China currently has no animal welfare laws. I’ve said it many times and it still shocks me bearing in mind this is the second largest economy in the world. The existence of animal welfare laws is a reflection on the morality of a society. We are compelled to conclude that Chinese society is morally challenged.
Bad animal welfare linked to low levels of morality
This assessment is supported by many reports on the level of corruption in China. Corruption is also a reflection on morality. You don’t have to go far to understand that China ranks as a corrupt society with perceived corruption at the level a similar to Cuba and Ghana. It is ironic that President Xi Jinping gets on well with President Putin. Russia is one of the world’s most corrupt countries.
On a worldwide corruption scale China scores 45 out of a hundred and that’s after a massive anti-corruption purge by Xi Jinping recently which lasted three years with 40,000 criminal cells and corruption companies busted and more than 50,000 Communist Party and government officials punished for aiding and abetting corrupt businesses.
The purge raised Chin’a ranking on the corruption scale by several points but it is still a corrupt society.
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Ghost scales
The corruption goes right through society like the letters in a stick of rock. It is deeply embedded within it. For example, a vlogger recently exposed “ghost scales”. I bet you have never heard of those before. These are weighing scales used by fraudulent sellers. They tamper with them so they weigh more than the actual weight of the product being bought. This inflates the price and so the seller increases their profit margins dramatically.
It took a vlogger, superB太, a regular citizen of China, to discover and expose this, rather than the authorities charged with the task of keeping law and order. And the differences between the true weight and the false weight can be enormous.
One customer discovered that the 200 g of tripe he ordered for the equivalent of $11 actually weighed 138 g. The lesson is to bring your own scales to markets in China!
Lack of building regulations and their enforcement
Apparently, this sort of corruption is everywhere in China. You’ll find it in a lack of enforcement of building regulations if they exist. Three Chinese middle school students died in November when the gymnasium roof collapsed after a heavy snowfall. It was the second such incident in the same province. There appears to be a lack of proper regulations and proper enforcement of those regulations in China.
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Fake birth certificates
Another example is fake birth certificates being sold by a hospital in Xiangyang for use by human trafficking brokers. This criminal activity was also exposed by a Chinese investigative vlogger. This too went viral with many citizens asking how it could happen in 2023.
Low trust society
The commenter, Manya, Koetse, on Chinese society – through the lens of Weibo.com, the social media website – states in a newsletter to me that China is a ‘low trust society’. The citizens don’t trust each other which seems entirely plausible bearing in mind the amount of corruption.
China’s corrupt courts
And perhaps the worst of it is China’s judicial corruption. This is a reference to corruption within the judicial system including the criminal courts. A study on the Cambridge University Press website states that judicial corruption in China is an “institutionalised activity systemically inherent in the particular decision-making mechanism guided by the Chinese Communist Party’s instrumental rule-by-law ideal”. Corruption runs through Chinese courts like the letters running through a stick of Brighton rock.
No chance of enforcing animal welfare laws if they existed
If the courts are corrupt in China there is no possibility of enforcing animal welfare laws, which might, just might be enacted in the future. If the world has to wait 30-50 years for proper animal welfare laws to be enacted in China, they won’t be enforced because the criminal courts are corrupt.
One has to come to the sad conclusion, therefore, that the animals of China are going to continue to be persecuted and abused, sometimes in the most cruel and nauseating ways, for the indefinite future as there is a huge culture difference to the West in regards to their relationship with animals as highlighed by Ai Weiwei, the well-known Chinese contemporary artists. Read what he says by clicking on this link and here.
P.S. There is a growing number of brilliant animal advocates in China fighting animal abuse. They are swimming against the tide but deserve a ton of praise.
Source: various including What’s On Weibo (newsletter), Wikipedia and NPR plus the study referred to.
