Starving zoo animals and cucumber fines. China's indebted cities are desperate for cash

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A Chinese wildlife conservation group issued an unusual appeal earlier this month.

The Endangered Species Fund called for volunteers to donate food to hungry animals kept at a zoo inside Dongshan Park in the northern province of Liaoning. The zoo is run by the local government, which was said to be running out of money and therefore unable to feed its charges.

"There are still bear cubs in the park that need to be fed, the [horse] mare is about to give birth and her food has been reduced by half, and the zoo's staff have not been paid for six months," the fund wrote in a post on its official Weibo account. "We hope relevant departments can pay attention to this issue!"

The zoo - which has three sika deer, six black bears, 10 alpacas and hundreds of monkeys and birds - doesn't charge admission and was reliant on state funds, but hadn't received money for six months, according to the fund.

Its predicament is a symptom of the financial crisis facing many Chinese city and provincial governments, which are having to slash spending as they confront a mountain of debt that swelled during the Covid-19 pandemic and the country's worst real estate slump on record.

Local governments had to spend billions of dollars on mass testing and lockdowns to enforce President Xi Jinping's zero-Covid campaign. The crisis in the property market - which resulted in a sharp drop in land sales - deprived them of a major revenue source.