Xinzhou

— Like many gay Chinese growing up at the turn of the millennium, Duan Shuai began his long, deliberate process of coming out online. After school, he would visit the newly opened internet cafe in his hometown, Xinzhou, a small city in Shanxi Province bounded by a veil of mountains.[…] When Duan opens up the app anywhere in the country, be it in Beijing’s bustling commercial district Sanlitun or back in Xinzhou, he’ll find an endless scroll of users: cosmopolitan yuppies dressed in drag, rural blue-collar workers with faceless profiles.

— The vague wording of the Xinzhou district government’s statement Saturday, which said workers had “decontaminated” the animal though there was no indication it had been infected with the coronavirus, helped fuel the outcry. The pet’s owner or owners could not be reached for comment. According to an account on the Twitter-like platform Weibo that first shared the video, the owners had been sent to hotel quarantine along with other residents of their neighborhood in the city of Shangrao, in Jiangxi Province.