I. Bark Bark, (汪汪)
The image above is of Wang Wang, a stray mother nursing a two week old litter of three. She lived among the humans who regularly fed her. She often approached passersby as she had been given no reason to be afraid.
On June 28, 2026, she was approached by a group of four boys.
All four boys were around twelve years old, sixth graders.
They wrapped iron wire around Wang Wang’s neck. Once she could not run, they began beating her with sticks.
They dragged her across the ground with the wire.
They beat the three puppies to death in front of her.
Wang Wang tried to hide herself, burying her head into the ground.
They then poured gasoline over the injured mother and set her alight.
They continued to probe and beat at the dead body long after Wang Wang had expired.
We only know of all this because the boys filmed the whole affair and posted it online. From there it became quite viral.
II. The Human Flesh Search Engine
While isolated acts of cruelty were shared in the early years of the Chinese internet, the modern history of organized abuse content began in 2006.
A video surfaced on domestic forums showing a woman standing on a riverbank. She placed a small kitten on the concrete, adjusted her footing, and crushed its head with the point of a stiletto heel.
At the time, as is the case today, there were no legal avenues to pursue. Under Chinese law, pets and strays are treated strictly as property. Unless an animal explicitly belongs to someone else, crushing it to death is legally equivalent to throwing a stone.
Outraged users on the Mop Forum (猫扑) took matters into their own hands. By geolocating the footage to a specific town in Heilongjiang province and tracing the online purchase of the distinctive heels, anonymous netizens uncovered the woman’s identity as Wang Jue.
This became one of the earliest high-profile uses of China’s renrou sousuo (人肉搜索)—the Human Flesh Search Engine. It was crowdsourced digital vigilantism born entirely out of a legal void. In the resulting public backlash, both the woman and her cameraman lost their jobs at a local government hospital and a regional television station, respectively.
The 2006 case marked the first time Chinese and Western news media heavily covered a "human flesh search," cementing it in the public consciousness as the primary praxis for animal rights enforcement.
What started as sporadic viral posts, however, evolved over the following two decades into a highly monetized, underground market. To dodge online censorship, organized perpetrators—ironically branding themselves as Ai Mao (爱猫), or "cat lovers"—migrated to encrypted networks to produce and distribute crush videos.
Today, this trade is sustained by regulatory arbitrage. It operates much like a global supply chain, routing its production to China for the same reason multinational corporations move their factories there: weak standards. Foreign buyers commission bespoke torture videos, specifying the methods and the animals involved. While producing this material in the buyers' home countries carries felony convictions, the network utilizes China as an offshore production hub. Here, filming the slow destruction of an unowned animal violates no criminal statute at all.
III. A Crime Against Property
Why does this market continue to flourish?
China isn't entirely devoid of animal legislation. The Wildlife Protection Law safeguards endangered species, and the Animal Husbandry Law regulates livestock. Yet, the country stands alone among major powers in having no national law criminalizing cruelty against the millions of companion animals living in its cities.
Torturing a neighbor's pet can be prosecuted under the Civil Code or the Public Security Administration Punishment Law, but only because the state treats the act as "intentionally damaging public or private property" (故意毁坏财物). Torturing a stray, however, is a different matter. Because a stray is legally res nullius, property belonging to no one, it cannot be "damaged" in the eyes of the law. You cannot destroy what nobody owns.
In the vacuum of formal legal recourse, justice is outsourced to public outrage and social ostracization. Instead of facing court-ordered fines or criminal sentences, abusers are fired by employers, expelled from universities, or blacklisted from civil service.
State-sanctioned outlets, typically eager to suppress narratives of social dysfunction, regularly report on these extrajudicial punishments. By doing so, they frame moral cancellation as a functional substitute for legal accountability:
'Cat abuse' candidate not admitted; virtue supersedes good grades (Global Times, April 2024)
Henan college student expelled for cat abuse (China Daily, September 2023)
He Poisoned Cats in College. Now He Can’t Join China’s Civil Service. (Sixth Tone, July 2024)
By highlighting these cases, state media acknowledges the public's moral consensus while neatly bypassing the absence of actual statutory protection.
However, public tolerance for this legal vacuum has virtually vanished. As pet ownership has surged across urban China, the exposure of abuse networks now triggers immense backlash. High-profile cases routinely provoke massive online petitions and rare, tense physical demonstrations outside the homes of accused abusers.
