Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West

WILDLIFE

CONSERVATION

IN

CHINA

WILDLIFE

CONSERVATION

IN

CHINA

PRESERVING THE HABITAT OF CHINA’S WILD WEST

RICHARD B. HARRIS FOREWORD BY GEORGE B. SCHALLER

An East Gate Book

M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England

} An East Gate Book Copyright © 2008 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harris, Richard B. Wildlife conservation in China : preserving the habitat of China’s wild west / by Richard B. Harris. p. cm. “An East Gate book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7656-2057-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wildlife conservation—China. I. Title. QL84.5.C6H37 2007 333.95’40951—dc22

2007001676 Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984.

~ BM (c)

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CHAPTER TITLE

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Bart W. O’Gara (1923–2003) whose fame as a wildlife biologist and a hunter may have obscured the fact that, in essence, he was a simple man who cared deeply about both wildlife and the people whose lives were connected with it.

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CONTENTS

Map of China Foreword by George B. Schaller Preface Acknowledgments Note on Sources Photographs follow page 120

xi xiii xv xxi xxiii

1. Introduction China’s Native Fauna: Astoundingly Rich Natural Capital China “West of the Pandas” Wildlife Species in China’s West The Enormity of the Task China’s Wildlife Institutions in Brief A Perspective

3 4 7 9 10 13 16

2. China’s Wild West: Geography Is Destiny Is “Western China” Really Part of China? A Perspective—Gansu and California High and Dry Ethnicity and Culture The Changing Face of China’s West Human Population Density and Growth Has Western China Been Getting Drier? How Much Have Grasslands in Western China Been Degraded? Four Case Studies of Grassland Condition Grazing Pressure and Local Livelihoods The Great Opening of China’s West

20 21 22 23 24 27 27 29 36 39 47 54

3. The Chinese Perception of Wildlife Language Utilitarianism Dominionistic/Aesthetic Views

58 59 60 63 vii

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Hunting Dissenting Views Confucian Optimism and the Problem with Tuanjie Non-Han Perceptions Are Changes Afoot? 4. Animals: Wild, Captive, and Domestic Distinctions: Clear and Blurry Captive Breeding in China Why Breed Wild Species in Captivity? Two Controversies: Musk Deer and Bears

64 65 68 72 75 78 79 82 84 87

5. Chinese Legal Institutions and Wildlife The 1988 Wildlife Protection Law Is the Law Part of an Evolving Understanding of Conservation? Do Laws Constitute a Wildlife Conservation System?

92 95 102 104

6. Nature Reserves: Poor Substitutes for Comprehensive Natural Resource Management Yeniugou: A Cautionary Fable Nature Reserves on Paper: Statistics and Regulations On-the-Ground Realities in Western China

105 105 111 116

7. Species Stories Used and Abused: Musk Deer From the Frying Pan into the Fire: Przewalski’s Gazelle Valuable, Valued, but Sensitive: Argali Globalization Strikes Back: Chiru Cause or Effect? Pikas and Zokors Wild Progenitors, Domestic Replacements Wild Yaks: Ferocious Cowards Wild Camels: In Retreat Into the Teeth of the Conflict: Large Carnivores Wolves: Surprisingly Common Dholes: In Trouble Brown Bears: Holding On Doing Well or Doing Too Well? Tibetan Gazelle: Finding a Small Niche Tibetan Wild Ass: Too Bold to Submit Blue Sheep: Above the Tumult

121 122 126 132 141 145 151 151 156 159 159 161 162 163 164 165 168

8. Trophy Hunting: Opportunities Squandered How Killing Animals Might Save Them

170 171

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Biology On-the-Ground Realities Establishment and Management of Hunting Areas Funding Power and Control Chinese Hunting Areas as Conservation Programs Lost Opportunities

173 178 178 181 186 188 189

9. Chinese Wildlife Science What Makes Wildlife Science Difficult (but Fascinating) Cultural Challenges Facing Chinese Wildlife Science Discomfort with Uncertainty Tendency to Assign Categories and Properties Rather Than to Explore Relationships Skepticism in Science Institutional Challenges to Chinese Wildlife Science Why Does It Matter?

192 193 194 194 200 203 206 207

10. A Future for Wildlife in Western China Toward a Model Wildlife Conservation System for Western China Linking People with Wildlife Through the Devil’s Bargain International Hunting Subsistence Hunting Commercial Harvest Giving Wildlife a Voice in Land Management Nature Reserves Beyond Dedicated Reserves and Hunting Areas Ecotourism Concluding Thoughts

209 211 211 211 213 217 224 224 226 227 228

Appendix: Animals Mentioned in the Text

231

Notes Bibliography Index

237 293 329

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Kazakstan

Kilometers 0

N

250

Heilongjiang

500

Chinese Boundary Provincial Boundaries

Jilin

Urumqi

Inner Mongolia

Mongolia

Liaoning

Xinjiang Beijing

Huhehot

Tianjin

Yinchuan Qinghai Lake

Qinghai

Xining

Hebei

Shanxi

Ningxia

Shandong

Lanzhou

Gansu

Xi’an

Tibet Lhasa

Sichuan

Hubei

Chengdu

Jiangsu

Henan

Shaanxi

Anhui Zhejiang

Hunan

Jiangxi

Guizhou Kunming

Yunnan

Guangxi

Hainan

Guangdong

Fujian

CHAPTER TITLE

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FOREWORD

When China opened its doors to foreign biologists around 1980, they found a huge, beautiful country with a gloriously rich variety of plants and animals in habitats ranging from rainforest to cold uplands. To initiate field studies of species and work on behalf of their conservation with local colleagues was intriguing, exciting, and challenging, especially when, as was soon noted, Chinese and Western perceptions about nature sometimes differ. I participated in a giant panda study at that time, and now, years later, I still collaborate on wildlife projects in the country. Yet the decades of political turmoil leading up to the 1980s had left China’s wildlife populations decimated, and large tracts of habitat degraded; the few protected areas were moribund, and ecological research had almost ceased. As if to make up for lost time, various government departments established many protected areas, raising the number from about a dozen in 1980 to over 2,000, or 15 percent of the country, today. A core of well-trained Chinese field biologists now conducts surveys and studies. New Chinese nongovernmental conservation organizations actively promote environmental issues. A Wildlife Protection Law was passed in 1988. For the first time ever, many Chinese have the funds and freedom to visit forests and mountains, to become aware of the pleasures offered by the country’s natural heritage, with its beauty admired and valued for itself and not modified to human tastes. I have found China’s changes in action and attitude toward conservation during the past quarter-century illuminating and remarkable, a lesson to the world about what can be accomplished within a few years. Of course, Chinese cultural standards of conservation, developed over many centuries, do not necessarily conform to Western ones. One must understand a culture in order to do conservation, as Richard Harris points out in Wildlife Conservation in China, based on his years of field work in western China. Nature in China still tends to be viewed mainly as utilitarian, designed for exploitation whether in traditional medicines, recipes, or trophy hunts by foreigners. The Western concept of protected areas does not easily apply to a crowded country where communities already occupy most land, including that inside reserves, and use the available resources. Applied wildlife management, sitespecific and flexible, does not yet exist in that all hunting is banned, even subsistence hunting of abundant species, something that alienates local people and creates hostility toward protected areas. As Harris comments, there is exploitation or prohibition and xiii

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nothing in between. Conservation regulations, laws, goals, and values obviously need to develop further in a way that suits the Chinese system. And, importantly, the public, both urban and rural, should have an increasing local voice in deciding issues of resource management if the conflicting demands of conservation and development are to achieve a measure of harmony. Harris clearly defines various management problems and offers insightful options for alleviating these, ranging from treating grazing policy on rangelands to consumptive use of wildlife. Conservation and culture are not static concepts. Both are readily modified, sometimes rapidly, as conditions, knowledge, and ideas change. In the spacious Chinese west, a unique community of large mammals remains—migrating Tibetan antelope, huge-horned argali sheep, wild yak, white-lipped deer, gazelle of four species, snow leopard, and many others. There and elsewhere, China has the challenge and, still, the opportunity to manage wildlife and habitat in a sustainable manner both as a resource and natural treasure. I feel confident that it will succeed in the years ahead. George B. Schaller Wildlife Conservation Society

PREFACE

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PREFACE

Of all the many great legacies that Chinese hope to provide their children, none is currently more threatened with destruction than China’s unique and diverse wildlife. As the twenty-first century begins, the Chinese face some fateful choices regarding the native fauna with which they cohabit their particular piece of geography. For unlike so many of the changes the Chinese have experienced, losing their wildlife—indeed, losing China’s wildness, should it come to that—would be permanent. China has at times been strong and powerful, at times weak and submissive; dynasties have risen to power only to be swept away by others promising reform. China has, at times, felt the yoke of foreign subjugation, and at times been an exporter to the world of goods, people, and culture. But no other place has the unique assemblage of wild animals that roam its plains, deserts, and forests. These animals cannot be exported to other places, nor can they be saved by other people. Their loss would be not only tragic for China, but for all humanity. Fortunately, at least in much of China—in particular, its vast western provinces and regions—there is still time to give wildlife a brighter future. There are also many hopeful signs. An increasing number of Chinese—from urban citizens who have never encountered a wild mouse to say nothing of a wild yak, to highly educated and field-savvy biologists—are demanding more. After years of neglect, a consciousness of environmental values is surprisingly strong and widespread in China. A number of species are in no great danger, and in some cases, are abundant enough to cause considerable problems for people. Additionally, some species are likely to persist regardless of the direction that Chinese economics and politics take in the coming decades. But as a whole, the current outlook is not bright. Most of China’s large mammals, and a large proportion of its birds, amphibians, and reptiles, are declining, endangered, or vulnerable. At fault, as anywhere in the world, are the usual suspects: habitat destruction, poaching, human population increase, pollution, and underinvestment in conservation. But as I will argue, Chinese culture, history, and politics exacerbate the usual difficulties encountered in wildlife conservation in a unique way. A popular misconception in the West is that if the Chinese run out of wildlife it will be because they’ve eaten it all up. The Chinese cultural interest and willingness to consume wildlife flesh, and perhaps even more uniquely, to attribute to various parts of numerous xv

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PREFACE

species medicinal properties in order to cure diverse ailments, is indeed striking, and forms an important backdrop to the problems China faces in conserving its wildlife. And it is unsurprising that foreigners would gravitate to the issue of Chinese traditional medicine: Chinese demand for wildlife products affects not only their own, native species, but those living in other countries, where citizens wishing to conserve their own wildlife must bear the burden of the Chinese appetite. (The most egregious example of this is probably in India, which has adopted a strictly protective, if not always entirely successful, approach toward its imperiled wildlife, yet faces the prospect of losing its remaining tigers due, at least in part, to the Chinese interest in consuming them as medicine.) It is relatively easy for a foreigner to prowl the backstreets of China’s cities and find wildlife products for sale, but it is quite difficult for a foreigner to even get to—much less explore on foot—the wild places from which those products originated. What most foreigners see or encounter in the mass media are images of dead and commercialized wildlife bodies on crowded streets, and they must therefore be excused if they cannot imagine how urban China avoids simply devouring what must surely be a tiny remnant fauna from an invisible countryside. I do not intend to dismiss this image entirely, for there is some truth to it. But I will argue that, alien though it may be to many Westerners, Chinese consumption of wildlife is not really the root of the problem. In fact, under some possible conceptions of a future Chinese wildlife management system, consumption of wild products could even be a blessing (if a mixed one). Instead, I will argue that the root of the problem lies in Chinese failure to value wildness for its own sake, and then, having done that, to engineer social systems that can transform that acknowledged value into incentives for conservation. In other words, China currently lacks effective wildlife conservation because it has yet to acknowledge what wildlife really is, and what conservation really means. In brief, the fundamental problem of wildlife conservation in China is not habitat destruction, nor is it overexploitation. These two phenomena are, of course, responsible for the current declines in most wildlife populations. However, they are not fundamental causes but rather symptoms of a deeper issue in China, namely, the failure to recognize, value, and manage wildlife as a common, social good with potential benefits for local communities, but requiring for its maintenance socially enforceable restraints on individual behavior. Treating only habitat destruction and overexploitation without dealing with this underlying, fundamental problem is like trying to cure a sick patient by treating only the symptoms and not the etiologic agent itself. This book is my attempt to explore these issues, and to suggest alternative solutions to those currently on the policy menu. Historian John King Fairbank has pointed out that, despite its political status as a nation-state, China is really more an entire continent than a single country. Seen in terms of breadth of geography, diversity of cultures, variety of ethnic groups, and multitude of languages, to say nothing of its long and tortured history, characterizing something as “Chinese” is much more like characterizing something as European than as French, Swedish, or Dutch. And China is arguably undergoing more profound changes, more rapidly, than any place in human history.

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Adding to this, information about wildlife in China—reliable information that I feel comfortable in reporting or repeating—is scarce. Indeed, the lack of high-quality scientific work on China’s wildlife (which often means simply acknowledging the limits of what can be known from any given study) is one of my major themes. The student of wildlife systems in China is at a disadvantage relative to students of other environmental problems. Researchers of environmental studies in China may differ on the merits of various theories and approaches to environmental remediation, but they can relatively easily agree on measures of success or failure. In wildlife, we rarely have a clear measure of success. As well, misinformation abounds in China; the place is rife with rumors, and it simply cannot be taken for granted that verbal information received will be correct, timely, or consistent. Most people in China are sure of what they are saying, but often it is just plain wrong. That said, I believe this is a story that needs to be told. There is no common body of information on the problems China faces in conserving wildlife, particularly in its western regions, that draws both on the biological and social sciences. This book is intended for the China scholar who may know little or nothing of wildlife and its conservation (beyond the ubiquitous and superficial stories about giant pandas that appear in the popular press), but who wishes to benefit from the insights of a wildlife biologist. It is also intended for wildlife enthusiasts, who may not think of China when considering conservation issues. Indeed, until a few years ago, it was common to find in the brochures or Web sites of environmental groups discussions of wildlife conservation issues in Asia that completely ignored China. China watchers are usually not terribly knowledgeable about wildlife, and wildlifers usually lack the understanding of Chinese history and culture that social scientists would insist was needed background before taking on the subject. The literature on Chinese environmental problems generally has blossomed in recent years, but very little of it has treated the issue of wildlife conservation. I hope to fill that void, linking those primarily interested in the place with those primarily interested in the animals. I contend that you can’t understand conservation there without understanding a fair bit about the place, and that no complete understanding of the place is possible without knowing something about its wildlife and its future. The core of this book emanates from field studies in which I have participated beginning in 1988, but as with anything worth understanding, a number of related issues must be examined for the core to make any sense. Thus, I deal with issues outside of my expertise, depending on my conversations or interviews with experts in those fields, as well as on readings and on general observations during the many years I have spent in China. I first visited China as a tourist in 1985, having little inkling I would end up spending nearly an additional four years of my life there over the following two decades. All told, my four-plus years in China have been spread over some thirty trips, with the vast majority of that time spent in China’s west. One might legitimately wonder, in a place that houses and feeds almost one-fifth of the world’s humanity, how much wildlife really matters. I use Chapter 1 to explain why it might, and further to give an overview of what is going on in China regarding wildlife.

