IS CHINA STARTING TO CRACK DOWN ON ITS CAT TORTURING SUBCULTURE?

 

Cats = soft power

by Martin Gomersall

With "China hawk" Donald Trump in the White House, major problems with the Chinese economy, and key China ally Russia on the verge of economic collapse as part of its "three-day military operation" in the Ukraine, now is a difficult time for China and its leader Xi Jinping. The last thing China needs is to be seen as a nation of cat torturers, a massive PR own goal.

But there is definitely a flourishing culture of cat torturing in China, with several groups monetising videos of feline suffering, and even one case where the torturers were confronted online by female campaigners and responded by asking them to send sexual images in exchange for the cats not to be killed.

A recent Serpentza video made the case that while China bans a lot of other behaviour, it drags its heels with regard to people making and sharing videos of cat torture. Watch the video here:

But is this actually the case? 

There has been some official pushback against cat torturing. In March this year a student was rejected by two universities because of complaints by activists about on-line cat torture videos. A few days later, a college student in Jiangxi province was expelled for similar reasons. In April this year, there was a report in the China Daily of a student at Jiliang University in Hangzhou being "punished" for cat torture, although the nature of the punishment remains unclear. 

There is growing sentiment among Chinese that animal cruelty should be banned, but, unfortunately, China has almost no animal cruelty laws, and passing laws in China is a long and torturous (no pun intended) process, so this kind of animal abuse will continue to go relatively unpunished, with action only being taken in cases where activists identify the culprits and get them "cancelled" in some way.

Meanwhile, there are aspects of Chinese culture that will be extremely hard to bring in line with Western norms of anti-cruelty. For example, every year the notorious Yulin Dog Meat Festival takes place in Guangxi province. Here people kill and eat tens of thousands of dogs to celebrate the summer solstice. 

As long as these aspects of Chinese society remain in place, it will be easy for China's enemies to present it as a brutal and savage country. This in turn will weaken China's soft power position -- a CATastrophe for China!