China Power | Society | East Asia

A Woman Exposed China’s Cat-Abuse Networks – and Paid a Terrible Price

When the law lags behind, citizens end up doing investigative work themselves, and pay for it when the people they expose strike back.

In April, a 29-year-old woman traveling in Hainan swallowed a bottle of pills in a hotel room. Two days earlier, a fellow volunteer had told her that her national ID number, her parents’ home address, and her grandparents’ phone numbers were circulating online. Her offense, in the eyes of the people who posted her and her family’s private information, was reporting cat abusers to the police.

The woman goes by the alias Zhima. She had spent early 2026 investigating networks devoted to torturing and killing cats on camera, working with other volunteers to gather evidence, identify participants, and repeatedly bring their findings to police. What happened to her afterward illustrates a recurring problem in Chinese online governance: when the law lags behind a form of harm, citizens end up doing the investigative work themselves, and pay for it when the people they expose strike back.

Zhima’s involvement began almost by accident. According to Southern Metropolis Daily (Nandu), on January 4, she was in a pet-owners’ chat group when strangers flooded in, posted graphic videos of cats being mutilated, and renamed the group to advertise cat abuse. She reported it to Shanghai police on January 8, and the case was opened as an administrative matter.

That report drew her deeper into the world she had stumbled onto. Volunteers who track these networks describe a tiered structure: joining the most restricted core groups reportedly requires a “pledge of allegiance” (投名状) in the form of an unedited video of the applicant abusing a cat, a practice Chinese media have documented for years. 

Zhima and fellow volunteers spent the following months identifying suspects and pushing police in multiple cities to act. One man she reported, a Jiangxi university student surnamed Qiu, kept posting abuse videos even after police opened a case against him.

Instead, it was Zhima who faced consequences. On April 8, a volunteer told Zhima her ID information had been leaked. Within days, her employer, education history, and her family’s identity numbers and addresses were circulating online, according to Nandu. Strangers were seen photographing her family’s home. The next day, in that Hainan hotel room, Zhima attempted suicide; she was found and rescued, Taiwan’s World Journal reported.

The harassment continued. Chat screenshots her father shared with Cover News showed vulgar doctored images, made using her profile photo, circulating in group chats. Rumors falsely claimed she had shared explicit photos of herself. Her father said the leaks did not come only from the cat-abuse networks: some appeared to originate from within the volunteer community........

© The Diplomat