In New York’s Times Square, a giant electronic billboard recently carried five words: “Never forget. Never give up.” Similar displays appeared near the Duomo in Milan, by the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and around Taipei 101, in a wave of memorials that hit more than 200 screens worldwide.

Ordinary Chinese people paid for these displays, one small donation at a time – all to mourn a stray dog.

On June 28, in a village in Jieyang, Guangdong, five boys — all under 14 years old — tortured and killed a stray mother dog, nicknamed Wang Wang by the villagers who knew her well, and her three puppies. They dragged her by a wire around her neck, beat her with sticks, doused her in fuel and set her alight. The boys laughed while they filmed it, then uploaded the footage to social media.

Because all four were below China’s age of criminal responsibility, the official response was to send them to a “specialized school” for corrective education. There were no formal charges – and not only because of their age. China still has no national statute against animal cruelty, so there was nothing to charge the boys with.

Nearly a month later, the case is still generating thousands of comments a day across Chinese social media. The shock, anger, and grief has coalesced into a concrete demand: pass an animal cruelty law.

Internet users carried that demand offline. They crowdfunded memorial displays on commercial LED screens in shopping districts across China. A domestic cosmetics brand even ran mall ads in Shenzhen: “Resist animal cruelty; insist there be a law to rely on.”

But China’s party-state is inordinately sensitive to popular movements that call for political change, even demand seemingly as innocuous as outlawing cruelty to animals. It didn’t take long for the censorship apparatus to kick in.

In Guangzhou, screens along Beijing Road pedestrian street that had carried Wang Wang displays went dark. Staff confirmed that they had been ordered to take the memorials down. Sympathy posts were quickly deleted from Weibo. In Chengdu, a street mural painted in Wang Wang’s memory was covered over. A leaked internal notice from a district internet affairs office in Shenyang reportedly classified the campaign demanding justice for Wang Wang as a “political risk” susceptible to “malicious hype by foreign forces,” and instructed officials to inspect commercial LED screens. 

The repression reach to Hong Kong, another symptom of the increasing restriction of free speech in the city. Internet users had crowdfunded a screen to display a Wang Wang memorial at the junction of Argyle and Shanghai Streets in Mong Kok. Handwritten placards appeared in Causeway Bay. Each display was shut down.

A boxing gym run by Hong Kong Muay Thai team member Leung Pak-yu hung a 5-meter banner on its external wall: a portrait of Wang Wang and her puppies beside the words “Being a minor does not mean cruelty can be lightly brushed aside.” On the morning of July 23, police officers came to the gym three times. By that afternoon, the building’s management was demanding the banner come down, citing the lease. Leung complied. Then he cut the banner apart and rehung the fragments he could – the dogs’ portrait among them – inside his own window facing the street.

Days earlier, the adoption platform Suppaw had crowdfunded HK$95,000 (roughly US$12,000) in about two hours to place Wang Wang’s image on a Hong Kong tram. They were told that while the wording passed review, the images of the dogs did not — out of concern, the tram company said, that they might “affect public sentiment.”

With Wang Wang memorials tightly policed on the mainland and in Hong Kong, overseas billboards have become the only outlet left for public anger and grief.

Hong Kongers will recognize this playbook. In 2019, they crowdfunded newspaper ads in dozens of major dailies ahead of the G20 summit, asking the international community to stand with the movement against the extradition bill.

What is remarkable about the Wang Wang campaign is that this same model — horizontal, leaderless, funded in micro-donations, executed across jurisdictions in days — has now been picked up by mainland Chinese internet users. This is a rare, genuinely grassroots demonstration of civilian coordination across the Chinese-speaking world.

The party-state has spent decades trying to make this impossible. Civil society organizations in China – independent labor unions, feminist and LBGTQ+ groups, rights-focused law firms, religious congregations, NGOs – have been systematically dismantled or captured. But, as Wang Wang’s case revealed, there is still the possibility for public action. Decentralized, apolitical interest communities of internet users come together over love of a shared subject – pets, in this case. When they feel wronged, they can mobilize.

Precisely because such expression is apolitical, it travels further inside China’s public sphere than any dissident message could. Shared life experience – grief for an animal, fury at cruelty, the moral compass of ordinary people – is among the few unifying forces the censorship system cannot easily counter.

That’s why the state now treats spontaneous compassion as a political threat, as the Shenyang notice showed. The authorities understand that autonomous grassroots coordination, on any subject, is dangerous.

The Pew Research Center reported this month that, for the first time in roughly 20 years of tracking, China is viewed more favorably than the United States in most countries surveyed (25 of 36). As official narratives compete, these citizen-funded billboards offer something neither Beijing’s propaganda nor Western commentary can: an unmediated look at what Chinese people themselves feel. A public that mourns a stray dog and demands the rule of law is a truer picture of China than any state broadcast, and a more humanizing one than any threat assessment.

How should democratic societies respond? Not with appropriation or instrumentalization – this movement belongs to the Chinese people. The right response is helping these stories be seen, so that the people who paid for a billboard in a city they will never visit can watch their message echo back.

Democratic municipalities and transit authorities could publish clear, content-neutral guidelines for public-interest advertising by overseas communities, so that approval does not depend on a facility manager’s private calculation of political risk. Crowdfunding platforms could build standing partnerships with outdoor-advertising companies to streamline compliant campaigns. None of this is China-specific; the same infrastructure would serve marginalized voices from anywhere whose domestic public square has been closed to them.

As a Hong Konger, I have seen firsthand the frightening speed with which a society can arrive at a place where a sign in your own window is a criminal risk. I also know what it means to people in those restricted circumstances to see their words appear on a screen in Times Square or on a building in Tokyo. That visibility is a sustaining force – proof to those inside that their voices carry. It’s also one of the few things that can preserve, and perhaps quietly foster, the civilian networks on which any future civic life in China will have to be built.

The boys who killed Wang Wang will face no trial. But the millions who refused to let her memory disappear have shown that Chinese civil society still lives.