There were signs telling people these were dogs, the zoo did it as a marketing gimmick. They look cute as heck. I don’t speak Chinese but if you listen to the video you can tell the visitors found it funny, they’re laughing.

“It’s a PANdog,” one viewer wrote, while someone else joked: “That’s the Temu version of a panda.”

They don’t say who these viewers are but I doubt the independent would bother translating a pun from Chinese that works so well, so it’s safe to say these “viewers” were randos on Youtube or Twitter in the Anglosphere. I also doubt Chinese people call something the “temu version” of smth else.

A whole lot of nothing except to further demonize China and, two for one, try to present it as a failed economy where zoos have to resort to painting dogs so people can see pandas because there’s no pandas in China if you ignore that it’s thanks to the PRC’s efforts that pandas were taken off the endangered species list.

A zoo that just had cute puppies that you could play with would still be worth going to, even if they didn’t have pandas. Really a missed opportunity here.

Zoos trying to survive in a market economy. Not enough pandas to go around. The people want pandas. Xi needs to recollectivise the zoos.