New Tax Puts Bite on Beijing Dog Owners

It’s a bear market for dogs these days in Beijing.

Wang Junxiang, general manager of the modern World Pet Garden shop, said he has not sold a dog in more than a month, since the Beijing government slapped a hefty luxury tax and strict new regulations on canine companions.

Prices on his forlorn supply of Pomeranians, toy poodles, Chihuahuas and Pekingese--wagging their tails and gazing up hopefully from stainless steel cages--have been clipped from a high of $2,000 last year to less than $400 today. Still, no one buys.

Business is so bad that Wang, feeling betrayed by what he views as a breakdown in the country’s policy of openness and economic reforms, is thinking about going into pigeons.

“Chinese people like pigeons,” he said.

After nearly a year of public hearings and discussion, the Beijing municipal government last month instituted regulations limiting the number, size and even outdoor walking times of dogs in the capital. Similar regulations, aimed at controlling the exploding dog population in China’s increasingly affluent urban centers, are under consideration in Shanghai and other cities.

Dog owners are allowed to walk their pets only before 7 a.m. and after 8 p.m., for example--a regulation that clearly ignores the animals’ biological needs. Dogs more than 13 inches tall and 25 inches long are not permitted, so all but the smallest breeds are eliminated.

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The regulations, which include a $700 luxury tax and licensing fee, have put the leash on what had become a dog craze. Only last summer, the demand for dogs was so great that Russian traders were smuggling Siberian Husky puppies across the northern border and selling them for a premium in Beijing markets.

According to the Beijing government, the dog population swelled from practically nil 15 years ago to more than 193,468 last year. For the first time in decades, puppies frolicked in the narrow hutongs of the capital.

But along with the dog proliferation came a wave of complaints from health and sanitation officials. The Beijing Police Bureau reported 50,000 dog-bite cases in 1994. Between 1988 and 1994, there were 89 deaths attributed to rabies.

To the outside world, the new regulations might appear unnecessarily strict. But they also represent one of the first attempts in modern China to regularize pet ownership.

In that respect, at least, they are aimed at avoiding mass killings of animals, which was the ancient Chinese method of pet-population control. Until the recent regulations, the Communist government of the world’s most populous country had never really known what to do about pets.

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Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book did not tell them, except to say that dogs were a bourgeois bad habit and should be eliminated.

During the 10-year Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, tiny pet birds were banned, denying the elderly Chinese population one of its favorite hobbies. Even tropical fish were banned.

Pets made a comeback when Deng Xiaoping launched his economic liberalization in the late 1970s. Technically, dogs and other domestic pets remained illegal. But the laws were only periodically enforced.

The elderly birdmen again walked the streets, swinging their birds in bamboo cages. Dogs became the latest fad for China’s emerging middle class.

To avoid a stiff new tax, some pet owners have been forced to send their canine friends to the countryside for shelter and re-education as rural animals. Diplomats and foreign business people with dogs, many of which exceed the size restrictions, are in a rush to get their animals back to their homelands before the anti-dog campaign begins to bite.

Ann-si Li, an American veterinarian working as a United Nations volunteer at Beijing Agricultural University, said the dog patient load in the clinic where she teaches dropped from 860 to 340 a month.

Many Beijingers are privately bitter about the new laws.

“I think it is very unfair to charge money just because you have a dog,” said an electric power plant employee who lives in the northern suburbs with her husband and a Pekingese named Lili. “The rule should be that if somebody’s dog bites someone or fouls the environment, they should be heavily fined. But if we keep our dogs quiet, kind and in our apartments, why should we be charged for that?”

She said the tax is a financial burden for her and her husband, who together take home $200 a month. But in the end, like a surprising number of Beijingers recently hooked on dogs, they plan to fork over the money to municipal authorities in exchange for a dog license.

“At the beginning,” she said, “we didn’t want to pay. We sent her away for a while. But we missed her so much that when we heard that her new master wasn’t feeding her as well as we did, we brought her back and decided to pay, no matter how much it costs.”

A supervisor at the Beijing General Animal Hospital, the city’s main veterinary clinic for small animals, said that 100 dog owners a day visit so their pets can get the examinations and vaccinations required for a license, which the government has designed to resemble a passport.

On a recent afternoon, more than a dozen dog owners were in the animal hospital waiting rooms, cradling their small pets in their arms. For the most part, they were a well-dressed, middle-class group--including a popular television hostess and an electronic engineer.

The engineer, Qiu Guanchun, explained how he and his wife had become enamored of their 3-year-old French poodle, named Siwei.

“My daughter brought the animal home, and my wife and I were very angry at first,” Qiu said. “The dog was very dirty and always needed washing. But after a while, we began to love her, especially my wife. Now we can’t live without her.”