China’s dog abuse culture evolves into a social media trend

China has an animal abuse problem but especially a dog abuse problem. There are no laws against animal cruelty in China and abuse against dogs is widely accepted and tolerated. There are very political, cultural and anthropological reasons why this is so.

China is a very hierarchal society were authority is strictly top down. This hierarchy is controlled by the Communist Party of China which rules the country with an iron fist and unbridled cruelty against its own people. The human cruelty in China is codified in strict laws that give the Communist Party and its officials nearly absolute power, but the public security laws aimed at opponents of the party are typical examples of China’s cruelty. Journalists, artists and dissidents in China are detained in secret without access to lawyers and relatives. China also has an ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims in what the Chinese state calls Xinjiang (actually called East Turkestan).

Cruelty in China travels top-down with the power-dynamic ingrained deeply in the systems of society. For the top party cadres, animal cruelty is a way for the poor Chinese (Pínkùn rénkǒu) to blow off steam. As cynical and malignant it sounds, the Chinese Communist Party allows animal cruelty because it serves as an outlet to vent frustration and hence minimising the risk of having poor and angry people taking to the streets. The Chinese Communist Party literally views animal as a functional political tool that minimises dissent. Top party cadres think it is better if the poor take out their frustration on dogs rather than against the Communist Party.

China used to be known as the country where the Chinese eat dogs. This is a legacy of Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution which included mass famines as one of the consequences of Mao’s insane collectivisation of private property and agriculture that left millions of Chinese malnourished and dead.

Eventually, and by time, this practice did not remain mainstream and nowadays the number of people in China eating dogs has narrowed significantly. What is becoming mainstream in China however, is the publication and dissemination of videos on social media of cruelty and abuse against dogs. The practice is not new but is now going mainstream on Facebook. Remarkably, Facebook doesn’t think that these videos breach its standards which is very strange considering how strict Facebook is with violent content.

There is a niche market in China for animal torture and cruelty videos. The case of Wang Chaoyi in 2023 of the cat in the blender, did just expose his cruelty, it exposed that there are many Chinese people who are willing to pay to watch videos of extreme animal torture and cruelty. Wang Chaoyi may have inspired others including a Japanese man in Malta who went on a cat-killing-spree.

Earlier this year in China, a new video case of a extreme dog torture went viral in China and eventually the video hit social media. The case was so cruel that it triggered protests in South Korea and an international campaign for justice. The case involves up to four children who tortured and burned a female dog and her pups. The dog, called Wang Wang, was filmed while being tortured after the boys killed her pups in front of her own eyes. After Wang Wang was burnt and had only seconds left of her life, she crawled to her dead pups and tried to lick one of them while the trio kept beating her.

As usual, the Chinese state covered up the case, silenced the witnesses and no one was charged in Court. The children were considered to be below the threshold age of criminal liability so they were sent to an educational programme instead.

The brutal video of the torture of Wang Wang spread like wildfire on the internet, and it has been followed by a barrage of dog cruelty videos from China on social media. Now, after the Wang Wang incident, Chinese dog torture videos are spreading on Facebook like wildfire. There may probably be something with the algorithm of the platform that has enabled this but I do not know for certain.

The dog cruelty videos being posted online are less extreme than Wang Wang’s but they consist of torture and cruelty nonetheless. The type of videos vary. There are couples and individuals uploading videos of their own dogs in supposedly comic situations that involve a dog handler beating, threatening, and harassing the dog. Dogs are now props for Chinese social-media content, and most of this content is stomach-churning because it involves cruelty.

Then there are the types of videos that are being published by Chinese individuals who are in the animal industry – surprisingly these are more cruel and extreme.  One particular case caught my attention. There is a Facebook page called “Chongqing dog training ~ Zhang Deshua”. Chongqing is a Chinese municipality in the central areas of China. Zhang Deshua is supposedly the owner of the page.

The page is presented as a dog-training camp but it’s actually a torture camp. Dogs at this camp are not trained, they are bet to submission and fear and trauma is instilled in them to the extent that the dogs become fearful enough to use their defense mechanisms. The process is traumatising to watch. The pseudo-dog trainer even beats small dogs to submission and he keeps beating them even when they are leaking blood from their faces. Some of the videos are being uploaded here for the sake of record and archiving. I do not recommend to watch the videos at all.

To be fair and fully truthful, it should be noted that many Chinese have commented in anger about these videos. Others, however, defended him. At a first glance on social media, Chinese society seems to be split on dog cruelty with many perceiving it as acceptable while others adhere to the ethical view that dogs should not be beat and neither treated badly.