 15 percent of those polled believed that the earth would be destroyed someday and 10 percent believed that day would be December 21.

The survey also showed that the percentage of believers from China was the highest, followed closely by Russians. 

"Those who came to me were buying a sense of security, rather than a lifeboat," Yang said.

Fears spread

Unlike Yang, who designed the lifeboat to make a profit, Lu Zhenghai, a young man from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region who used to work as a company commander in the army, made an ark to save his family and friends from floods he believes will strike on the predicted doomsday.

Lu has spent nearly two years and 1.5 million yuan building the 80-ton boat. "I firmly believe it was right to prepare for disasters and even the disaster does not come, the boat can be used for receptions and shipping goods," he said, the China News Service reported.

Another man in North China's Hebei Province launched a similar project by building a round ark with nine seats.

In another incident related to doomsday fears, residents in Southwest China's Sichuan Province rushed to buy candles for the three days of darkness predicted before the end of the world. The same fears prompted a 54-year-old university professor in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province to donate her life-savings along with her house, worth 1.04 million yuan, to charity.

The professor told a local newspaper that she wanted to do something meaningful before the end.

A lack of beliefs

While Web users make jokes at the expense of these people, experts are concerned at the level of anxiety emerging in Chinese society, and the vacuum of stable belief systems.

 "For those who are afraid the world will be destroyed, the 'doomsday' prediction is just an excuse for them to release the anxiety hidden deeply in their hearts," Sun Yuxiao, a clinical psychologist from the Beijing Spiritual Counseling Fraternity, told the Global Times.

Nearly 20 people came to Sun for advice over the last month because the fear of a doomsday had made them unable to continue their normal lives.

An anonymous patient with mild depression, one of those who came to Sun, is a 15-year-old student. She kept asking Sun what would happen if the day came and her parents died.

"These rumors bring out the insecurities of society. This generation grew up in an age without beliefs but full of speculation," Sun told the Global Times, adding that it's not just the prospect of natural disasters that are worrying people, but also food safety problems, deteriorating air quality and global warming.

In contrast, Yan Yuanyuan, a spokesperson from Science Squirrels, a Beijing-based NGO, pointed out that doomsday jokes have been multiplying online. "It seems like they are looking forward to doomsday, that way they could escape from the life they hate," Yan told the Global Times.

Zhou Chu, a professor with Fudan University in Shanghai, said those jokes also reflected the "doomsday complex" and people are unconsciously expressing their discontent and pessimism with their lives and society.

Surviving at any cost

While some make jokes and others panic, survivalists across the nation, mostly those born after 1980, have been preparing ways to deal with other disasters, rather than pinning their "hopes" on an apocalypse.

"For us, 2012 is more of a serious warning rather than a joke," said Nan Ming, 29, a survivalist from Jiangsu Province, adding that many survivalists only feel secure when preparing for danger.

Nan said his parents survived the earthquake in Tangshan, Hebei Province, that killed 655,000 people in 1976. "Some people could stop praying once they made it to safety, but survivalists could not," he said.

Nan has been stockpiling hard bread, energy drinks, hiking gear, medicine stocks and ropes at home.

"There are a series of skills that would allow us to survive by ourselves. Survivalists believe that nobody, not even the government officials or the military would be there to save individuals in a real disaster," Nan said.

Nan and his friends have been preparing for the coming "doomsday" by conducting drills.

He told the Global Times that a war scenario might be chosen for drills on this occasion, as "a Sino-Japan war could break out someday if the Diaoyu Islands spat is not properly solved."

Nobody in Nan's survivalist group treats the drills as games.

"When a war breaks out, telecommunications signals might be cut off. It wouldn't be possible to use public transport and if you were driving, you would have to avoid the main roads and the highways or you would be found and killed by the enemy," he said.

Zhou believes that the grim efforts of survivalists are the result of the same anxieties that causes others to make jokes or visit psychologists. "They have the same mindset as those who built the ark," she said.