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PREFACE

Because I restrict most of my points to China’s west, it is crucial to understand something of its land and people, and how they both differ greatly from most of agricultural and urban China. Thus, Chapter 2 deals mostly with geography and ethnicity. Because one of my principal arguments is that the Chinese have not yet established effective wildlife conservation because they have yet to come to grips with the fundamental issue of wildlife habitat, some detailed scrutiny of that habitat in China’s west is justified. In Chapter 3 I argue that Chinese attitudes toward nature are primarily utilitarian, and show little sign of changing any time soon. In Chapter 4, I explore the situation with respect to captive breeding, which receives a great deal more emphasis in China than in most other countries. Some confuse a wildlife conservation system with a simple body of laws. This is particularly misleading in China, where the legal system comes from a very different tradition than that in the West, and is expected to function in society quite differently. These differences, and their application to laws bearing on wildlife, are explored in Chapter 5. In recent years, China has established huge nature reserves in its western regions, and these offer great promise of protecting wildlife habitat. However, what occurs in nature reserves in reality is quite different from what national regulations for nature reserves would suggest. The legal status, and the contrasting situation on the ground, is reviewed in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, I provide what can best be called “stories” about eight species (or groups of species), focusing not on their biology but rather on the conservation or management challenges facing them. Each species (or group) exemplifies a theme in wildlife conservation that cuts across taxonomic boundaries and recurs frequently. I’ve minimized biological details about each species, and instead focused on the category of conservation issue for which each, unique as it is, provides an emblem. Few topics in the world of wildlife conservation and management bring blood to a boil more quickly than trophy hunting. The emotional intensity on all sides makes it difficult to take a dispassionate view of China’s “international big-game hunting” program, although that is what I attempt in Chapter 8. Trophy hunting is a minor element of wildlife conservation globally, but it commandeers a large proportion of the available energy and personnel available for wildlife in western China. Although I argue that wildlife conservation is inherently an exercise in human engineering, affecting and affected by cultural, political, and economic factors, biological knowledge also has an important role to play. Unfortunately, basic information on most wildlife species in China is unreliable at best and lacking at worst. In Chapter 9, I attempt to dig deeply into the reasons why Chinese wildlife science is so poor and information so unreliable. I conclude in Chapter 10 with some thoughts about future directions that might be taken by Chinese with the power to affect wildlife and its habitat. Of course, they cannot remake history any more than they can alter geographic realities; they can only play the hand dealt them. Still, there are fundamental choices, and I worry about the direction in which most Chinese policy currently seems headed. I use information from both the biological and social sciences, yet to keep it manageable and my arguments focused, provide detail and depth in neither. My apologies in advance to scientists who find my synopses of biological and evolutionary concepts

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simplistic. Because I hope this book will find readers among those with little knowledge of China but with interest in global wildlife, it is necessary to discuss some aspects of Chinese culture and history that China experts will no doubt find superficial, and in some cases, perhaps even debatable. Sinologists may, for example, dispute my characterization of historical Chinese views of nature (Chapter 3), or of Chinese approaches to wildlife science (Chapter 9). The topic within these pages is broad, and understanding it is a challenge. My hope is that by increasing general knowledge and generating informed debate about problems, constraints, and potential new directions, a slightly brighter future might be in store for the unique and irreplaceable wild fauna in China’s west.

Western China, showing places I traveled during 1988–2006 (solid lines), and more intensive study areas noted in text (shaded areas).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to the memory of Bart W. O’Gara (1923–2003), wildlife biologist and famed hunter, a simple man who cared deeply about both wildlife and the people whose lives were connected with it. Funding and support through fieldwork and the writing of this book was provided by Robert M. Lee of Sparks, Nevada, whose interest in the wildlife of western China allowed me the opportunity to experience it myself. Other financial supporters throughout my time in China have been the Lit Ng Family Foundation, Denver Zoological Foundation, National Geographic Society, Patagonia Corporation, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature. For assistance in various field and analytical endeavors, I thank Don Bedunah, Milo Burcham, Liu Yongsheng, Chris Loggers, Rick Mace, Lee Metzgar, Daniel Miller, and Dan Pletscher. For field assistance and/or assorted insight into Chinese wildlife conservation, I thank Abulterp Ali, Auducupai, Marie-Claire Bedard, Cai Guiquan, Cai Ping, Chen Hu, Chen Xiaocheng, Chu Hongjun, Cui Qinghu, Da Shenglin, Dong Jiansheng, Du Yongcheng, Gamacairen, Gao Jun, Yanick Gendreau, Gong Jien, Han Lianxian, Jabla, Jembasona, Ji Weizhi, Jiang Zhigang, Jing Bao, Laitipu, Lajiacairen, Lan Daoying, Lan Jingcai, Li Jianguo, Lit Ng, Liu Chuguang, Liu Rongtang, Luo Xiaoyan, Lü Zhi, Kang Aili, Ma Chongyu, Mamil, Ma Shilai, Ma Yiqing, Nur Mohan, Ouyang Feng, Qian Qihong, Qiu Mingjiang, Ruan Xiangdong, Shao Yang, Shi Jun, Shi Lihong, ShiYunhong, Sonabaden, Sonadorji, Song Yanling, Su Jianping, Wang Sung, Wang Wei, Wang Wei (yes, there really are two), Wang Weisheng, Wang Zuwang, Xi Zhinong, Xu Aichun, Xu Yingli, Yang Qisen, Yu Yuqun, Zhang Guilin, Zhang Lin, Zhang Yanming, Zhang Yaosheng, Zhang Yingyi, Zhao Qikun, Zheng Jie, and Zou Hongfei. Various other biologists, scholars, writers, and thinkers have provided information, wisdom, or help (in some cases, all three), or have in other ways influenced my thinking on Chinese wildlife conservation. These include Frank Bessac, Mary Ann Bishop, William Bleisch, Michael Carpenter, Richard Cincotta, Tom Dahmer, Matthew Durnin, Marco Festa-Bianchet, Marc Foggin, Joseph Fox, Dave Garshelis, Mel Goldstein, Michael J.B. Green, Charles Greer, Ute Grimm, Jim Harkness, Rodney Jackson, Kurt Johnson, Ted Kerasote, Craig Kirkpatrick, Li Fengrong, Li Fengru, David Mallon, Jerry McBeath, Richard Reading, George Schaller, Laurence Schneider, Andrew Smith, Gretchen Stark, Ron Swaisgood, Richard Taber, Bill Wall, Peter Ward, Terry Weidner, Phillip West, Howman Wong, and xxi

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Emily Yeh. My most heartfelt thanks to all. I am indebted to Vanetta Burton, Virginia Johnston, and Jeanne Franz for helping keep the finances straight. Maps were prepared by Bob Perrier, CGM Graphics, Missoula, Montana. Thanks also to Doug Merwin for having faith in this project, and to Patricia Kolb, Makiko Parsons, Susanna Sharpe, and Angela Piliouras at M.E. Sharpe for their invaluable assistance. It is not possible for me to put into words the value and source of strength that my wife Barb and my daughter Lia have been to me during my long time away from home and during the writing of this book. I wish I had a tenth of their tolerance and patience.

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NOTES ON SOURCES

Obtaining—and admitting having obtained—source material in China presents some difficulties. In some cases, I had access to written material that was labeled neibu, meaning “for internal [i.e., Chinese] use only.” If not exactly top secret, this was material that I was clearly not supposed to have seen, much less taken home. No material was stolen and none was copied without the knowledge and consent of the Chinese citizen providing it to me (some of it was purchased at various bookstores or kiosks). Nonetheless, there remains considerable risk to any Chinese who could be accused of providing such material to me. To reduce that danger, I have deliberately avoided citing these documents, but have used them for background when it seemed appropriate. I have had to justify my case that the quality of Chinese wildlife science is most often quite poor with illustrative examples. My intent is assuredly not to embarrass or condemn the individuals responsible for the faulty work, but it would be nearly impossible to completely disguise their identity while simultaneously providing the necessary background and documentation for my argument. The best alternative seemed, to me, to discuss the work along with what I see as its problems straightforwardly, highlighting the conceptual errors while soft-pedaling the identity of the erring authors. In the text, I have tried to be transparent about the technical and/or conceptual issues involved, but deliberately a bit murky about the identities of those involved. Curious readers can navigate through the notes to find the sources. Difficulties arise in creating a work in English that must use terms and concepts from Chinese. Confusion increases when dealing with western China, where many names of places and people are originally from Tibetan, Mongolian, or Kazak, none of which uses Roman letters. For consistency, I use the standard pinyin transliteration system throughout. Exceptions are made for place names that are well known in nonstandard pinyin (e.g., “Golmud” is retained in preference to the direct transliteration of the Chinese characters spelling “Geermu,” and “Aksai”—“white creek” in Kazak—is retained over “Akesai” because local people there speak Kazak). A few other exceptions to using pinyin are made when failure to use common English terms would be excessively awkward or confusing (e.g., “China” rather than “Zhongguo”). Throughout, I use the word “Tibet” to refer to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, acknowledging that cultural and geographic Tibet is considerably larger. To avoid clutter, I have avoided using Latin names of species except in places where taxonomy is xxiii

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at issue or is otherwise unavoidable. A cross-tabulation of English, scientific, and Chinese names of animals is appended. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Chinese to English are my own. Finally, although I would have preferred documenting all verbal comments via specific “personal communication” tags, I found that doing so inevitably unmasked the identity of critics of policy and implementation, once again raising the specter that I might inadvertently cause hardship for the very people who kindly provided me valuable information. I’ve generally referred to such sources as “a government official” or “an involved scientist.” Abbreviations used throughout the text are as follows: CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), GOW (great opening of the west [xibu da kaifa]), NGO (nongovernmental organization), IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, now renamed the World Conservation Union), SEPA (State Environmental Protection Agency), SFA (Chinese State Forestry Administration, known until 1998 as the Ministry of Forestry), TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), USFWS (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), and WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature, known in the United States as the World Wildlife Fund). Portions of this book were drawn from earlier published work. Permission to quote from and adapt R.B. Harris’s “Approaches to Conserving Vulnerable Wildlife in China: Does the Color of Cat Matter—If It Catches Mice?” (1996), published in Environmental Values, was graciously provided by White Horse Press, Cambridge, UK. Parts of Chapter 7 were adapted from R.B. Harris and C.O. Loggers, “Status of Tibetan Plateau Mammals in Yeniugou, China,” Wildlife Biology 10: 121–129 (2004), with permission granted by the Nordic Council for Wildlife Research, Ås, Norway. Parts of Chapter 9 were adapted from R.B. Harris and D.H. Pletscher, “Incentives Toward Conservation of Argali (Ovis ammon): A Case Study of Trophy Hunting in Western China,” Oryx 36: 373–381 (2002), with permission granted by Fauna and Flora International, Cambridge, UK.

WILDLIFE

CONSERVATION

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CHINA

INTRODUCTION

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1

INTRODUCTION

Through more than three thousand years, the Chinese refashioned China. They cleared the forests and the original vegetation cover, terraced its hill-slopes, and partitioned its valley floors into fields. They diked, dammed, and diverted its rivers and lakes. They hunted or domesticated its animal and birds; or else destroyed their habitats as a by-product of the pursuit of economic improvements. By late-imperial times there was little that could be called ‘natural’ left untouched by this process of exploitation and adaptation. —Mark Elvin Experience with game has shown . . . that a determination to conserve, even when supported by public sentiment, protective legislation, and a few public reservations or parks, is an insufficient conservation program. Notwithstanding these safeguards . . . wild life is year by year being decimated in numbers and restricted in distribution by the identical economic trends—such as clean farming, close grazing, and drainage— which are decimating and restricting game. The fact that game is legally shot while other wild life is only illegally shot in no way alters the deadly truth of the principle that it cannot nest in a cornstalk. —Aldo Leopold

Wildlife? Yes. China? Of course. But China and wildlife? Seems a strange match. In most minds, I suspect there isn’t much of a connection. Most Westerners who have visited China—indeed, I suspect most Chinese themselves—have never seen a wild animal there beyond the common pigeons and sparrows that inhabit cities and farmyards, or perhaps a few bats flitting about at dusk over irrigation canals. China’s environmental problems have recently loomed large, both within China and elsewhere, and nobody seriously disputes that a stable future cannot be built on a deteriorating environment. As is appropriate, most investigations into China’s environmental problems have focused on pollution, energy use, water, and land degradation; wildlife per se has generally been an afterthought.1 Does China have much interesting wildlife, and does its conservation mean much for China or the world? 3

