Thanks for your service, soldier!

I’ve lived in China for 7 years and I have not seen anyone serve or eat a single dog

I've been to china on three business trips and in two occasions I'm pretty, pretty sure we got dog meat served. We were with our english speaking hosts, and whenever we were not sure what was on the plates, we'd ask and they'd tell us precisely. except for these two times when we met business friends in Guangdong where they only repeated like "It's good meat! It's delicious! It's good for health!" whenever we asked what exact animal we're eating. They really loved it and it wasn't half bad, a bit like horse and beef.

it's quite common, to them it's normal, so serving it to foreigners is no deception. read this, but it can be confronting, so it's a warning http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat11/sub73/entry-4480.html

I think it was some kind of deception, they just loved it, and didn't want to tell us because they had "big noses" freak out when they told them what was course #12, the "fragrant meat", in that 36 course dinner. We would discuss every course in detail, all ingredients, everything, and we had really horrifying stuff on the table. I'm not going into details but some of that seemed to be coming from a Tim Burton movie. In order not to loose face we needed to give everything a try, or else our hosts would literally be twitting us, but if we didn't like it, we could spit it back on the plate, no problem. Which is what they did when we hosted them in germany and took revenge by inviting them to typical german horrors, uhm, no, specialities, like Eisbein.