Dogs of war - the Chinese eat dog, not just the predominate poor and peasant classes, but a large swath of a not so poor middling class eat dog too - the preferred way to kill dog so that the meat supposedly remains tender is to hang the cur by its hind legs and beat it to death - apparently one can walk down back alleys in any number of Chinese cities and hear the cries and whelps of dogs being beaten to death. I'm guessing there's some or much truth to that after seeing the effort China put into curbing the practice during the Olympics - see for example the infamous mass round up of 'strays' necessitated ostensibly by a rabies scare.
This is interesting because there is a growing middle and upper class dynamic to Chinese society, and these middle and upper classes are increasingly attracted to the luxury of pet owning, especially in the form of Man's best friend [during the cultural revolution pet owning was outlawed as a bourgeois affectation]. Thus you have a fractious divide brewing up through Chinese society based on whether you take the dog for a walk or beat it to death for dinner. Each side uses the diverging approaches to the custom [which for many is a practical necessity] to negatively define, pillory, lampoon, ridicule, demean, insult and curse to Naraka the other.
In the West, where devotion to pets is sometimes so over the top it lends credence to the prohibitions of the cultural revolution, we have seen how 'animal welfare' can take on a potent political animus - people become attached to their pets and imbue them with a personalized emotion that resembles love - this emotion can then easily be translated into a more generalized, albeit still vague, moral imperative.
And so the question of interest becomes: how does an autocracy like China, that may indulge as it sees fit some public opinion, but as an official matter anxiously seeks to limit and control such expressions, how do they adjudicate such an emotional and class conscious problem? The state needs both the dog lovers and dog eaters in order to maintain current economic growth and stability - but any laws wrought to deal with the problem will surely stir raw emotions, class enmity and raise, with implied insults, one group over another. How is comity possible?
Given past behaviour one assumes Chinese officials will suppress info, hide unpleasantness away behind secrecy and lie at will - but one reckons that only works for so long [but who really knows? The Chinese character, if one can even speak of such a thing, remains a mystery, at least in a modern context] - you allow the bourgeois affectation of doggie love hard to then deny its consequent expression. Will the facade of the Middle Kingdom be rent by the dogs of a culture war?
