In April 2022, a blogger who posts under the pseudonym Tizi shared a video of her cooking and eating an animal on social media such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and Kuaishou.
Identified as Jin by officials, the vlogger said she bought the shark from Chinese shopping site Taobao for 7,700 yuan (£926).
Videos of Jin cooking a six-foot white shark in a spicy broth and eating its meat have gone viral.
In the video, Jin says “He may look vicious, but his meat is really very tender” before taking a bite.
Tizi is known for publishing mukbang videos of her eating exotic animals like crocodiles and ostriches with 7.8 million followers on Douyin.
Investigators identified the shark in her video as a great white shark through DNA testing of the remaining tissue, and the Nanchong City Market Supervision Bureau said in a report that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs valued the shark at 25,000 yuan (£3,004).
Jin was fined 125,000 yuan or £15,017. Authorities have already identified and arrested the individuals who sold the shark to Jin last year, according to local media reports.
Jin claimed she bought the great white shark legally when Chinese authorities first launched an investigation into her last August.
“These people are talking nonsense,” she told the South China Morning Post.
In her video, she claimed that the shark was “captive-bred” and “edible,” but an editorial on Chinese state-run news site The Paper said that Jin’s claims were contradictory.
“It cannot be ruled out that there is a black market,” writes The Paper. Time.
“After all, to send a big shark from the coastal region to Nanchong [an inland city more than 1,100 miles away]it requires agreement
What is Mukbang and where did it come from?
Mukbang, which comes from the Korean words for “eat” and “broadcast”, originated in South Korea.
It’s the internet craze where the host is filming large portions of food while chatting with his audience.
Great white sharks are a protected species in China under the Wild Animal Protection Law, which prohibits anyone from transporting, buying and selling them, and violators can face heavy fines or up to ten years in prison.
According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the animals are hunted for their fins and teeth and are considered vulnerable to extinction. Numbers are also falling due to global overfishing and bycatch, when sharks are accidentally caught in fishing nets.
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