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CHAPTER 1

I hope to show that the answers to both of these questions are most definitely yes. What Chinese do regarding wildlife, particularly in China’s vast western regions, will have a tremendous impact on a multitude of species, and will also affect, to lesser or greater degrees, the lives of a multitude of Chinese people. This book is not simply a report, however, about wildlife in China or Chinese efforts to conserve and manage it. It is rather an analysis, including an assessment of the problem, a critique of current strategies, and suggestions for alternative directions. As an introduction, I first need to convince you that China’s wildlife consists of a great deal more than the sparrows or pigeons that a casual tourist might encounter. And yes, a great deal more than pandas as well. The geographical area that is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been endowed with a dizzying array of terrestrial wildlife species; China’s natural wonders truly rival its cultural wonders. I also need to put the problems faced by China’s wildlife into context. Wildlife conservation is never an easy task, yet China faces a greater burden than most countries, and one tremendously greater than developed nations. Because of my focus on conservation in China’s west, I explain first why I have split the country in two, and discuss the importance of fauna in the western half. I then provide an overview of China’s current wildlife conservation efforts. Finally, I preview the major themes to be developed in the remaining chapters. CHINA’S NATIVE FAUNA: ASTOUNDINGLY RICH NATURAL CAPITAL In part because of its vast territory, which runs the gamut of biomes from desert to rainforest and from boreal to tropical, the PRC contains a native fauna that is astounding in its breadth and diversity. Perhaps because its territory was spared the worst of the latePleistocene extinctions that occurred in North America, Chinese civilization developed amongst an array of wild animals that makes North America appear impoverished by comparison. In the dry terms of the scholar, China is a “mega-diversity” country, ranking second worldwide in its number of mammal species, fourth in its number of reptile species, and sixth in its number of amphibian species. Although coming in at only eighth in its number of bird species, it still contains an estimated 1,244—enough to keep the most avid birder busy for a good long time.2 Many of these species are endemic, that is, they live only in China, and thus their future existence is entirely in China’s hands. Such lists and rankings can be helpful as summaries, but they fail to engage the imagination. Some examples of China’s diverse fauna, if necessarily subjective in their selection, might better convey just how impressive its natural endowment really is (see Table 1.1). Because primates are most common in the tropics, North Americans and Europeans tend to think of our wild cousins as occurring primarily in Africa or Central and South America. Yet, largely because its territory includes tropical and subtropical regions, China is home to an impressive sixteen primate species. But even well north of the tropics, China can boast such species as the Sichuan golden monkey (in Hubei as well as Sichuan provinces) and the Yunnan golden monkey, which lives in snow-covered high-elevation

INTRODUCTION

5

Table 1.1

Species Within Selected Taxonomic Groups: Comparing North America with China North America Animal Grouping Mammals Order Primates (primates) Order Carnivora Family Canidae (dogs) Family Felidae (cats)

Species

No. Species —

red, swift, kit, gray, and Arctic foxes; coyote; red wolf; wolf mountain lion; lynx; bobcat; jagourundi; jaguar; ocelot

black, brown, polar bears Family Ursidae (bears) Order Perissodactyla — (horses and asses) Order Artiodactyla Superfamily mule, white-tailed deer; elk Cervoidae (deer) (wapiti); moose; caribou Family Bovidae Subfamily Antilopinae (antelopes and gazelles) Subfamily Caprinae (sheep and goats) Birds Order Galliformes (grouse, pheasants) Family Gruidae Order Falconiformes Family Cahartidae (vultures) Family Accipitridae (hawks, eagles, kites)

China

0

loris (2); macaques (4); langurs (3); golden monkeys (3); gibbons (4)

16

8

red, corsac, and Tibetan foxes; wolf; raccoon dog; dhole wild, desert, jungle, Pallas’, golden, and leopard cats; lynx; clouded leopard; snow leopard; common leopard; tiger Asiatic black, brown, and sun bears; panda Przewalski’s horse; Mongolian and Tibetan wild asses

6

6

3 0

5

pronghorn antelope

1

bighorn and Dall’s sheep; mountain goat, musk ox

4

turkey; chacalaca; grouse (7); quail (6); ptarmigan (3)

No.

18

sandhill, whooping cranes

2

turkey, black vultures; California condor

3

kites (4); accipiters (3); harrier; 31 buteos (13); eagles (2); osprey; caracara; falcons (6)

11

4 3

18 mouse deer, musk deer (4); water deer; tufted deer; muntjaks (3); sambar; red, Eld’s, sika, whitelipped, and Pere David’s deer; moose; roe deer Mongolian, Tibetan, goitered, 5 and Przewalski’s gazelles; saiga antelope argali; blue sheep; ibex; gray, red 9 goral; serow; takin; Himalayan tahr; chiru snow partrdige; snow cock (4), partridge (19); quail (2); blood pheasant; tragopoan (5); pheasant (21); peacock; grouse/ ptarmigan/capercaillie (8) Siberian, sarus, white-naped, common, hooded, black-necked, and red-crowned cranes lammergeier; vultures (5) bazas (2); honey-buzzard; kites (4); accipiters (7); harriers (6); buteos (7); falcons (13)

62

7

6 40

Sources: Mammals: Wilson and Reeder (1993); birds: MacKinnon and Phillipps (2000). Nearctica Checklist of the Birds of North America, www.nearctica.com/nathist/birds/

6

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habitats of up to 4,270 m (about 14,000). Although China has no true “great apes,” it has four species of gibbons, which are evolutionarily just a notch down from the chimps, gorillas, and orangutans that we understand as closely related to humans. Although Americans often hear of “wild” horses in Nevada and Utah, these are not wild species shaped by natural selection, but rather feral animals—domestic horses that long ago escaped their human masters and became free-ranging. There have been no wild species of equid in North America for millennia, but China is still home to three. Turning to other animals, there is hardly a word that conjures up images of savage wilderness more than “bear,” but although bears are increasing in Europe, they are all of a single species. North America, even including polar bears, can boast of only three species. China has four bear species. Imagine a tiger and most will envision India; imagine a leopard and most will envision Africa; yet China still contains a few of both of these big cats (in addition to a variety of smaller ones). And we hardly associate rhinos with China, but until relatively recently (at least in Chinese terms), as many as three rhinoceros species still lived in China. Similarly, if you think you must travel to Alaska to be in a place with grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, and lynx, or with golden eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons, think again: China has them all. Most North American big-game hunters prize their privilege to stalk various kinds of deer (which include species not actually called deer, such as wapiti, moose, and caribou), but China has almost four times as many species of deer or close relatives as in the New World. Bird hunting is among the most popular outdoor activities in North America, and most hunters realize that some of the most popular game birds are exotics (including, of course, the ring-necked pheasant, which comes from China). But North America’s total of eighteen Galliform (i.e., large upland game) bird species pales in comparison with China’s sixty-two. In North America, we have our common sandhill crane and our endangered whooping crane, but no less than eight species of crane make China at least part of their migratory route. There are, of course, entire orders and families that are concentrated elsewhere in the world: China has no marsupials, and only a single Procyonid, the family of raccoons and their relatives (although it is arguably among the world’s most charismatic animals, the red panda). But for every group that is missing entirely from China, one can easily name groups of mammals, birds, or reptiles with which North Americans are wholly unfamiliar. North America has no native Viverrids (civets and relatives, a type of carnivore); China has ten. There are no tree shrews (order Scandentia, these are different from “regular” shrews) in either North America or Europe, but one species (Tupaia belangeri) of this tropical Asian critter has a distribution that arcs north to include southern China. The only elephants one can see in Europe or North America are captive, but a few small populations of wild Asian elephant still roam southern Yunnan (as they do in other Southeast Asian countries). For the birder, there’s no point staying in North America if you are looking for barbets, hornbills, or sandgrouse. In addition to these, China’s native avifauna includes pitas and broadbills, leafbirds and drongos, forktails and wallcreepers. Consider the common starling and the ubiquitous house sparrow that inhabit virtually every town in North

INTRODUCTION

7

America. Think they are native species? Both are aliens, but they are natives in China. Hummingbirds are, alas, lacking in China, but their absence is compensated by ten native species of colorful nectar-sipping sunbirds. And North America has no hoopoes. Can a continent truly consider itself to contain a full complement of avian species when it lacks the species with that most embarrassing of formal Latin binomials, Upupa epops? China may not have as many reptiles as can be found in the Amazon, but it has more reptile species than Australia, including a rather cute (if endangered) alligator. China lacks rattlesnakes, but who needs them when you have Indian pythons and king cobras? And although China may not rate as amphibian central, it boasts the largest-bodied amphibian in the world, a forty-kilogram (but harmless) monster called Megalobatrachus davidianus. Did I mention butterflies? Needless to add, with such a diverse fauna, China’s flora is similarly well endowed. CHINA “WEST OF THE PANDAS” The astute reader will have noticed how little attention I’ve paid thus far to the giant panda, by far China’s most famous wildlife species. Lest the reader misapprehend that the prominence given to giant pandas exists only outside of China (the logo of the Worldwide Fund for Nature [WWF] comes to mind), I’ll put that to rest now. There is, within China, far more money and attention spent on pandas than any other species. Pandas even rate their own office within the State Forestry Administration’s (SFA) Conservation Department, imputing to a single species the same level of importance as the country’s entire nature reserve system or the broad and complex issue of wetland conservation. Pandas are, indeed, a central focus in China. It is partly for that very reason that I have avoided pandas and their conservation here. An increasing body of literature exists both in English and Chinese on the panda’s plight and efforts to ensure it does not disappear, covering both the technical/biological and social/conceptual domains.3 There is simply no need for me to add yet another viewpoint, or to reiterate information readily available elsewhere. There are now indications that the energy spent on pandas over the past few decades is beginning to show results. Although it is far too early for complacency (and, as I will argue, no effective or sustainable wildlife conservation yet exists in China, even for pandas), there is now some evidence that the decline in giant panda numbers has been arrested, and possibly reversed.4 But the most important reason why I pay such scant attention to pandas is none of these. Rather, it is that—in a crucial way that I’ll expand on later—pandas live in eastern China, and I am concerned principally with wildlife conservation in western China. A more thorough defense of my categorization awaits in the next chapter, but I must give a preview here because the entire provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu, to which pandas are restricted, are often considered to be part of China’s “west.” But here is the crucial distinction I make, one that I believe has been underemphasized by Chinese policymakers and that, I believe, harbors the seeds for a fundamental distinction in conservation philosophy: in eastern China the fundamental land use is agriculture, whereas in western China the fundamental land use is livestock grazing.5 This distinction between the agricultural and

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CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.1

China, showing precipitation isopleths (shading) and highly concentrated areas of human population. Areas north and west of the solid line cannot support agriculture in the absence of irrigation, and hence qualify as “western China” in my definition.

Precipitation 0 100 500 10001500 Millimeters 0 3.9 19.7 39.4 59.1 Inches

380mm (15inch) isohyet western limit of non-oasis agriculture Areas of Dense Population

N 0

250 500 Kilometers

the pastoral, like any imposed categorization, will easily find exceptions, and it makes, at times, for some odd geography (see Figure 1.1). But I believe it is a useful and important categorization when applied to the domain of nature conservation. Habitat needed by pandas, despite being located entirely in provinces often included within China’s “Great Opening of the West” (about which more will be said in Chapters 2 and 10), is sufficiently fragile and unique that the only economic activity people can reasonably expect to pursue within it is small-scale tourism. The nature reserves that have recently proliferated to conserve pandas, while perhaps not yet functioning fully, are absolutely crucial. If the setting aside of these lands as panda habitat is not made a strong priority, they will almost certainly be managed for wood products and/or agricultural crops in ways that simply won’t provide homes for pandas. But as soon as one travels west along the elevational and moisture gradient, past the point where pandas have ever lived, human impact and uses of the land change, such that coexistence with wildlife becomes a genuine possibility. Note that I have used the word “possibility” here and not “certainty,” because it is by no means inevitable that wildlife can tolerate humans even here, west of the pandas.6 For that to occur, social and economic

INTRODUCTION

9

policy must deliberately consider wildlife, which, in turn, generally means creating incentives for households, cooperatives, counties, and provinces to restrain themselves in deference to maintaining some wildness. In part, it is the “western vs. eastern” China distinction that is important. However, from the point of view of strategies for conservation of wildlife, the issue is one of dividing the country into zones in which wildlife can only realistically expect to persist in formally protected areas, as differentiated from those in which wildlife can have a future alongside human activities. The distinction is probably most closely captured by simply distinguishing rural from pastoral—that is, an economy based on agricultural crops vs. an economy based on livestock. I have focused my attention on the latter, and assert that Chinese policy errs by treating these two areas as strategically identical. Sichuan, despite being in the “west” and having a fantastically unique and varied fauna, belongs mostly to the former category. Outside of nature reserves, the steep hills and recovering forests in Sichuan harbor very little wildlife and even secondary-forest-dwelling small species are probably beyond recovery. The issue in the forested areas of Sichuan is how well (and indeed, whether) nature reserves can be made to work. WILDLIFE SPECIES IN CHINA’S WEST I need to be honest and admit that many of the species and much of the tremendous biodiversity in China to which I referred above does not extend past my boundary line into western China. Because of the much lower primary productivity in western China, biodiversity in general is much lower, and thus provides habitat for fewer species of vertebrates. In western China as I have defined it, there are no “mega-diversity hotspots,” no Qinling Mountains crawling with endemics such as golden monkeys and takins. When we travel west of the pandas we also leave behind pangolins and honey-eaters, sambars and bulbuls, palm civets and parrotbills. The physical aspects of birds’ niches, which can be stacked vertically, cannot possibly be so diverse in a landscape devoid of trees. China’s west also has few reptiles and even fewer amphibians. But considering its generally arid state, western China still contains an amazingly diverse assemblage of terrestrial vertebrates. In western China, one can find hawks, falcons, eagles, and kites of all sizes and shapes. Carrion-eating vultures may be emblematic of America’s southwestern frontier, but both the number of species and the birds themselves are puny in North America compared with what western China has to offer. In many areas, one can encounter three different species of vulture—cinereous, Himalayan griffon, and lammergeyer—all of which are enormous birds, trailing only the Andean condor as the world’s largest-winged flying bird. There are also owls, although only a small one (the aptly named little owl) and a large one (the eagle owl). There are upland birds ranging from large (such as the white-eared pheasant), to medium-sized (the Himalayan snowcock), to small (the Tibetan partridge), not to mention sandgrouse, bustards, and shrikes. If it lacks forests to support a varied group of Passerine birds, western China is still home to huge flocks of larks and snowfinches on the grasslands, along with the occasional wagtails and redstarts.

