Was anything good spared by the communist regime that took over China in the middle of the last century?
Reviewing the litany of looting and murder, all the many forms of the war of all against all described in Frank Dikötter’s Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957—one would have to say no.
The nihilistic campaign extended to dogs. Not just feral or dangerous canines. Also harmless house pets. Dikötter writes that dogs were “denounced as a threat to public hygiene and a symbol of bourgeois decadence at a time of food shortages.”
In Beijing, a swoop cleared thousands of wild dogs from the streets, often with the support of local residents, as policemen armed with wire nooses on bamboo poles rounded them up. Then, by September 1949, dog owners were required to register their pets and keep the animals indoors. A year later the destruction of registered dogs started. Some of the animals were voluntarily turned in, but a few owners refused to surrender them. In a few cases the police were even confronted by angry dog keepers, who sometimes had the crowd on their side. The police then started breaking into houses. Owners came back home to find their doors broken down and their pets gone.
But the campaign really took off during the fight against germ warfare, when teams of dog chasers appeared on the streets, carrying out house-to-house searches…. Even though her roommates objected to the animal, Esther Cheo kept a small female dog in her dormitory, which she had taken in as a puppy…. During the cull one of her colleagues who disliked dogs opened the door and let her out. The dog was soon caught and carried away, but, with the help of a high-ranking cadre, Esther managed to locate the compound where the animals were kept. ‘I walked up and down stumbling over dead and dying dogs, shouting out Hsiao Mee’s name, trying to drown out the barks and whines of hundreds of dogs. Eventually I found her. She was in a cage with several others. She jumped up and tried to lick my face, trembling with fear and perhaps excited, hoping that I had come to take her home. I could only sit there and stroke her.’ Esther came back to the compound regularly, even taking a pair of scissors to the dog’s coat in the hope that she would not be slaughtered for her skin. But in the end all she was allowed to do was to feed her pet some scraps of pork from the canteen and look on as the animal shivered and ate from the bowl in her mangled coat. Finally, with the help of a sympathetic cadre, Esther was given a pistol. She took off the safety catch, pressed the barrel against the dog’s ear and blew her head off.
Persons who might torment and help kill neighbors, friends, and family, including children, for being class enemies and “landlords” were sometimes more reluctant to surrender their dogs.
“Killing of landlords was one thing, but taking away a man’s dog was another matter altogether, as they protected homesteads, crops and livestock. In the end, however, even the countryside fell into line.”