This legal void is not born from a lack of institutional effort. Legal scholars have pushed for statutory reform for decades. Their most prominent attempt occurred in 2009, when a research team led by Chang Jiwen at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) published a comprehensive draft for an Anti-Animal Cruelty Law. Since then, delegates at the National People's Congress (NPC) have reintroduced similar proposals every year during the annual "Two Sessions" parliamentary meetings. Public sentiment consistently backs them.
Yet, year after year, the legislation remains permanently stalled.
IV. The State's Excuses and Zoonotic Spillover
The freeze on statutory reform is not an oversight. It is the deliberate protection of commercial interests. The primary resistance comes from an agricultural sector that fears the dangerous legal precedent any anti-cruelty framework might establish. Even if that framework is narrowly applied to dogs and cats.
China’s agricultural sector has rapidly consolidated into a few high-density, industrialized behemoths. This shift toward sheer scale is exemplified by facilities like the 26-storey pig skyscraper in Ezhou, Hubei, where a million animals are slaughtered annually. Agricultural lobbyists argue that legally acknowledging animal sentience or defining "cruelty" creates a slippery slope that activists could eventually weaponize against factory farming.
Beyond food production, wildlife is heavily utilized for fur, leather, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The market for ejiao (阿胶), a medicinal gelatin made from donkey hides, grew into a 50-billion-yuan industry by 2020. Satisfying that demand requires harvesting nearly six million donkey hides every year, draining livestock populations across Africa and the rest of the world.
The urban pet trade is booming alongside these industries, but from a regulatory standpoint, it remains a wild west reliant on backyard breeding and cheap shipping. To understand the sheer lawlessness of this sector, consider the 2021 "pet blind box" scandal. Public outrage boiled over when it was exposed that live puppies and kittens were being sold online and shipped in taped crates through standard mail. Thousands of dead and dying animals were discovered at ZTO Express logistics hubs in Chengdu and Shanghai (coverage by Sixth Tone). Chengdu police told local media they had no power to act, and agricultural officials insisted their authority was strictly limited to disease control protocols during transport.
This lack of regulation exposes the real crux of the issue: the threat of zoonotic spillover. It is a threat the state consistently overlooks when prioritizing commercial interests over animal welfare. Combining high density livestock with unregulated wildlife farming and a chaotic, transport heavy pet trade creates an almost ideal environment for viral emergence.
Viral shedding spikes when animals are stressed. When immunocompromised animals from disparate environments are stacked together in logistics hubs or wet markets, the risk multiplies. Pigs, for instance, possess receptors for both avian and human influenza viruses; if pathogens jump to them, domestic livestock acts as a biological mixing bowl for genetic reassortment (as seen in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic).
SARS was meant to be the definitive warning. Following the initial COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Beijing moved to ban the breeding and consumption of most terrestrial wildlife for food. However, industry interests immediately carved out loopholes for fur and medicine. The Ministry of Agriculture simply reclassified species like raccoon dogs, minks, and silver foxes from "wildlife" to "special livestock" to shield the fur trade. But viruses do not care whether an animal is slaughtered for its meat or skinned for its pelt.
When confronted with these massive public health risks and widespread public outrage, official resistance inevitably falls back on the excuse of an "enforcement burden." An anti-cruelty law, bureaucrats argue, would flood the courts with civil disputes and force police to investigate private domestic behavior.
That defense fails on its face. State capacity isn't the issue. A government that built a sophisticated digital surveillance apparatus and successfully enforced strict zero-COVID mandates down to individual residential blocks definitively possesses the logistics to enforce animal welfare laws. It is the political motivation that is lacking.
V. The Threat of Horizontal Compassion
Regardless of the immense public anger generated by animal abuse, authorities continually refuse to pass laws granting legal standing to civil society groups like rescue NGOs or independent activists. The state's hesitation here has very little to do with animals themselves. The real reason for their resistance is the political threat of horizontal organization.
The Chinese Communist Party does not tolerate unmediated grassroots movements. While local civic groups are occasionally co-opted when their goals align neatly with state priorities, such as local environmental watchdogs reporting on polluting factories, animal welfare advocates present a unique challenge. Because they are highly motivated and easily cross economic and regional lines, these advocates can mobilize thousands of people online within hours to coordinate rescues. More dangerously in the eyes of the state, they demand accountability.
To the state security apparatus, any network of citizens capable of rapid, independent, nationwide mobilization is viewed as a systemic threat. Providing these networks with legal leverage through a statutory anti-cruelty framework is considered an unacceptable political risk.