10

CHAPTER 1

But it is with an extraordinary array of large-sized mammals that western China’s rich fauna stands out as noteworthy among arid biomes. I have had the experience of standing on a particularly productive chunk of alpine meadow and identifying the fresh tracks or droppings of seven different wild ungulate (hoofed-mammal) species, all within a few bounds’ distance. If North Americans think of the pronghorn antelope as symbolizing the arid steppe of the New World, it is worth noting that western China is home to four species of gazelles and another odd-looking antelope (the recently extirpated saiga), not to mention the emblem of the Tibetan Plateau, the chiru (which is actually a goat even though it looks like an antelope). If North America has its bison and Europe its wisent, China can answer with the wild yak (although it’s not a competition). Scrambling along cliffs and skating along talus slopes are blue sheep (on the Tibetan Plateau), Himalayan tahr (along the Himalayas), and Asiatic ibex (in Xinjiang). On the rolling hills below, China’s wild sheep, the argali, make the headgear of North American bighorns seem small. Western China has never had lions, but it did have tigers until recently, and still has common leopards reaching up into eastern Qinghai and snow leopards in most mountain chains. There is, put simply, quite a lot to conserve and, put more darkly, quite a lot at risk. THE ENORMITY OF THE TASK As is well known, China is the world’s most populous country (although India will soon surpass it, and other countries have more densely concentrated populations). Although its human population only seemed to explode in the twentieth century, China has been relatively heavily populated for a long time. Even as early as 1200 C.E. there were about 100 million people living within today’s borders (Figure 1.2). As is also well known, China’s people have, for at least 4,000 years and perhaps longer, organized themselves into societies bound by language, use of irrigation, protection by armies, and common culture. So long and deep is China’s history that Chinese understandably tend to view most other cultures as rather immature and untried. Not in many countries could one legitimately consider an event that occurred in the year 1368—the establishment of China’s second-to-last imperial dynasty, the Ming—as being relatively recent. People—with their agriculture and their livestock, their cities and towns, their dams and irrigation canals—have been heavy on the land for a long time. Pearl S. Buck titled her 1931 classic extolling the hardships of simple Chinese peasant life The Good Earth. In 1984, Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil published one of the first books warning of China’s environmental problems, entitled The Bad Earth.7 When I look at today’s Chinese landscape, so much of which bears the unmistakable footprint of man, the earth seems not so much bad as simply tired. The lands that make up China have done a yeoman’s job in providing sustenance for untold millions, ceaselessly and without rest for a few thousand years. They seem to be asking for a bit of a break. Of the societies known today as the “modern industrialized West,” none began to take wildlife conservation seriously until the late nineteenth century. By that time, many species that are now abundant—and that we take for granted—were at the brink of extinction. Thus we are hardly in a position to take China to task for being a bit late in recognizing

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.2

11

Approximate population of the area currently known as the People’s Republic of China, 400 B.C.E. to the present

1800

1600

1400

Population (millions)

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

00

00

00 20

19

18

00

00

00

00

00

00

00 17

16

15

14

13

12

11

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

00 10

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

0

10

-2 00 -1 00

-3 00

-4 00

0

Year

the need for wildlife conservation. In the United States, the federal government first set aside lands for nature protection in 1872 but by 1910 had established twelve national parks, thirteen national monuments, as well as 150 national forests that themselves stretched over about 730,000 square kilometers—almost 10 percent of the entire country at the time.8 China established its first nature reserve in 1956 and by 1980 had only a dozen or so, constituting less than one-half percent of its territory. One might plausibly argue that both countries got around to the task when they were sufficiently mature and ready to do so. But the combination of China’s population density and the tardiness of any organized effort to conserve nature made its task quite different from that facing North Americans, Europeans, or Africans. In 1910, as North American conservation began maturing, the population density of the United States was about ten people/km2; Canada’s population density was less than 0.8 people/km2. Even as recently as 1999, human density in Botswana was about 3/km2, and in Namibia (as well as Australia) only about 2/km2. In contrast, China’s population density in 1980 was about 107 people/km2 (and had risen to about 145/km2 by 2005). At a time when nature reserves were just becoming legally recognized and laws to prohibit widespread hunting just being discussed, humans had already set themselves down in virtually every conceivable corner of China. As a result, when Chinese finally started getting serious about nature conservation, they had an enormous problem already facing them. North Americans living today have been blessed by the foresight of those who, long since gone, established protected areas when the Native American population had already been decimated but the European population

12

CHAPTER 1

had yet to arrive en masse. These early conservationists had the vision to develop game regulations when habitat was still sufficiently abundant to allow most of the species that had been ravaged by the unregulated slaughter of the nineteenth century to recover. They also had the vision to carve from their midst substantial chunks of landscape where natural processes would enjoy priority well before these parcels of land had become the subject of intense human demands. When China reached an analogous stage in conservation, it had a human population density over ten times what the pioneers of the North American conservation movement dealt with. As is also well known, China has embarked on the most ambitious program of population stabilization in world history (popularly, if somewhat inaccurately, known as the “one-child policy”), and has enjoyed considerable success in lowering its rate of population growth. Today its population growth rate is similar to that of countries many times wealthier (hence its impending loss of the dubious honor as world’s most populated to India). But the twin legacies of son preference (owing to the traditional pattern of farming families gaining daughters-in-law by having sons, but losing everything by having daughters) and Maoist pro-natalism (a combined Marxist and Confucian belief that because human labor or wisdom can overcome any obstacle, the more Chinese the better) have doomed twenty-first-century China to continued population increase despite its tremendous achievements in family planning. It is currently estimated that China’s population will not peak and begin to slowly recede until it reaches about 1.5 billion.9 Furthermore, Chinese citizens of the 1980s, while poor by international standards, were already expecting to live according to industrialized standards, and thus their requirements of the land (in terms of crops, livestock products, minerals, water, waste disposal, and other assorted features of modern civilization) were incomparably higher than those of North Americans in the early twentieth century. The reason that wildlife conservation is difficult—indeed the reason there is need for conservation at all—is that we humans tend to appropriate as much of the earth’s resources and the sun’s energy as we possibly can. Wildlife—meaning biodiversity in all its fullness—is dependent on these same resources, with each species finding a unique way of using a small part of them. Whereas human development depends on channeling resources and energy into a very few products we find useful, and simplifying systems so that they work most efficiently for our own species, intact ecosystems that support wildlife depend on diversity and complexity. The calories and proteins wrapped up in diverse vegetation, the fresh water needed by fish, and the large expanses of space needed to escape predators are all required by healthy, natural ecosystems. Yet to humanity, with its overriding interest in development, these and other features of diversity are simply waste. Just as Westerners have been doing for the past few centuries, Chinese citizens—not only those living in cities that have long since ceased to harbor much wildlife, but also those living on mountain slopes, deserts, reclaimed wetlands, and vast grasslands—are furiously working to elevate their degree of creature comforts by controlling and converting the earth’s matter and energy into forms useful for themselves. Most of us possess an abstract understanding of modern civilization’s demands on the natural world. If you want to see this up close and personal, if you want a visceral experi-

INTRODUCTION

13

ence of humans rapidly consuming increasing amounts of wood, minerals, water, fossil fuels, and adding increasing amounts of greenhouse gases to the environment, come to China. And then, once there, add to what you see now another 200 million people who will be coming along soon, all 1.5 billion of them living at a higher standard than today. Allowing some of China to prioritize the thousands of nonhuman species that also consider it home is not going to be easy. Thus, regardless of what strategies they decide to adopt, Chinese leaders with an interest in conserving the country’s irreplaceable wildlife will be faced with a Herculean task. And by offering alternative opinions and often criticizing the approaches currently taken, I do not mean to imply that conserving wildlife in China’s west is a simple proposition. Today’s leaders are in an unenviable position, having inherited a legacy of hundreds of years of unsustainable agriculture and forestry practices, compounded by the folly of Mao Zedong’s twin concepts that man need not heed the limits of nature, and that an ever larger population would lead to an ever stronger China. Were China’s leaders gifted with uncanny vision and granted perfect knowledge, their task would still be enormous. That said, there is increasingly little reason to excuse a poorly functioning wildlife conservation system in China. The country is a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and the third (or second, depending on how it’s calculated) largest economy on earth. China has its own Antarctic research program and has put a man in space.10 Still relatively poor on the whole and very crowded, China is almost all grown up now, having largely pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to join the ranks of the powerful and influential. It is quickly on its way to being what it has always wanted to be, indeed, what it always felt it deserved to be given its history: a world power. It has a relatively strong education system, and, among almost all of its citizens across a broad array of various cultures, traditions of hard work and ability to put up with hardship. Isn’t it time that Chinese justifiably feel as proud of their husbandry of their natural resources as they do of their cultural and economic successes? CHINA’S WILDLIFE INSTITUTIONS IN BRIEF A Chinese graduate student on his way to the United States to work on a Ph.D. once told me starkly, “China has no wildlife management.” What he meant, I think, was that China lacks institutions and staff specifically dedicated to adjusting human-caused wildlife mortality in order to achieve management objectives, and that it lacks land-management policies that consider the needs of, and conflicts posed by, wildlife. In this he was correct, but it doesn’t follow that there is no management or policy in China at all, because humans affect the natural world so dramatically that even doing nothing is doing something. In the various attitudes possessed by its citizens, its land-use policy, its nature reserves and international trophy-hunting areas, its donor-assisted development projects, and of course, its laws and regulations, China has, like it or not, a wildlife policy, and thus indirectly, a conservation system. Assessing this system is the task of the remaining chapters in this book. First, however, I will touch on the administrative schemes that exist nominally to deal with wildlife, and to which foreigners might first look for information about wildlife in China.

14

CHAPTER 1

Nationally, the primary office dealing with wildlife is the Department of Fauna and Flora Conservation (Yesheng Dongzhiwu Baohu Si), which is one of twelve departments of the State Forestry Administration (SFA).11 Under this are offices of Wildlife Management, Nature Reserves, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Import/Export, Wetland Protection, and, as mentioned earlier, a special office just for giant pandas. All of these offices are primarily administrative in function, approving or denying permits and plans. All are based in Beijing and are relatively small, and none has any research function. Although its name would suggest a minor function dealing only with a single international treaty, the CITES import/export office is actually the largest, because it is responsible for overseeing all international trade, both for listed and unlisted species.12 Also at the national level is the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), a hybrid organization that really deserves the moniker GONGO (government-operated nongovernmental organization).13 For many years, China confused foreigners by insisting that CWCA was truly independent of the government; only in the 1990s, when NGOs such as WWF, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and Conservation International (CI) began operating in China did the language used to describe CWCA become more accurate. In fact, CWCA is nongovernmental only in the sense that it does not participate directly in permitting or management decisions. It is housed within SFA and all of its employees are paid by the government. CWCA’s best-known program domestically is the annual “Love Bird Week,” a largely educational and exhortatory event occurring in the spring of each year. CWCA also gets involved with anti-poaching educational efforts, and some international cooperation. Since the establishment of international hunting areas in the mid-1980s, CWCA has functioned as one of the primary domestic commercial agents, selling hunts to foreigners and acting as a liaison to provincial hunting companies and/or provincial wildlife authorities.14 Also at the national level, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) has nominal oversight of SFA’s management of nature reserves. SEPA itself manages about 19 percent of China’s nature reserves.15 At provincial levels, wildlife management offices are housed under the forestry bureaus of their respective provinces. These provincial offices serve two masters simultaneously: they are formally part of their provinces’ forestry bureau, yet unable to act independent of direction provided by the national-level Department of Fauna and Flora Conservation. In China’s west, these offices are even smaller than in Beijing, and appear to be woefully underfunded and -equipped. In Qinghai, for example, there was a single trained wildlife biologist as of 2005; Gansu had three for the entire province. Much of the oversight and permitting done by both national and provincial-level wildlife staff is devoted to commercial game farming operations; minor tasks include overseeing transfer of live animals (e.g., to zoos) and permitting foreign trophy hunting. Wildlife offices also oversee most of their province’s nature reserves (those at both the national and provincial levels), as well as certain aspects of zoological gardens. Again, these offices serve primarily to oversee paperwork; they do very little field work. The CITES import/export offices also maintain provincial stations in most, albeit not all, provinces. So far so good, if this means that the bulk of wildlife work is carried out at the prefec-

INTRODUCTION

15

ture, county, or township level. Unfortunately, with only the occasional exception, there are no personnel at all dedicated to wildlife at lower levels in western regions. With the exception of some nature reserves and international hunting areas, the few paper pushers at the national and provincial levels constitute the entire wildlife infrastructure in China.16 Most counties and prefectures lack staff trained in wildlife biology entirely, and even nature reserves and hunting areas are poorly funded and staffed. Nor are there game wardens per se. Although some counties have “forest police,” these employees have multiple duties that extend beyond apprehending poachers (mostly to preventing forest and range fires), they are unarmed and minimally trained in wildlife, and only have authority to monitor, but not to apprehend or arrest, violators. In the United States and Canada, by contrast, most wildlife is managed by states and provinces. Hunting and fishing licenses support a broad infrastructure of biologists, wardens, and refuge managers, usually based in regional centers within each state. These regional-level wildlife personnel usually get to know given areas quite well, and divide their time between office- and field-based tasks. Thus, compared with that of the United States, for example, the current structuring of wildlife authority in China is excessively top-heavy, with many supervisors and few workers, all support-beams and tresses but no actual building. Because there is, for all intents and purposes, no legal hunting in China, a body of trained wildlife staff such as exists in the United States, Canada, or Europe is lacking entirely, there simply being no reason for its existence. Beyond dealing with permits and assisting with the very occasional survey, wildlife staff at the provincial level do almost none of the work we associate with wildlife management in North America. In China, all government units work largely under the framework of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law. This law sets down very strict prohibitions on killing wildlife. In doing so, it explicitly alienates people from wildlife, and implicitly establishes the geographic scale on which costs and benefits of having wildlife are to be weighed as the entire People’s Republic. China’s top-down and hierarchical political system ensures that lower-level staff have little flexibility to deviate from the strictures in the 1988 law. In addition to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES, which it joined in 1980), China is also a signatory to most of the major wildlife-related international treaties and conventions, such as the Ramsar convention (on protecting wetlands) and the International Convention on Biological Diversity. Through its membership in the UN and the World Bank, China also participates in various loan and grant programs administered through the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), some of which may have benefits for wildlife habitat. In this system, nature reserves take on the primary, and in some cases, the sole burden of providing habitat for species that cannot thrive in human-dominated landscapes. A system in which strictly protected areas are relied upon for wildlife habitat makes sense in eastern China, but it does not make sense in western China. What China presently lacks, indeed what it has never had, is a functioning system to regulate use of wild species by common people, and to mediate and modulate the changes to habitats that occur with persistent yet low-density human occupation. There has been rampant exploitation, and

