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

Por Lina Ma — The Diplomat

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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 itself, from people who had gained trust as fellow investigators before leaking information. 

On July 17, overwhelmed by the renewed harassment, Zhima attempted suicide again and was hospitalized.

Accountability came slowly and unevenly. Qiu was placed under 10 days of administrative detention and expelled from his university on May 14, Tencent News reported . Shanghai police separately opened a criminal case against him on April 17 over the leak of Zhima’s personal information. But as of her father’s interview in July, whoever first obtained and circulated her family’s identity documents remained unidentified and unpunished.

Despite public demand for such a law following high-profile cases of animal abuse, China has no standalone national law against animal cruelty. Qian Yefang, a law professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, has told reporters that while existing statutes cover wildlife, livestock, and laboratory animals, companion animals like cats and dogs fall into a regulatory gap with no dedicated law of their own. Police are left relying on public order and cybersecurity statutes, an approach that works case by case but offers no consistent standard.

One local government tried to close that gap this year, then quickly backed away. In March, Sanming, in Fujian province, published a draft regulation that would have been China’s first local rule explicitly banning abuse and abandonment of “companion animals.” Less than a month later, before the public comment period ended, the draft was quietly taken down with no official explanation, Hong Kong’s The Standard reported . 

Legal experts cited in that report noted a related weakness: even where rules exist, the absence of specific penalties in China’s Public Security Administration Punishments Law makes them hard to enforce.

The gap in animal-protection law that pushes accountability onto volunteer investigators, and another gap in the legal system offers little protection to those investigators once exposed. Some of the doxxing reportedly took place on Telegram, outside the platforms Chinese authorities can police directly, helping explain why the trail went cold. 

China can punish individual animal abusers, case by case. Its personal-information protections offer little accountability for those who release others’ personal information out of spite. Until that changes, citizens like Zhima will keep shouldering investigative work the state has left undone, with far less protection than the people they investigate.

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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 itself, from people who had gained trust as fellow investigators before leaking information. 

On July 17, overwhelmed by the renewed harassment, Zhima attempted suicide again and was hospitalized.

Accountability came slowly and unevenly. Qiu was placed under 10 days of administrative detention and expelled from his university on May 14, Tencent News reported . Shanghai police separately opened a criminal case against him on April 17 over the leak of Zhima’s personal information. But as of her father’s interview in July, whoever first obtained and circulated her family’s identity documents remained unidentified and unpunished.

Despite public demand for such a law following high-profile cases of animal abuse, China has no standalone national law against animal cruelty. Qian Yefang, a law professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, has told reporters that while existing statutes cover wildlife, livestock, and laboratory animals, companion animals like cats and dogs fall into a regulatory gap with no dedicated law of their own. Police are left relying on public order and cybersecurity statutes, an approach that works case by case but offers no consistent standard.

One local government tried to close that gap this year, then quickly backed away. In March, Sanming, in Fujian province, published a draft regulation that would have been China’s first local rule explicitly banning abuse and abandonment of “companion animals.” Less than a month later, before the public comment period ended, the draft was quietly taken down with no official explanation, Hong Kong’s The Standard reported . 

Legal experts cited in that report noted a related weakness: even where rules exist, the absence of specific penalties in China’s Public Security Administration Punishments Law makes them hard to enforce.

The gap in animal-protection law that pushes accountability onto volunteer investigators, and another gap in the legal system offers little protection to those investigators once exposed. Some of the doxxing reportedly took place on Telegram, outside the platforms Chinese authorities can police directly, helping explain why the trail went cold. 

China can punish individual animal abusers, case by case. Its personal-information protections offer little accountability for those who release others’ personal information out of spite. Until that changes, citizens like Zhima will keep shouldering investigative work the state has left undone, with far less protection than the people they investigate.

Lina Ma is a Chinese-born freelance journalist and research writer based in New York. She covers gender, digital culture, and social change in contemporary China, She is also a contributing writer to Global Voices. She holds an M.S. in Global Affairs from New York University and a B.A. in Translation from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Get in touch with Lina by LinkedIn or email.

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Fonte: The Diplomat