This year, ACTAsia turns 20. For co-founder Isobel Zhang, the milestone is an opportunity to look back on a journey that began, almost by accident, with a single cat, and grew into a calling and a partnership that has been shaping animal protection and humane education in China for two decades.
Isobel and Pei, 2019
Before the Beginning: 2001-2005
Isobel never set out to become an animal welfare advocate. In 2001, her husband brought home a cat – because he liked cats, not her, Isobel clarifies. As someone trained in medicine and biology, with a research background that had once involved performing surgery on laboratory rats, she did not consider herself an animal lover. However, that single pet cat opened a door. Isobel began writing about feline welfare, joining online discussions, and in 2002 founded the Shenzhen Cat Network. What started as a small community for cat owners soon expanded into something larger: a campaign against the eating of cats, and an international seminar bringing together voices from Hong Kong, Macau, and beyond. Animal protection had found her.
“When you are fully committed to doing something, it becomes your North Star. You discover your calling – you’ve found it.”
For years, Isobel lived a double life: building a corporate HR career by day, running the Cat Network and volunteering as an ACTAsia co-founder by night. She did not resign from the corporate world until 2013. She had known for a long time that animal protection and compassionate education was her true calling but finally realised that “in the field of animal protection, whether in China or on the global stage, there is only one Zhang Yuanyuan (Isobel). … I am uniquely qualified, and there isn’t another person in the world who can do this work.” It wasn’t an emotional decision, she insists, just the recognition of where she was needed most.
2006: The Year It Began
Isobel and Pei first met in person in May 2006 – ACTAsia’s formal starting year – at a training program for Chinese animal protection workers, created in memory of Wang Pei, a respected colleague whose death had deeply affected the community. Isobel organised the Shenzhen leg; Pei travelled from overseas to lead it. What began as a professional collaboration quickly became a partnership of equals.
“I’ve interacted with many animal protection organisations in Hong Kong, Macau, and other regions,” Isobel recalls, “but I feel that Pei possesses an exceptionally strong sense of determination and willpower. When working with her, I have this feeling… if she wants to do something, she will definitely make it happen. I am the same way.” She describes their dynamic as something more akin to “soulmates” than colleagues. “Sometimes, she thinks of something, and I immediately have that thing in mind,” says Isobel. “What we each yearn for in our hearts might be different, but the concern for the entire planet is profound and interconnected.” Twenty years later, that founding partnership is still the backbone of how she talks about ACTAsia.
The Pivot That Defined the Next Decade
ACTAsia began as an organisation empowering animal welfare professionals by training veterinarians, shelter workers, and advocates. But by the late 2000s, a few years into the charity’s founding, Isobel and Pei recognised this work, however necessary, could only go so far. “We have a North Star, a very ambitious goal: to reduce animal cruelty,” Isobel explains. “Education is so crucial in this regard, and it was also an area that remained largely untapped. That’s why we decided to take action.”
By 2012, that conviction had become ACTAsia’s Caring for Life education curriculum, built not just for students but for teachers, who Isobel saw as the true multipliers of change. Trained largely by university volunteers rather than professional educators, the program still reached classrooms of 40, 50, even 70 students at a time. “Imagine how powerful that is,” she says. At its core was a simple idea: empathy reaches beyond sympathy in an understanding of how someone else thinks; what Isobel calls the “minor mind.” The curriculum built outward through six progressive themes – care, kindness, respect, norms, appreciation, and coexistence – beginning with first graders exploring one question: what does it mean to truly care for another being?
Challenges Along the Way
Twenty years rarely run smoothly, and Isobel is honest about the difficulties encountered. Working closely with another strong-willed partner meant learning to disagree with “courage and love,” remembering that “the goal is a shared, beautiful vision.”
Isobel also speaks candidly about watching ACTAsia’s programmes be copied elsewhere without credit. This was a frustration she carried for years before finally letting it go around 2020. “I realised I was afraid of others criticising me, and that fear of having my work stolen also held back my own development.”
And there was the sobering realisation of scale. “Being in a place like China, the professional training for animal protection talent that we at ACTAsia are doing is truly just a drop in the ocean.” That recognition pushed ACTAsia toward education as its deeper, longer-term strategy. This has now defined more than half of its 20-year history.
Twenty Years On, Looking Toward the Next Twenty
Asked what she hopes for as ACTAsia marks this anniversary, Isobel’s answer is both modest and immense. “I hope Caring for Life Education in Asia will continue for another 20 years, and then another 20 after that,” she says. “Only through such sustained rooting in China can it truly flourish.” Her other wish is quieter still: that everyone connected to ACTAsia today – staff, volunteers, supporters – might simply live out the values the organisation teaches, so that compassion spreads not through pressure, but by example.
Isobel formally retired from ACTAsia in 2021, but her calling hasn’t faded, just taken a new shape. Today she works as an independent scholar focused on One Health and holistic education, and is writing a book. Twenty years after a cat she never asked for changed the course of her life, the thread she started pulling in 2001 is still unspooling: in ACTAsia, and in everything she continues to build beyond it.
Thank you, Isobel, for two decades of dedication, and for helping build the foundation ACTAsia stands on today.
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