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there has been absolute prohibition. There are places where, supposedly, humans are not even allowed to enter (core regions within nature reserves), and there are places where wildlife habitat does not even merit a passing thought (almost everywhere outside of nature reserves). But there are almost no places where wildlife can negotiate for partial privileges, where it can pay for a recognized right for some, albeit not all, of the earth’s mineral and energy flows. A PERSPECTIVE In my view, China has a wildlife conservation system based, largely, on the following three precepts: 1. Most wildlife should be completely protected from direct exploitation by people, that is, through legal bans on hunting, such that wildlife is very deliberately and very clearly set apart from humankind. 2. Nature reserves function as the preeminent (perhaps even the sole) lands on which wildlife habitat merits any priority. Outside of nature reserves, wildlife habitat is simply not a consideration. 3. The traditional Chinese consumptive use of wildlife is to be supported, but the raw materials for it are to be supplied by captive rearing rather than by prudent and sustainable use of truly wild species. I would not argue that this system was designed following any particular theoretical construct, or, in fact, that it was designed at all. Instead, it has come about organically as a result of Chinese culture, history, and recent state policy. But rather than being any kind of “wildlife conservation system with Chinese characteristics,” it seems to have few if any Chinese characteristics. Excepting perhaps the third, these pillars of the current system are paradoxically opposed, not only to what appears to be practical in the current Chinese context, but even to prevailing Chinese mores and conceptions of nature. And rather than result in the conservation of wildlife, this system seems likely to result in protecting pretty scenery and producing anthropogenic animals. These two results are not the same. Here are the root problems of each precept. First, both Han and most rural and pastoral non-Han peoples in western China have traditionally (including up until quite recently) consumed wildlife and their products. Underlying attitudes toward wildlife may differ among individuals, but the notion of complete protection of wildlife appears not to have arisen naturally from any native source. Some critics of recent Chinese wildlife conservation efforts have suggested that Chinese simply alter their way of valuing wildlife as a first step toward better results. For example, Shen and colleagues17 wrote that “The single most important factor hampering wildlife conservation in China is the traditional use of wild animals for medicinal purposes, meat and skins.” A report commissioned by a prominent nature conservation organization, referring specifically to bears, concluded that “No campaign to slow or stop the bear trade will ever succeed without understanding Asian attitudes ,” but later recommended that “educational efforts should promote the value of bears as wild animals and

INTRODUCTION

17

important members of the world’s ecological community.”18 These authors thus legitimately suggested that non-Asians should seek to better understand Asian attitudes, but then seemed to propose that such efforts be made in order to show Asians the error of their ways. Yet there is no inherent reason why utilitarianism cannot be consistent with at least some definitions of conservation.19 If society uses and values a renewable resource, it is logical that it ought to strive to conserve it so as to be able to continue using it. Westerners may argue that the utilitarian view of a species makes it more valuable dead than alive. But a similar argument could be made about the wildlife conservation system for many species in western North America, where the premise is largely that a broad constituency—much of which values wildlife primarily for food or sport—provides the political muscle to conserve that wildlife’s natural habitat. Such a system has not resulted in, for example, deer being worth more when dead than alive. Most Chinese defend their traditional consumption of wildlife products, and I discern no evidence of a sea-change in Chinese perceptions of nature or wildlife.20 But, paradoxically, Chinese policy alienates the vast majority of Chinese from any direct use of wildlife. By enacting sweeping bans on hunting, the Chinese legal system puts itself squarely at odds with the Chinese cultural desire to obtain the material goods that wild systems can produce. In most of eastern China, such a collision of interests is made unavoidable by the simple overlay of such a dense human population on such a limited geography. Species of consumptive interest are already far too rare, and the habitat needed to support them far too limited, to conceive of satisfying the demand through regulated use of a common pool resource. But in much of western China, where the facts on the ground are quite different, the potential still exists to conserve wild places based, at least in part, on the energy created by the use of wild products they are best situated to produce. In the Chinese west, the disconnect between historical practice and contemporary prohibition, indeed the mixed messages sent by a government that sanctions medicinal use while proscribing the means to obtain the medicine, stand out as worthy of serious question. Second, although the Chinese nature reserve system has developed astoundingly quickly and now occupies a respectable proportion of the country, it is still woefully inadequate in both quantity and locational representativeness if its objective is to function as the sole source of wildlife habitat. Equally importantly, there is little reason to think that Chinese nature reserves, at least as currently conceived and managed, can succeed in this mission, if for no other reason than that almost all were provided legal status only after people, with their needs for obtaining their own resources from those habitats, had long been established there. If this weren’t enough, nature reserves as currently managed in China are in fact a compromise between the goals of nature protection and the usual ones of increasing living standards of people, both local and distant, because the most critical decisions bearing on the health of wildlife habitat are made not by reserve managers but by governments for whom nature conservation is more of an annoyance than a goal. Beyond the borders of nature reserves, habitat for wildlife is simply not a consideration. Third, captive breeding can produce wildlife products, but it can never produce wildlife. Captive breeding adopts a technological attitude toward what is partly a spiritual problem, circumventing the need to maintain wildness in order to produce wild products. It may

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ultimately satisfy the demand for a specific tonic or animal part, but, in the context of the other two pillars of Chinese policy, does nothing to ensure that wildness itself, the ultimate source of the products many Chinese continue to consume, will have a future. Thus, my fundamental premise is that, to the degree that China can be said to have a wildlife conservation system at all, its pillars are curiously out of step with the realities of both the practical and conceptual aspects of Chinese life. Further, in its arid west, where wildlife still has the potential for a vigorous future, this system appears oriented toward removing the wild from the faunal landscape, substituting the untamed with the civilized. It does this, to boot, by denying legitimate parts of some traditional cultures that might yet be adapted to the modern world. While many species are declining and in trouble—the usual focus of wildlife conservation efforts in developing countries—there are some wild species in China’s west that are thriving, some even becoming nuisances for local people. Dealing with wildlife that causes harm to life or property on a local level is also part and parcel of a successful wildlife management system, but Chinese policy lacks both the institutions and the flexibility needed to usefully intervene. In suggesting better approaches, I will take refuge in two premises that I believe are fundamental and that characterize any successful system, regardless of other differences that may exist: (1) Direct mortality from people must be controlled but need not necessarily be eliminated completely; and, (2) land use, over broad expanses, must take account of wildlife’s needs. Usually, this will require that some opportunities to provide benefits only to humans be forgone, lest energy and material flows be entirely appropriated by people to the exclusion of the native flora and fauna. Both of these, obviously, require sacrifices from people, and conflict with the shortterm economic interests of at least some citizens. The way these conflicts are usually resolved involves some kind of “Devil’s bargain”: some individual animals are killed in exchange for broad acceptance of limitations on killing others; consumptive use helps pay the opportunity cost of forgone development on wildlife habitat; minor degradation of wildlife habitat or alterations of wildlife behavior is acceptable in order to allow the public access to viewing or using wildlife (and thus supporting protection of both the animals and their habitats in natural settings against other human desires to convert either into products used directly for human welfare). I contend that the current system in western China has this exactly reversed. None of the elements of such a “Devil’s bargain” has been institutionalized. Instead, China’s wildlife conservation is premised on controlling human-caused mortality, but not controlling human-caused degradation and destruction of habitat. Humans generally harbor conflicts of interest regarding wildlife: we love it, but we must constrain it in order to live ourselves. It is not possible to provide unlimited conservation for wildlife without deciding to remove ourselves entirely. In fact, a plausible argument can be made that the single greatest enemy of wildlife worldwide is agriculture, without which, of course, modern civilization would be impossible. Yet by appropriating so much of the earth’s available resources for ourselves, we limit the available space for wildlife daily in ways both direct and indirect. In the eyes of wildlife, we are all sinners. As individuals, we can, of course, elect to sin with greater or lesser effect. But because

INTRODUCTION

19

most of us live in human-centered societies, connected to wildlife only via indirect and circuitous routes, it is usually difficult to see what effects our actions have on wildlife. And, as just one of over 6 billion human beings (most of whom live far from wildlife), one individual can hardly make a difference. Instead, we generally find that we must institutionalize conservation, for example by establishing limits on how many animals we kill and on how much habitat we convert, which can be enforced by social institutions such as governments. I will argue that both Chinese history and the examples of modern societies elsewhere suggest that a more promising path is to increase, rather than decrease, human interactions with and appreciation of wildness. The Devil’s bargain that I contend the Chinese have not appreciated is that we can accept restrictions on our own vaunted task of civilizing the wild if we are able to benefit directly from having the wild. The triumph of civilization over wilderness is not yet complete, but we must limit ourselves over the long term in order to allow wildness a place in our future. Such a fundamental limitation of what would appear to be progress will only be possible if some tangible benefits accrue to society from prioritizing biological niches other than human. The rub, of course, comes in institutionalizing incentives for players at all levels of the system to prioritize long-term benefits over short-term profits. It is worth pondering whether this is possible in Chinese culture, with its weak tradition of power coming from the bottom, spread reasonably evenly over individuals assumed to be equal in prerogatives and responsibilities. Yet such does not seem totally unrealistic, particularly if management units are focused on local rural areas sufficiently small that they retain an internal sense of connectedness, and particularly if management policy attempts to harmonize with the tradition of viewing wildlife primarily in terms of its material value. I am an advocate of change. Scholars of the Chinese legal system William Alford and Yuanyuan Shen have written that “it is imperative to develop an approach toward environmental protection that takes account of Chinese circumstances without accommodating them so completely as to surrender all possibilities of fostering transformation.” Simply replace the words “environmental protection” with “wildlife conservation” and one has a nice encapsulation of my perspective on change and tradition as it relates to wildlife. This challenge, it seems to me, is the real one facing China’s vulnerable wildlife.

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2

CHINA’S WILD WEST Geography Is Destiny

Because under a predominantly fishing, hunting, and animal husbandry way of life there is a relatively strong dependence on natural vegetation, forests and other natural vegetation are relatively widespread. In contrast, under an agricultural system, mankind cultivates vegetation, thereby replacing the natural species [with domestic species]. As a result, mankind becomes ignorant, and places too much importance on the profit immediately visible to him, blindly opening more land for agricultural development. This leads to loss of forests and ultimately, to mankind receiving retribution in kind from nature. —H.R. Wen

Beijingers, after I’ve answered their question about where I live within the United States, invariably respond with a puzzled expression and a wrinkled nose. They have heard of New York, San Francisco, and perhaps a few other places, but Montana requires an explanation, and that I place it on their mental map. But even more predictably, when I tell them that I’m not working in Beijing but just traveling through on my way to the western provinces of Qinghai or Gansu, they cluck in sympathy. So poor, so undeveloped, so backward. Why would a Westerner go there on purpose? China’s west is so different from what most people imagine China to be, that an entire chapter is justified to describe it, focusing on specifically western Chinese issues that are relevant to wildlife conservation. Thus, this chapter will serve to ground us geographically, exploring the land on which western Chinese native fauna will either persist or die out. I will put western China into geographic perspective, provide a brief overview of the ethnic and cultural dynamics that apply particularly to people on the land, discuss development and the rapid pace of change in western China—focusing on the conditions of its grasslands and arguments over the extent and causes of grassland degradation (for which a slight digression into the issue of climate change is required)—and finally overview the Great Opening of the West and what that portends for wildlife. Because my argument with Chinese wildlife policy is generally that it has yet to come to grips with human transformation and degradation of wildlife habitat, a detailed look at that habitat in China’s west is appropriate. 20

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

21

IS “WESTERN CHINA” REALLY PART OF CHINA? Residents of the United States or Canada are undoubtedly familiar with differences between their western and its eastern halves. On a superficial level, the differences between western and eastern China are comfortingly similar. In both cases, the east is where the people and the power are. Eastern sections are more densely populated, wealthier, more urban, and capture the lion’s share of attention from outsiders. China’s west, like western North America, is larger geographically, more mountainous, more arid, and its people tend to be poorer. But to stop at that parallel would miss the mark, not because it is incorrect but because it doesn’t go far enough. The differences between eastern and western China—rich vs. poor, rural vs. pastoral, educated vs. uneducated, powerful vs. weak, tame vs. wild—are so much more pronounced than the parallel differences in the United States and Canada as to make these North American countries appear homogenous by comparison. The first thing that most Chinese will tell you about their western region is that it is poor. Of course it wasn’t long ago that poverty accurately characterized all of China, but the west certainly has largely been left behind in the Chinese economic miracle that began in the 1980s. As of the year 2002, mean GDP per capita in Tianjin was $2,484/year, in Beijing $2,753/year, and in Shanghai had reached $4,059. That same year it was $786/year in Qinghai, $737 in Tibet, and only $546 in Gansu.1 Much of this gulf reflects the huge urban/rural divide that exists throughout China, regardless of region. But even when the effect of urbanization is minimized, the wealth disparity between east and west remains.2 Predominately rural provinces such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Liaoning in China’s east have mean per capita wealth two to three times that of China’s west. The five provinces of Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia are lightweights within the Chinese economy, accounting for less than 5 percent of total national production while accounting for about 6 percent of China’s population and 55 percent of its area. Numerous other socioeconomic indicators tell a similar story. The number of people per doctor in 1990 was about 134 in Beijing, 215 in Heilongjiang, and 288 in Shandong; in the west, parallel figures were 347 in Qinghai, 478 in Tibet, and 676 in Gansu. In 1990, life expectancy for males at birth was 73.7 years in Shanghai, 73.0 in Beijing, and 68.4 in Heilongjiang. By contrast, it was 66.3 in Gansu, 59.3 in Qinghai, and 57.6 in Tibet. Enrollment rates in secondary and higher educational institutions were five to ten times higher in urban, eastern areas than among the western provinces. Chinese might next point out how vast an area its western regions occupy. One need only look at a map to see this: Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia alone (encompassing 5.25 million km2) would, were they a separate country, rank as the world’s seventh largest (sixth if the rest of China were considered in their absence). If overlaid on a map of Europe, this “country” would blot out all twenty-five European Union countries, plus the candidate countries of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia (as well as Norway, Switzerland, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, thrown in for good measure). But all these statistics fail to capture the essence of the difference. What Chinese

