China Power | Society | East Asia

What a Stray Dog’s Murder Tells us About Chinese Civil Society

Wang Wang has appeared on billboards around the world – visible proof that China’s censorship does have limits.

A Wang Wang electronic billboard in Times Square, New York City.

In New York’s Times Square, a giant electronic billboard recently carried five words: “Never forget. Never give up.” Similar displays appeared near the Duomo in Milan, by the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and around Taipei 101, in a wave of memorials that hit more than 200 screens worldwide.

Ordinary Chinese people paid for these displays, one small donation at a time – all to mourn a stray dog.

On June 28, in a village in Jieyang, Guangdong, five boys — all under 14 years old — tortured and killed a stray mother dog, nicknamed Wang Wang by the villagers who knew her well, and her three puppies. They dragged her by a wire around her neck, beat her with sticks, doused her in fuel and set her alight. The boys laughed while they filmed it, then uploaded the footage to social media.

Because all four were below China’s age of criminal responsibility, the official response was to send them to a “specialized school” for corrective education. There were no formal charges – and not only because of their age. China still has no national statute against animal cruelty, so there was nothing to charge the boys with.

Nearly a month later, the case is still generating thousands of comments a day across Chinese social media. The shock, anger, and grief has coalesced into a concrete demand: pass an animal cruelty law.

Internet users carried that demand offline. They crowdfunded memorial displays on commercial LED screens in shopping districts across China. A domestic cosmetics brand even ran mall ads in Shenzhen: “Resist animal cruelty; insist there be a law to rely on.”

But China’s party-state is inordinately sensitive to popular movements that call for political change, even demand seemingly as innocuous as outlawing cruelty to animals. It didn’t take long for the censorship apparatus to kick in.

In Guangzhou, screens along Beijing Road pedestrian street that had carried Wang Wang displays went dark. Staff confirmed that they had been ordered to take the memorials down. Sympathy posts were quickly deleted from Weibo. In Chengdu, a street mural painted in Wang Wang’s memory was covered over. A leaked internal notice from a district internet affairs office in Shenyang reportedly classified the campaign demanding justice for Wang Wang as a “political risk” susceptible to “malicious hype by foreign forces,” and instructed officials to inspect commercial LED screens. 

The repression reach to Hong Kong, another symptom of the increasing restriction of free speech in the city. Internet users had crowdfunded a screen to display a Wang Wang memorial at the junction of Argyle and Shanghai Streets in Mong Kok. Handwritten placards appeared in Causeway Bay. Each display was shut down.

A boxing gym run by Hong Kong Muay Thai team member Leung Pak-yu hung a 5-meter banner on its external wall: a portrait of Wang Wang and her puppies beside the words “Being a minor does not mean cruelty can be lightly brushed aside.” On the morning of July 23, police officers came to the gym three times. By that afternoon, the building’s management was demanding the banner come down, citing the lease. Leung complied. Then he cut the banner apart and rehung the fragments he could – the dogs’ portrait among them – inside his own window facing the street.

Days earlier, the adoption platform Suppaw had crowdfunded HK$95,000 (roughly US$12,000) in about two hours to place Wang Wang’s image on a Hong Kong tram. They were told that while the wording passed review, the images of the dogs did not — out of concern, the tram company said, that they might “affect public sentiment.”

With Wang Wang memorials tightly policed on the mainland and in Hong Kong, overseas billboards have become the........

© The Diplomat