Stability maintenance, or weiwen (维稳), remains the paramount domestic imperative for the Party. Since the early 2010s, the state has actively dismantled independent civil society. Investigative journalism, feminist networks, and labor unions were suppressed precisely because they organized horizontally. This crackdown was codified by the 2016 Charity Law and the Foreign NGO Law, which severely restricted independent organizations from operating or fundraising without direct state sponsorship. The state has spent a decade neutralizing autonomous civic infrastructure; passing a national animal welfare law would require empowering that exact same infrastructure.
This political paranoia is heavily reinforced by an ideological defense: the lingering view among policymakers that animal welfare is a Western luxury.
The belief that animal protection is a trivial distraction has deep roots in pre-opening-up ideology, particularly under Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution, keeping a pet for companionship was denounced as a bourgeois indulgence. Red Guards actively targeted pet owners, treating dogs as symbols of Western decadence that consumed food meant for the proletariat, leading to routine mass dog culls in Beijing and other major cities.
Underlying this persecution was a Marxist-Leninist framework that viewed nature through a purely utilitarian lens. Animals were not sentient beings deserving of ethical consideration; they were merely material resources to be extracted and mobilized for state progress.
Although Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s allowed pets back into daily life, giving rise to a booming urban pet-owning middle class by the late 1990s, the utilitarian view remains embedded in the political elite. To China’s aging cadre class, born in the 1950s and 60s, dedicating state resources to the well-being of animals is not a legitimate domestic priority.
When resisting calls for animal welfare reform, official channels frequently weaponize "the right to development" (发展权), arguing that basic material growth must take priority over civil liberties or ethical regulations. Senior officials routinely frame animal rights as a decadent Western import (西方精神文化) that a developing nation simply cannot afford.
VI. The Incubation of Violence
In both youths and adults, a history of animal torture is rarely driven by a specific hatred of animals. Psychologically, it is driven by a need for dominance over a vulnerable, sentient subject.
Animals serve as low-stakes testing grounds for control, sadism, and Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. They are selected by abusers precisely because they are defenseless and cannot report the crime.
In criminology, animal abuse is recognized as one of the most reliable predictors of intimate partner violence. Abusers frequently torture, mutilate, or threaten to kill family pets as a tactic to psychologically break, coerce, and silence their human victims.
China only passed its first Anti-Domestic Violence Law in 2016. For years prior, Chinese feminists, legal aid workers, and sociologists fought an uphill battle to force law enforcement to treat domestic abuse as a crime rather than a "private family matter" subject merely to informal mediation (jiating tiaojie / 家调). Within this environment, abusive partners exploit the legal vacuum around animals. Because destroying a partner's companion animal carries virtually no criminal liability, perpetrators are handed an entirely unregulated mechanism for domestic terror.
Furthermore, juvenile animal cruelty is heavily correlated with abuse within the household. Children who witness or experience domestic trauma frequently engage in displaced aggression, taking the violence inflicted upon them and passing it down the hierarchy to the only entity weaker than themselves.
This occurs against the backdrop of China's ongoing domestic abuse crisis and its tens of millions of "left-behind children" (liushou ertong / 留守儿童)—youth raised in rural villages by elderly relatives while their parents work in distant industrial hubs. Millions of these children grow up exposed to profound emotional neglect and domestic violence.
When state commentators dismiss the psychological links between animal abuse, domestic violence, and violent crime as "Western concepts" irrelevant to Chinese social realities, they engage in deliberate deception. Human psychology is not bounded by national borders.
When twelve-year-old children take pleasure in setting living creatures on fire, it is not a cultural quirk.
VII. Marxist Cultural Amnesia
Consider the historical foundations of Chinese ethics: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.
Confucianism centers on the cultivation of the junzi (君子), the exemplary person, and the practice of ren (仁), benevolence. In this context, abusing an animal is not a mere crime against property; it actively degrades the moral character of the perpetrator. Mencius famously posited that the spontaneous feeling of distress upon witnessing the suffering of an innocent (恻隐之心) is the very seed of human morality. To torture a creature for pleasure or profit is to sever oneself entirely from ren. A society that shrugs off this moral rot actively raises uncultivated, dangerous citizens.
Buddhism, woven into the fabric of Chinese culture for millennia, operates on ahimsa (non-harming) and the recognition of animals as youqing (有情)—sentient beings with feelings. The traditional practice of fangsheng (放生), or life release, reflects a deeply rooted cultural logic: rescuing a living creature from terror is a supreme moral act. Beyond individual virtue, Buddhism warns of cosmic and social fallout. Torture for profit generates karmic debt (ye / 业), trapping both the abuser and the society that tolerates them in a cycle of collective suffering.