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might not tell you—in part because it would not occur to them in such form, in part because the language does a poor job of expressing the concept—is that western China remains, largely, wild. In this huge area, dominated by mountains and deserts, urbanization and transport links are mere specks on the landscape. Unlike similarly remote arctic North America, there are no helicopters and very little radio communication. Outside of isolated towns, oases, and areas near rivers, people live essentially on native vegetation as processed through the bodies of their domestic livestock, dependent on the inherent properties of the land under their feet, largely untouched by the web of globalization and homogenization that are hallmarks of our age. A Perspective—Gansu and California To put the size and importance of western China into perspective, let’s take a look at Gansu, arguably one of the least known of China’s thirty-one provinces3 both by foreigners and by Chinese themselves. One might, with some justification, consider Gansu to be both a cultural and political backwater, unimportant to the greater goings-on within China, to say nothing of the world at large. And this observation would largely be correct, on a relative scale. But to understand that scale, it is instructive to compare poor and obscure Gansu with a more famous political entity, the U.S. state of California. California has the third largest area of any U.S. state (trailing only Alaska and Texas), and—as has been noted frequently by economists—were it a separate country, would have a gross domestic product similar to that of France4 (making it the sixth largest economy in the world). But although Gansu is geographically much smaller than Qinghai, Xinjiang, or Inner Mongolia, overlaying it onto a map of California reveals that humble Gansu is actually about 12 percent larger5 (see Figure 2.1). Gansu’s Qilian Shan mountain range,6 which few outside China have even heard of, would also dwarf the famous Sierra Nevada mountains, not only in extent (the Sierra Nevada stretches about 700 km from south to north, whereas the Qilian Shan traces an east-west arc almost 1,000 km) but also in elevation. The Sierra’s famous Mt. Whitney, at 4,419 meters (14, 494 feet), would hardly rate as a foothill in most of the Qilian, where numerous, mostly unnamed peaks rise to over 5,000 m, and the tallest ones exceed 5,900 m (19,350 ft).7 Western China is relatively sparsely populated; it is remarkable for its geographic scope and physical characteristics, not its human population. But a low-density population does not mean that the absolute number of people living in China’s west is inconsequential. Given the geographic scale involved, even low-density habitation implies a large number of people. It may not be surprising that the state of California, with some 35.5 million people, has a larger population than does Gansu. But at about 26 million, Gansu is lightly populated only by Chinese standards: it would rank second were it a U.S. state (ahead of Texas and Florida), and it contains only about 18 percent fewer souls than all of Canada. True, Gansu has no glitzy urban centers to compare with California’s Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco. But its capital, grimy and industrial Lanzhou, is a city of over 1.5 million (with over 3 million living in the general area), and Gansu also has eleven other cities containing over 100,000 people.8

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

Figure 2.1

23

The Chinese province of Gansu and the U.S. state of California, drawn to scale

N Miles

0

100

200

300

High and Dry To provide a perspective on just how high and how dry western China is, some additional comparisons with North American geography are useful. It is not only western China’s mountains that are at high elevation; the valleys and cities also require that their citizens breathe hard. With an average elevation of about 2,070 m (6,790 ft), the state of Colorado is the highest in the United States, and its capital city of Denver is known as the “milehigh city.” But one need not travel to Lhasa (at 3,658 m, or just under 12,000 ft) to find cities in western China that render Denver’s oxygen concentration normal by comparison: Qinghai’s capital of Xining is not really on the Tibetan Plateau, yet at an elevation of 2,317 m (7,600 ft) is higher than Mexico City. Many other towns on the periphery of the Tibetan Plateau are above 3,000 m (9,840 ft), elevations that in North America would place them on top of mountain peaks. All moisture gradients in western China (Figure 2.2.) are essentially variations on a theme whose motif is aridity. Even the wettest portions of western China are barely able to support forests; mean annual precipitation at Yushu in southern Qinghai (486 mm/yr) is close to the worldwide mean for grasslands. But it gets drier north and west of Yushu.

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Figure 2.2

Mean annual precipitation at selected weather stations in western China. Note that although all amounts are low, precipitation declines as one travels north and west.

To see just how dry, it is useful to compare mean annual precipitation at some towns in western China with the arid southwest of the United States. Xining, the booming capital city of Qinghai, gets only slightly more precipitation annually than does Salt Lake City. Tuole, a tiny hamlet situated amid seemingly verdant grasslands south of the Qilian Mountains, gets 286 mm/yr, about the same as Tucson. The small town of Dulan, although situated at a cool 3,185 m (10,448 ft.) and able to support irrigated agriculture, gets only as much precipitation as Phoenix. The town of Needles, California (abode of the imaginary Spike, brother of the cartoon character Snoopy and always depicted in Peanuts as consisting of nothing but cactus and sand) receives about 108 mm/yr in precipitation, but that is considerably more moisture than any of the cities in the western part of the Gansu corridor receive. Even Death Valley gets 40 percent more precipitation than Dunhuang, and the aptly named Lenghu (“Cold Lake”) near the Qinghai-Xinjiang border gets 50 percent less precipitation than Dunhuang. ETHNICITY AND CULTURE In western China, particularly in those areas where wildlife populations still survive and have the opportunity to persist, what Chinese refer to as minority ethnic groups (shaoshu minzu) are a critical component of the socioeconomic fabric dictating the future of wildlife. Ethnic Han, who make up 93 percent of China’s population overall, are minorities in most counties in western China. Except for irrigated areas, land use—and by extension, wildlife habitat—is dominated by people other than Han. (More than a few Chinese with knowledge of wildlife have remarked that its condition tends to be a negative function of the proportion of the human population made up by Han Chinese.) Although Lhasa has

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25

increasingly become a Han-dominated city, Han make up only a relatively small proportion of people on the land elsewhere, even in Tibet. Tibetans loom large in western China, particularly in the Western imagination. In fact, not only is there an entire field of study devoted to Tibet and Tibetans, there are also scholars of the scholarship of Tibet.9 But although it is mistaken to view all of western China as synonymous with “Tibet” (as a naïve Westerner might10), Tibetan culture produces the largest single human impact on the land and wildlife in western China as I have defined it. Tibetans predominate not only within Tibet itself, but also in the southern half of Qinghai, the western third of Sichuan, the northwestern tip of Yunnan, and within various pockets of Gansu. Most Tibetans in China are comfortable with multiple identities, as their culture has never become completely unified. Although all see themselves as Tibetan, most also recognize, and have made some sort of accommodation with, their political status as Chinese citizens.11 While almost all venerate the Dalai Lama as a religious leader, many focus more attention on local religious leaders.12 Although a visit to Lhasa is almost as important as the Muslim hajj to Mecca, neither the Kham speakers of western Sichuan and the Yushu area of Qinghai nor the Amdo speakers of central Qinghai and southern Gansu, can understand the Tibetan spoken there. The three major dialects within Tibetan are almost as mutually unintelligible as some of the Chinese dialects. All Buddhists, Tibetans nonetheless profess allegiance to different sects: although the Gelugpa have dominated religious life in Lhasa for centuries (and have defined Tibetan Buddhism in the West through the personages of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas), their sect is, in places, less important than the Nyingmapa, Kargyüpa, or Sakya sects. While there is no doubt that Buddhism pervades the lives of most Tibetans, in their daily activities and world views, most Tibetan pastoralists resemble Mongol or Islamic Kazak pastoralists13 more closely than they do monks or lamas. They interact daily with the natural world, and although they venerate life, they are far too close to its realities to eschew an earthy practicality. Almost none are vegetarians (even if they prefer to hire others to kill their livestock), and hunting is also a consistent, if never predominant, cultural theme. Many people in the West do not realize that there are more Mongols in China (almost 5 million) than in Mongolia. True, Chinese Mongols do not have their own country, but their sheer numbers alone (not only in Inner Mongolia, but also in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai) create a strong ethnic presence. Western China is also home to over a million Kazak, almost 200,000 Qiang, 143,000 Kyrgyz, 45,000 Tajik, and 15,000 Yugur pastoralists. In agricultural and urban areas, Uygurs number well over 9 million, dominating southwestern Xinjiang, while a large proportion of China’s almost 9 million Hui Muslims live in the west (particularly if the west is defined to include Ningxia, nominally a Hui Autonomous Region). Another locally important Muslim ethnic group is the Salar, which although not numerous (less than 100,000), has a strong influence in commodity trade in western China. There is little doubt that the Chinese political system has not delivered “autonomy” to these ethnic minorities in any sense that Westerners would find meaningful. The English-language literature is filled with books and articles recounting and condemning the oppression that the majority and politically powerful Han Chinese have historically meted out to ethnic minorities,

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a trend that, though considerably muted since the reforms of 1978, continues to this day. It is not necessary for me to reiterate the examples here, nor do I wish to take issue with the general conclusion that interethnic relations have been characterized by what might be described as Han chauvinism at best or racism at worst. That said, relatively little of the literature on this topic takes an even-handed approach. Whereas the Chinese literature is dripping with political correctness, there is sometimes a tendency for the Western literature to overstate the situation in the reverse direction. While it would clearly be insensitive to downplay damage that has been done, I believe many Western observers have underestimated the resiliency of many of these cultures, particularly the pastoral cultures of China’s grasslands. Clearly much has been lost, and all might well be lost within a few decades if the most progressive Chinese policies are not continued or, better yet, improved upon. But the claims that only in other countries can one find “pure” Tibetans, Mongols, Kazaks, or Kyrgyz, or that within China one finds only hollow shells or representations for tourists of these people—and that therefore Chinese policy and/or assimilation with Han has been uniquely destructive of traditional pastoral cultures—seem to me simply untrue. One sometimes hears the claim that Chinese policy toward the ethnic groups in its west was less enlightened than Soviet policy of similar eras, and indeed, the 1990s saw the breaking free of the five Central Asian republics with the demise of the Soviet Union, whereas Chinese leadership gives no indication whatever that a similar breakup would be countenanced in China. However, at least for language and religion—two elements that appear crucial to the meaning of culture—Tibetans, Mongols, and Turkic-speaking pastoralists have arguably fared better under continuing Chinese domination than under the recently ended Soviet domination. Although never fully integrated into the Soviet Union, independent Mongolia has long since lost its traditional written script; Mongolian in Ulaan Baatar is now written entirely in Cyrillic. To find readers of traditional Mongolian, one needs to search in China. And while Buddhism among Chinese Mongols has suffered under the PRC’s limited view of religious freedom, it has been relegated to relatively minor status in nominally independent Mongolia (although a revival may have recently begun). Volumes have been written on the destruction of Tibetan monasteries and the continuing intolerance within the Chinese government of the full expression of Buddhism among Tibetans. That said, the central place of incarnate lamas in the hearts of Tibetan pastoralists, often in the person of a particularly well-respected local living Buddha, remains strong. Given the implacable opposition of Chinese leaders to allowing resurrection of a feudal theocracy, Buddhism will probably never again dominate Tibet in the way it did from the seventh century until 1959. But the religion has not died out, nor does it seem likely to in the foreseeable future.14 Similarly, there is no question that standard Mandarin is the lingua franca of all of China; pastoralists who cannot read it, not to mention speak and understand it, are at a huge disadvantage as soon as they leave their family encampment. And the rather half-hearted efforts to legitimize minority languages on government office signs, propaganda billboards, and storefronts in nominally autonomous areas are seen by non-native speakers of Chinese—correctly, I believe—as superficial and symbolic. But the Kazak, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Yugur languages remain alive and surprisingly well in the mouths and ears of pastoralists (as does Uygur throughout southwestern Xinjiang); indeed, they have probably survived the

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27

Han cultural onslaught better than languages of southwestern China such as Zhuang, Yao, and Bai. Follow a Kazak, Tibetan, or Mongolian home from a township setting, and he will invariably switch from Mandarin to his native language.15 THE CHANGING FACE OF CHINA’S WEST Western China is in the throes of an ecological crisis. At least, that’s the message one gets from much of the mass media (both Chinese and foreign) in recent years.16 Official pronouncements regarding recent environmental changes in China’s west depict a scenario that leaves one wondering how so much unscientific management, irrational economic activity, and wanton destruction could possibly occur in so little time. Forests have been cut down, rangelands have been turned to desert, rivers have dried up or polluted, and, as if that weren’t enough, Mother Nature herself appears to be wreaking havoc by rendering an already harsh environment even less hospitable through increasingly frequent droughts and floods. To address the perceived crisis, national and provincial governments have, in recent years, initiated a plethora of programs aimed at restoring (or “constructing”) the “ecological environment,” alleviating western China’s poverty, or both. Because the health of wildlife populations is inextricably linked with the health of the land overall, these claims and proposed measures clearly have relevance. But before either accepting Chinese claims uncritically (or, conversely, rejecting them on the assumption that much official information exists to promote underlying agendas), it is worth some effort to examine what is known about the condition of the land. Western China is changing rapidly, and the future of habitat for most wildlife is gravely threatened, but, it turns out, the picture is decidedly more mixed and nuanced than either Chinese or Western documentation would suggest.17 Human Population Density and Growth The capacity of any given area to provide wildlife habitat is invariably a negative function of human population density. China’s population problems are well known, but the unique characteristics of the western province and region often escape notice. Two features stand out as noteworthy: First, population density in most western provinces is, and has always been, far lower than in eastern China. Second, since 1949, population density in most of the west has increased at far higher rates than in eastern China. The implications are that in the huge western provinces, wildlife habitat has historically been not only more abundant (due to size of the region alone) but also much less constrained by human activity, and that this relatively happy situation for wildlife has also been changing far more rapidly in the west than in China’s east. Considered solely on the basis of human pressures, the future is far from assured. Figure 2.3 provides a general picture of human population abundance in six western provinces and autonomous regions. Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang have not only increased rapidly since 1949, but are, by far, the most populous of the six. Ningxia, Qinghai, and Tibet have, by Chinese standards, tiny populations. Because these provinces vary

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Figure 2.3

Human population of China’s western provinces and regions, 1949–2000. Data from UNESCAP (2004) and China Map Publishers (1984). Data for Tibet supplemented from Grunfeld (1996). Interpolations for years with data for only some provinces by author.

25

Population (Millions)

20

15

10

5

0 1949

1959 Gansu

1969 Inner Mongolia

1979 Ningxia

1989

Qinghai

Tibet

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Xinjiang

considerably in their area, I present the data expressed as densities in Figure 2.4. China has a total area of 11.1 million km2, so at 1.3 billion people, overall mean density is approximately 117 people/km2. But within these six western provinces, mean population density in 2004 was approximately 20/km2, whereas in the remainder of China it was approximately 176/km2. By contrast, in the conterminous U.S. states, mean population density in 1999 was approximately 28 people/km2, and in Canada was about 3/km2. Figure 2.5 provides approximate yearly growth rates, which gives some insight into periods in which immigration from other provinces peaked, at times government mandated, at times arising from personal hardships and the search for a better life. The famine of 1959–61 is reflected in the lowered growth rates during that time, particularly notable in the case of Gansu. All these data sources are subject to error (and particularly in the case of Tibet, are probably incomplete because they do not necessarily include military personnel or temporary workers), but it is clear that the growth rates of all six provinces (with the possible exception of Tibet, if these figures are reliable, and possibly Qinghai) are far too high to be explained by birth and mortality rates alone. Clearly then, for the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, western China has experienced growth rates of human populations more similar to those of developing countries than to China’s own more developed, eastern regions. That itself

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

Figure 2.4

29

Population density of China’s western provinces and regions, 1949–2000. Data from UNESCAP (2004) and China Map Publishers (1984). Data for Tibet supplemented from Grunfeld (1996). Interpolations for years with data for only some provinces interpolated by author.

