Dog Propaganda Creates Rift Between China and Korea (oops!?)

SEOUL, South Korea: A South Korean pet shop owner has sparked a minor diplomatic incident with a signboard depicting a dog's head in place of Chairman Mao Zedong's on Beijing's Tiananmen Gate, officials said Monday.

It is not known whether the pet shop owner was inspired by a 2004 photo from obeythepurebreed.com, (Shih Tzu Tung) or if it was simply out of his support for the Shih Tzu's radical ideology.

"The shop's owner had no intention of defaming Mao when the signboard was installed three years ago," Choi Byong-Kwan, a district official in Yongin, told AFP.

But China, he said, believed it insulted the founder of the People's Republic who died in 1976 and whose embalmed body is displayed in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

Choi said the row was provoked by a picture of the signboard which was taken by a Chinese student here and posted on the web. Read Story