Daoism demands alignment with the natural order. In the Dao De Jing, one of the "Three Treasures" of human conduct is ci (慈), compassion. Zhuangzi repeatedly argued that animals possess intrinsic value, living in accordance with the Dao entirely independent of human utility. To run industrial-scale torture rings for digital consumption is a gross perversion of the natural order (tiandao / 天道).
This historical reality exposes the deep hypocrisy behind Beijing's political slogans.
The Communist Party frequently invokes the goal of building a "Harmonious Society" (Hexie Shehui / 和谐社会). Yet, underground torture rings are the absolute antithesis of harmony. They traumatize the public, trigger massive online unrest, normalize sadism among youth, and fuel a lawless black-market economy. By refusing to intervene, the state allows a subculture of sadists to erode public morality and social stability from the inside out.
If one wants to find a Western, anti-human, culturally ignorant ideology that stands in direct opposition to China’s ethical and cultural heritage, they can find one in Communism. After all, this radical break from tradition was exactly what made it so appealing to the New Culture Movement, which allowed intellectuals to denigrate all that was traditionally Chinese as weak.
The true Western import is the materialistic reductionism of Marxism-Leninism.
VIII. Living Like Fish in Water
The case of Wang Wang illustrates the tightrope local animal welfare groups have to walk.
Without statutory anti-cruelty protections, activists cannot go to the police to report someone for torturing a dog. Instead, when abuse videos surface, advocacy groups file complaints under "Picking Quarrels and Provoking Trouble"' (Xunxin Zishi / 寻衅滋事) or regulations prohibiting the "Illegal Operation of Information Networks."
By reframing animal torture as a threat to public order, a violation of cybersecurity regulations, and a corrupting influence on youth, activists try to force the state's hand. In Wang Wang’s case, domestic advocacy groups explicitly leaned into China's laws regarding the online protection of minors.
When juvenile abusers are involved, activists exploit the state's deep anxiety over social stability. They petition local authorities by framing young perpetrators as imminent threats to neighborhood safety and future violent criminals. By pressuring police to investigate parents for failing their statutory guardianship duties, advocates pressure the state under the framework of juvenile delinquency.
Survival for these organizations requires tactical adaptation. Because the 2016 Charity Law mandates that every NGO secure an official government sponsor, a nearly impossible barrier for animal welfare groups, formal civil society is effectively banned. The movement survives by remaining decentralized and fluid.
Pioneering organizations like the Chinese Animal Protection Network (CAPN) explicitly anchor their mission statements in traditional Chinese philosophy to maintain cultural legitimacy and evade accusations of "Western infiltration." On the ground, student-run groups at institutions like Nanjing University independently trap, neuter, and shelter campus strays. Across urban centers, self-funded, unregistered catteries and shelters operate entirely through private WeChat networks for adoption and crowdsourced funding.
And of course there is the aforementioned vigilantism.
"Wang Wang" the Dog Mom and Her Puppies Brutally Killed | The Dark Side of Human Nature Reflected... - From the comments (Translated by Google)
XCS #1's father is named H, and he married into the family in Jieyang. XCS #2's father is named Z, and he owns two shops in the village: one called Z in X Town, J District, J City, and the other called X Town F. XCS #3's father is Z, who owns Z in Shenzhen and is the S distributor for S (search on Taobao).
Targeting family businesses and local standing becomes the public's only mechanism for imposing a cost on sadism.
"The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea." - Mao Zedong
Postscript - Personal Reflections
Post Script
I apologize if this essay ruined your day. Learning about this certainly ruined mine.
I held off writing this piece for quite a while because, for a few days and maybe more, I found it incredibly difficult to maintain my composure. My thoughts would drift away. It was difficult to care about the why; it was easy to just hate.
There is a deep irony in this. Only a few weeks earlier, I wrote a piece critiquing the use of animals as a sentimental crutch—a narrative device designed to manufacture tears without requiring any moral labor from the audience.
Writing this essay, then, became the synthesis. It is my attempt to avoid falling into the very trap of sentimentality I had criticized, refusing to use Wang Wang as a tragic prop like Oscar Wilde critiqued of Dickens’ Little Nell.
Sentimentality grieves, but analysis seeks to understand. To weep over the cruelty is a luxury. The only meaningful response is to do the labor of figuring out why things are the way they are, so that we might finally begin to ask how we can move forward.