90

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20

10

0 1949

1959 Gansu

1969 Inner Mongolia

1979 Ningxia

1989 Qinghai

Tibet

1999 Xinjiang

may contribute to the “ecological crisis” that is often attributed to western China. But simply pointing the finger at population increase is too facile an analysis; we must look further, at possible climatic changes, and at changes in the economics and social dynamics of pastoral systems, to more fully understand what has occurred—and what might occur in the future—on the land that wildlife must share with people. Has Western China Been Getting Drier? Most writers on environmental degradation in China’s west agree on one thing: western China has recently experienced a drying trend, making life for both people and wildlife more difficult. The desiccation of China’s west is described variously by different sources and accorded variable weight and significance, but is generally accepted as being beyond dispute. However, I have chosen not to reiterate the unexamined claim that western China is getting drier. For one thing, the reader can easily access numerous writings that make this claim elsewhere; for another, it isn’t true. Official pronouncements and press releases in China state that environmental degradation in general, and in particular degradation of grassland conditions, have at least partly been caused by natural factors.18 The claim that precipitation has decreased within living

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Figure 2.5

Population growth rate of China’s western provinces and regions, 1949–2000. Data from UNESCAP (2004) and China Map Publishers (1984). Data for Tibet supplemented from Grunfeld (1996). Interpolations for years with data for only some provinces interpolated by author. Dashed line with solid circles represents overall mean growth rates for China during the same time periods.

1.08

Yearly Population Growth

1.06

1.04

1.02

1.00

0.98 1949

1959

Gansu

Inner Mongolia

1969

Ningxi a

1979

Qingha i

1989

Tibe t

1999

Xinjiang

China

memory is also frequently voiced by pastoralists, and is usually given as among the reasons that forage seems less plentiful than in earlier times. Local informants also talk of natural springs, formerly reliable, that have dried up in recent decades. Data abound on rivers that no longer flow as they once did, and on retreating glaciers, all contributing to a sense of gloom and the notion that perhaps western China has just gotten particularly unlucky of late: an already dry place just happens to be getting even drier. The veracity of these claims is relevant to the examination of wildlife conservation in western China. If there really has been a general, long-term drying trend, then carrying capacity of the land for both livestock and wildlife should have declined. Thus, conflicts that might exist in any case would have been exacerbated regardless of how people managed themselves, their animals, or the grasslands their animals depend on. Even if such a general drying trend were part of the global climate change arising from the increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—and thus qualified in some sense as anthropogenic as opposed to simply being part of some larger atmospheric fluctuation—it would simply exist as an unfortunate fact that both people and wildlife in China’s west must cope with. The best possible management practices or most eco-friendly attitudes would be of little use against such a global phenomenon.

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Table 2.1

Weather Stations Used for Assessment of Climatic Trends in the Study Area Station Name

Distance from Study Area Center

Elevation (m)

Years of Data

Da Qaidam Dulan Dunhuang Jiuquan Lenghu Qilian Tuole Yumen

approx. 110 km south approx. 355 km southeast approx. 165 km north-northwest approx. 270 km northeast approx. 195 km west-southwest approx. 250 km east approx. 210 km northeast

3173 3191 1139 1477 2733 3360 1526

1957–1993 1954–1998 1962–1993 1935–1998 1957–1993 1957–1993 1953–1993

If, on the other hand, there is a common perception that precipitation has decreased when in fact it has not, the implications are quite different. If ground water reservoirs are drying up, subirrigated pastureland is decreasing in area, and formerly roiling rivers are evolving into mild rivulets in the absence of any reduction in actual precipitation, the most parsimonious explanation is that humans have been using surface water faster than it is being replenished. If local pastoralists are convinced that “it rains less than it used to” when, in fact, accumulated rainfall assessed over the long term has remained constant, they are probably reacting to declines in vegetation abundance or vigor whose causes lie elsewhere, most likely in excessive use by livestock. Thus it is worth taking a small detour into the world of meteorology and hydrology to examine these claims in more detail. One would think that, with the seeming unanimity of wisdom that China’s west has been getting drier, it would be easy to find solid evidence in the form of weather records (which are, in contrast to biological data, relatively straightforward to obtain and interpret). But strangely enough, the evidence of reduced precipitation simply isn’t there. In most cases, weather records show no discernible change in precipitation amounts over the past few decades. In the few places where changes appear to have occurred, data indicate a trend toward a wetter climate, not a drier one. For example, during our investigations into possible wildlife/livestock conflicts in Aksai County in western Gansu, we frequently heard pastoralists complain that the climate had gotten drier since earlier times.19 This view was shared by one of Gansu’s foremost wildlife experts who, as luck would have it, had lived in Aksai some two decades earlier and had supervised the vegetation study that, at least nominally, justified the livestock carrying capacity limits and household allotments that were implemented in the early 1980s. There was little doubt that vegetation conditions had worsened over time, but how much, if any, of that trend could be attributed to climatic factors? To find out, we obtained monthly precipitation records through 1993 for the seven weather stations surrounding our study area that had been vetted as most likely to be accurate by a joint Chinese-American meteorological program.20 The weather stations that were available and used for the analysis are listed in Table 2.1. In general, there is no evidence of substantial changes in precipitation amounts over the time-period for which data are available (Figure 2.6). Of the seven stations, two show significant (P < 0.05) trends of yearly precipitation on time, and both are positive (Dulan, about 1.2mm/year, and Qilian Tuole, about 1.5mm/year).

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Figure 2.6

Precipitation trends spanning 30–60 years at seven meteorological stations (solid circles) surrounding our survey area in Jianshe Township, Aksai County, Gansu.

Yumen Yumen

120 120

Jiuquan

80 80 40 40

Xinjiang

0 1953 1963 0 1953 1963

1973 1973

Year Year

1983 1983

1993 1993

Precip

Precip Precip

180 120 60 0 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995

Year

Dunhuang

Precip

90 60

Gansu

30 0 1962

1972

1982

1992

Year

Survey Area

Tuole 400

Lenghu

Precip

Precip

50

300 200

25

100 0 1957

1967

1977

1957

1967

1977

1987

Year

Qinghai

1987

Year

Da Qaidam

Tibet

240

80

0 1957

Precip

Precip

160

1967

1977

Year

Dulan

180 120

1987 60 1954

1964

1974

1984

Year

Was this sample of weather stations anomalous? Could it be that, although there is no indication of decreasing precipitation surrounding this particular area, the drying claim would be supported by looking at other data? It certainly does not appear so. Weather data have been assessed by various researchers, and none has used exactly the same sources, methods, time-periods, or geographic categorization. Yet, one looks in vain for statistical evidence of decreasing precipitation over the past four to five decades in western China, from Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia, from Tibet to Ningxia. Certainly there have been individual weather stations that have shown declines with time—precipitation is markedly variable on a year-to-year basis in such an arid and topographically complex region—but there simply is no sign of a general drying trend. If anything, there is a weak signal that precipitation amounts, particularly during spring and perhaps early summer, have actually tended to increase since the 1960s (but if so, by only a tiny amount).21 With a few exceptions, reliable weather recording has only taken place in western China since the early 1950s, so another possibility to examine is whether, while there has been no general drying trend during the past half-century or so, these years themselves have been,

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

33

on the whole, dryer than average on the scale of a few centuries. With no weather measurements available, how, one might ask, is it possible to determine yearly weather patterns in previous centuries? Here, a couple of tough little juniper trees that go by the Latin names of Sabina przewalskii and S. tibetica come to the rescue. Although not present everywhere throughout western China, these slow-growing and scrubby little trees find a niche where precipitation is just high enough to allow for tree growth, and at elevations high enough to avoid the parching desert below but not so high as to make for an insufficiently long growing season. Such places are found in the Qilian Shan along the Qinghai-Gansu border, in moister and warmer areas of southern Qinghai and northeastern Tibet, as well as in isolated ranges surrounding the Chaidam Basin. Conveniently, individual trees can live for hundreds of years, and stumps and snags of dead individuals stay on the landscape for centuries longer. Thus, by measuring the width of rings representing annual growth (and by careful calibration of those widths with weather conditions during years they could be recorded), one can reach back hundreds of years to trace general weather patterns in the area. The longest data set uses trees born as early as 159 C.E. As with precipitation analyses, studies differ in their choice of geographic area, sample size, and methods (although most use the same basic procedures), and no two studies point to exactly the same trends. As well, most studies are more concerned with inferring the periodicity and amplitude of wet and dry (as well as warm and cool) periods than with depicting a long-term trend. However, from the various graphs and tables resulting from this body of work, one can still search for evidence that the recent past has been, on average, dryer than the distant past. Yet again, there is no evidence that the past fifty years, or indeed the entire twentieth century, has been a particularly dry period.22 Indeed, one study, using 200 trees collected just east of the county town of Dulan, Qinghai, suggested that the twentieth century was among the wettest of the past two millennia.23 If precipitation itself has not declined, it could still be that western China has become drier and generally less hospitable to vegetation growth if temperatures have risen sufficiently to hasten evaporation, making less water available to plants. And unlike claims of reduced precipitation, there is evidence that temperatures have gone up recently. The same sources that claim a general drying in western China are quick to blame global warming for a gradual rise in temperatures. Here, the bulk of the evidence seems to support their claim: examination of the available data renders it incontrovertible that mean annual temperatures have increased.24 (In fact, they appear to have increased throughout most of China, but the rise has been greater in the Tibetan highlands than the overall mean, with analyses variously placing the yearly warming trend as between 0.02°C–0.06°C per year.) But even here, caution is warranted before jumping to the conclusion that such higher temperatures have been drying out western China despite unchanged or slightly increased precipitation. In assessing the possible effects of this warming on vegetation, one must consider the seasonality of the trends (because vegetation is differentially affected by temperatures during various growth stages, and is least affected when it is dormant in winter). Here, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of mean annual warming is caused not by higher summer temperatures but by milder winters,25 a season when desiccation hardly seems a concern. Finally, it is worth considering what effect the relatively small increase in summer temperatures would have on vegetation growth in large portions of western China that

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have short and cold growing seasons to begin with. Is such a warming likely to exacerbate desiccation or promote more vigorous growth? At least on the Tibetan Plateau, it is possible that warming, despite its overall dangers for humanity, may enhance grassland growth. A group of Japanese and Chinese scientists speculated that “climate warming may promote vegetation growth on the Tibetan Plateau.”26 More persuasively, a group from Beijing University seems to have data that support this: based on remote sensing data during the period 1982–99, they documented an increase of roughly 1 percent annually in net primary productivity as averaged over all of Qinghai and Tibet.27 One additional potential interaction between grassland degradation in western China’s coldest regions and recent climate change that deserves consideration is the reduction in extent and depth of permafrost. There are reliable data that overall warming has reduced the extent of permafrost that underlies much of the Tibetan Plateau and nearby mountain ranges at least seasonally, and increased the depth of its active layer (i.e., ground that freezes and thaws seasonally). These trends would tend to allow surface water to infiltrate into soils too deeply to be useful for plants, thus producing drier soils even without desiccation from the atmosphere. There are weak signals that this may indeed be occurring, at least locally. But even here, the issue is far from simple. Data collected and models constructed thus far suggest that such effects should be observed mostly in the highest, coldest sedge-dominated meadows (i.e., pastoral summer ranges), but much grassland degradation has occurred on lower elevation winter ranges. Further, degradation of permafrost and warmer surface soils can be caused by vegetation removal (i.e., human activities) as well as by globally-initiated warming.28 While plausible, studies have yet to show that site-specific, climate-induced permafrost reduction is an important contributor to range degradation (although future studies might). If there is so little clear evidence for a general drying trend in western China, why, then, does the claim so often reappear in Chinese documents? There appear to be three reasons. First, some publications provide no data themselves but simply accept and repeat the conclusions of other papers (the details of which are hidden from the reader). Writing in the Swedish publication Ambio, Wang Xiuhong and Fu Xiaofeng uncritically repeated the claim that summer precipitation had decreased by 0.65mm/year since 1961 in southern Qinghai in concluding that “Regional climate change is not suitable for the growth of alpine meadows.”29 Yang and colleagues asserted, “in the past decades, due to the climate warming, the climate condition [on the] . . . Tibet Plateau has been relatively dry,” but failed to back this up with any citation of data or analyses.30 Similarly, a livestock specialist working for a local livestock development center in Lhasa concluded that “climatic warming increases evaporation, which results in a negative trend of drought condition, and a worse environment for grass growth,” without citing references on temperature, precipitation, or their interaction on vegetation in the area studied.31 A press release issued in September 2004 by China Science and Technology Daily gained considerable attention by proclaiming the “Drying of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau,” based on a general increase in temperature of 0.336°C per decade (a figure that accords generally with other published information), but then providing no data at all to link the temperature rise (which, as explained earlier, was primarily an increase in winter minimums) with rangeland desiccation. The problem was later compounded when this press release was translated into

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

35

English and promulgated on Web sites32 as claiming that the temperature increase had been documented as 0.336°C per year rather than per decade (an easy mistake to make because the raw data must be expressed in terms of “annual temperature changes per decade,” but nonetheless, off by a factor of ten). Second, some publications provide data, assert a drying trend, but never bother to link their conclusion to the data via statistical analysis. A scholarly attempt to examine underlying causes of the “desertification disaster” in southern Qinghai presented decadal mean temperatures and precipitation amounts (categorized by seasons) for southern Qinghai from 1961 through 1999 and concluded that these data demonstrated a “clear warming and drying trend” attributable to global warming.33 But the authors never bothered to test whether these negative trends, so obvious to their eyes, were statistically significant. Of their four seasonal precipitation “trends” (in addition to the annual, grand mean), only one (winter) was even close to achieving the usual 0.05 level of statistical significance, and that trend was positive, not negative, as would be the case had there been a drying trend.34 Third, some publications accurately cite reliable evidence of warming or drying, but then use this data to make inappropriate inferences about other geographic locations, or interpret the data on the wrong time-scale. In northeastern China, for example, data suggest that precipitation may indeed have decreased over the past half-century, but China is a big and diverse country and what occurs in northeastern China does not necessarily apply to the west.35 There is also little doubt that western China has experienced a gradual drying trend when measured over the past 30,000 years; it may also be drier now than during the Han Dynasty, when written Chinese records began to include the area. Climate change on such a recent geologic scale is supported by palynological work and studies of relict vegetation structure.36 It is not surprising that the source of most of Asia’s great rivers once accumulated more moisture than the semi-desert we find there today. But some writing conflates this slow, natural drying (associated with the continuing uplift of the Himalayas, one of the world’s youngest mountain ranges) with a much more rapid deterioration in ground water supplies, river flows, and grassland conditions. It seems unlikely that when Kazak and Tibetan pastoralists despair of current grassland conditions or speak of higher precipitation in “earlier days” that they are referring to the late Pleistocene. This confusion of time-scales is clearly evident in the disagreement over the causes of the decline of Qinghai Lake, China’s largest inland lake. While admitting that the lake has been drying up and that the rate of contraction is faster now than in the past, most Chinese official statements continue to blame “natural factors” for the majority of the problem.37 To bolster this claim, reference is sometimes made to the fact that, early during the Holocene, Qinghai Lake was much larger than its current size; various records support the notion that it began retreating well before settlers began siphoning off water from its sources for agriculture in the twentieth century. Most sources agree that the lake level has been declining at a rate of roughly 0.1m/year since the 1950s,38 thus exposing hundreds of square kilometers of previously inundated lands. But if this rate of decline is no faster than the ancient, postglacial rate, Qinghai Lake would have been at its largest known extent as recently as the year 1125 C.E., and during the middle of the Han Dynasty would have been at an impossibly high level of almost 3,400 m, well higher than it is

36

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Figure 2.7

Precipitation recorded at Xining, Qinghai, 1951–93. Dashed line shows the (nonsignificant) trend with time, which is slightly positive.

600 y = 0.2182x – 66.988 R2 = 0.0013 500

Annual Precipitation (mm)

400

300

200

100

0 1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

Year

known to have been even during the wettest periods 30,000 years ago.39 Clearly, the rate of decline must have increased sometime during the past half-century. As well, if human activities around the lake are not the primary cause of its rapid decline, we would expect to find evidence of decreased precipitation in the area.40 But weather stations at neither Dulan (Figure 2.6 above, 1954–98) nor Xining (Figure 2.7, 1951–93), the two most reliable weather stations west and east of the lake, provide any evidence of a drying trend during the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, the more likely culprits are the scores of diversions from Qinghai Lake’s feeder streams that have been built, first prior to 1949 but in increasing density during the 1950s and 1960s, to develop an ill-advised agricultural base at 3,200 m. The point of all this is not to deny the reality of long-term climate fluctuations, or to doubt the reality of global warming (or its likely negative consequences for biodiversity in western China should it continue).41 Rather, it is to urge the interpretation of the implications of climate change at an appropriate temporal scale, and care in making overly broad inferences. Climate change is real, but it seems premature to invoke it as an important cause of grassland degradation in western China. HOW MUCH HAVE GRASSLANDS IN WESTERN CHINA BEEN DEGRADED? Most wildlife in China’s west is ultimately dependent on the condition of its extensive grasslands for its future. Virtually all these grasslands are grazed, at least at some point

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

37

during the year, by domestic livestock. Yet the condition and trend of western China’s grasslands are the subject of considerable debate despite the almost universal claim from official Chinese sources that overgrazing and rangeland deterioration are serious and widespread. Alas, as with many other crucial questions related to western China, reliable data upon which to assess the various positions are scarce. To begin, the terms “overgrazing” and “grassland degradation” are often poorly defined. What, exactly, is meant when these concepts are invoked? The two most common terms used in Chinese literature, both scientific reports and policy statements, are chaozai (“exceed capacity”) in reference to livestock stocking rates and tuihua (“degrade, deteriorate”) in reference to rangeland response. But lacking more specificity, neither of these terms can be interpreted. A water tank has a clearly defined capacity: continue to add more water after capacity is reached and it will simply spill back out. But this same clarity eludes us when referring to a grassland ecosystem: there is no clearly demarcated “capacity” below which more grazing pressure can be added and beyond which it spills out. Rather, increased grazing produces quantitative or qualitative responses, and at certain grazing levels, changes in plant composition or soil health may become so pronounced as to become irreversible without external input and intervention. To reduce the problem of grazing intensity into a simple dichotomy (below or above a defined “capacity,” i.e., “overgrazed” or not) is to lose sight of management objectives. If one’s objective is to retain species composition and abundance that allows for wildlife use as well as livestock use, the grazing capacity will be different from that suggested if the management objective is merely to minimize soil erosion.42 The term “degradation” avoids the categorization problem by suggesting a continuity of states, implying that any given parcel may be relatively more “degraded” than another. But it suffers from vagueness sufficient to render the term almost meaningless. If one could begin with a parcel of rangeland entirely untouched by any herbivore, the introduction of even a single plant consumer would begin to change the quantity and quality of vegetation. As more herbivores were added and more plant material removed, plant size, plant vigor, and vegetation composition would all change as well. Clearly, rangeland plants have evolved in the presence of herbivory, so such changes are not necessarily destructive to ecosystem function.43 But would any such change merit the term “degradation”? Certainly, there are grazing intensities that result in replacement of favored species by unpalatable or poisonous species, by complete loss of plant species, and, in the extreme, loss of soil productivity. By any standard, such rangelands deserve to be called “degraded.” But variation from an idealized (if unnatural) ungrazed state to a completely unusable one is continuous (or perhaps occurs via relatively rapid transitions among differing states44); without quantitative data, there is no way to know where any parcel of land is on the continuum. Alas, Chinese writing on range condition invariably avoids quantification, instead leaping straight toward categorization and conclusion.45 It is easy to find sources purporting to show how much, or how badly, Chinese grasslands have been “degraded,” but difficult to find documentation on what is meant or on how the information was collected. Nationally, there are at least two quite disparate official statistics regarding the magnitude of grassland degradation. One, issued in 1999

38

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by the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), estimated that about 1,350,000 km2, or “one-third of the nation’s useable grasslands,” had suffered from some degree of degradation. Although this report suggested that the rate of yearly degradation had slowed in recent years, three years later the State Council issued a second estimate suggesting that “Presently, ninety percent of China’s useable natural grasslands have some level of degradation.”46 Sources providing region- or province-specific estimates of the magnitude of the problem display similar variability and inconsistency. The same SEPA document that reported the less alarming nationwide figures estimated that, in Ningxia, degraded grasslands constituted 97 percent of the natural grassland area. For Inner Mongolia, a recent compilation estimated that 58 percent of grasslands were in “moderate to severely degraded” condition as of 1998.47 For Gansu, proportions of grasslands degraded varied from 39 to 48 percent.48 Xinjiang was reported to have 46 percent of its grasslands moderately or severely degraded.49 In Qinghai, “A recent sample of 111 villages in a relatively productive area of Qinghai found that . . . degraded areas of temperate grassland, of alpine grassland, and of temperate desert grassland are 45.12 percent, 33.56 percent and 35.28 percent of their respective total utilizable areas.”50 For Tibet, figures vary from 15 percent to 26 percent, depending on the source.51 Curiously, mammalogists studying the effects of rodents on grasslands estimated that 50 percent of the 1,400,000 km2 of grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have been “seriously” degenerated52 (a number incompatible with the previous estimates for Tibet and Qinghai). An attempt to integrate satellite-derived productivity data with estimates of livestock stocking densities (by individual county) suggested that large swathes of southern and western Qinghai, eastern Xinjiang, and western Gansu (as well as northeastern Inner Mongolia and extreme northern Heilongjiang) were, in fact, stocked at sustainable densities. In contrast, the most severely overstocked areas were calculated to be in central Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, central and southern Gansu, eastern Qinghai, and western Xinjiang (neither Sichuan nor Tibet were included in this analysis).53 Reports of lowered productivity among livestock herds are also variable, although most report declines of one-third to one-half relative to estimates from the 1950s or 1960s. About all that can be concluded from these summary statistics is that stocking densities are generally high relative to the capability of most grasslands to sustain both livestock and wildlife in a healthy condition. Further, it seems safe to conclude that many western Chinese rangelands no longer produce the abundance of palatable vegetation they formerly did, have lost soil matter or productivity, and are less efficient at facilitating quick weight gains in domestic livestock—in short, are “degraded” by some definition or other. But exactly where, to what degree, and—most importantly—why rangelands have deteriorated remains uncertain. It is difficult to develop or assess restoration strategies when it is not clear either how bad the problem is or why it has occurred. This lack of data is partly a result of unfortunate policy decisions, and could have been avoided had Chinese agencies followed through on their promising actions of the early 1980s. When management of grasslands was transferred from the giant communes of the 1960s and 1970s to individual households and small cooperatives in the early

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

39

1980s, organized and extensive rangeland surveys were conducted by the provinces, with standardization and guidance from the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing.54 These investigations no doubt varied considerably in their quality and thoroughness, but at least benefited from consistent methods and definitions. Each survey developed livestock carrying capacities (from which allocations to families from the former communes were determined); if inaccurate, these capacities were at least based on field data that could later be checked and adjusted. Some surveys even documented growing conditions with geographically fixed photographs, allowing future trends to be seen as well as measured quantitatively. They thus constituted an invaluable starting point from which trends in range condition, as affected by livestock numbers, herding strategies, economic incentives, land tenure arrangements, and—as always—yearly weather anomalies, could have been measured. The great tragedy was that no system was ever set up or funded to continue such rangeland monitoring on a continual basis, notwithstanding general exhortations in the 1985 Grassland Law to do exactly that. Instead, the grassland surveys of the early 1980s were treated as though they were capable of determining inherent and unalterable characteristics of each surveyed area. The one-time nature of the surveys betrayed an unstated but pervasive belief that science could determine fixed properties of these complex and variable systems, to which the social and organizational systems need merely adjust themselves to produce a sustainable pastoral economy. It was thus impossible, for example, to alter livestock carrying capacities—whether implemented or not—if subsequent monitoring revealed the initial estimates to be erroneous.55 Instead, assumptions and projections that would constitute a baseline for years to come were developed based on only one or two seasons’ data.56 The years of sampling were plucked from all the variations inherent in such arid ecosystems not because they were known to be representative or random, but simply because they coincided with the administrative mandate for conducting the surveys and allocating the livestock. That is not to say that no inventories of grassland condition have been conducted since the early 1980s. Indeed, there have been studies, each providing a snapshot of information gathered at the time. But such individual, time-specific studies can only describe what is found; they fail to provide any longitudinal data with which to compare the magnitude of changes over time, much less to relate those changes unambiguously to biophysical and anthropogenic causes. Without monitoring trends over time, interpreting conditions as being caused by grazing pressure is always liable to being confounded by bio-climatic differences among sites and weather-related differences among years. Four Case Studies of Grassland Condition Given the scarcity of reliable data with which to make generalizations, a brief look at the grassland/livestock dynamic at four of my study sites in pastoral western China is valuable, even if I, too, lack rigorous, quantitative data with which to make well-grounded conclusions. Each of these four study areas falls on a different point along the precipitation continuum that dominates western China (but all have similar elevations, which is

40

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helpful in removing an additional but uninteresting source of variation). The sites were visited over a number of years, and if my observations were biased, at least such biases were likely to have remained consistent throughout. Each area (summarized in Table 2.2) differed in history of use, degree of integration with the larger market economy, ethnic group involved with pastoralism, mixture of livestock species, and—at least according to my qualitative observations over the years—range condition and trend. From the wettest to the driest, the four study sites were the Baizha Forest in Nangqian County, Qinghai (at approximately 31° 45’ N and 96° 45’ E); Fifth Brigade (wu dui) in Gouli Township, Dulan County, toward the eastern (and thus wettest) portion of the Kunlun Mountains (at approximately 35° 30’ N and 98° 30’ E); Yeniugou in Golmud municipality, situated approximately 475 kilometers further west along the Kunlun chain (at approximately 35° 45’ N and 93° 30’ E); and Jianshe Township in Aksai County, Gansu, situated at the western end of the Qilian Mountains (at approximately 39° N and 95° 30’ E) (see Map 2). Because none had weather stations, I developed a regression equation using latitude and longitude (and which explained about three-fourths of variation in total annual precipitation recorded at thirty-seven weather stations in Qinghai, western Sichuan, eastern Tibet, western Gansu, and eastern Xinjiang) from which I interpolated approximate precipitation at the study areas.57 In all four cases, summer grazing occurred between approximately 3,800 and 4,500 meters (although elevations of winter grazing varied considerably more). These areas were not selected randomly and therefore cannot substitute for the many more areas never visited. Indeed, they most likely represent better-than-average grassland conditions, and I chose to investigate them specifically because they were known to be important areas for wildlife. More importantly, at only one site did my colleagues or I obtain standardized, quantitative measures of range condition (and even at that site, we did not sample from randomized plots); hence to some extent I run the risk, just as most Chinese surveys have, of inadvertently mixing subjective (and possibly biased) observations with objective ones. Readers are thus strongly cautioned to view these comparisons as approximate and subject to observer bias. That said, the patterns that emerge from this comparison appear robust to me, and also seem generally consistent with my brief observations of rangeland condition elsewhere, as well as the published literature. Baizha Forest At elevations below about 4,300 meters, where pastoralists spent most of their time, vegetation consisted of forests interspersed with grass and shrublands. North-facing slopes had a spruce overstory (mostly Picea likiangensis), and a shrub layer of Sibiraea angustata, S. laevigata, and willows (Salix spp.), as well as a variety of graminoids. South-facing slopes had an overstory of short (10 to 20 meters high) juniper (Sabina tibetica) at elevations 3,900–4,500 m, and open grassy slopes above. Pastoralists in 1988–90 were a “production team” (xiao shengchandui) of Khamspeaking Tibetans who were affiliated with a village and a few outlying encampments all connected by a religious bond to the Gar Monastery (of the Kargyupa sect).58 Nine

Sheep and yaks Long-term trend unknown, palatable species common, but evidence of loss of vegetative cover and increase of unpalatable species in places

Almost entirely subsistence

Mostly yaks; small commercial sheep herds

Stable, no evidence of change in either species composition or vigor; seedling and sapling trees present; local overgrazing near encampments and homes

Economy

Livestock

Range trend

Widespread loss of Stipa and other palatable grasses; losses of vegetative cover and plant vigor; widespread pedestaling and other signs of chronic overuse

Sheep and goats; some horses, camels

Sheep and goats Local areas of Stipa being replaced by unpalatable plants, evidence of reduced ground cover near newly settled summer and winter encampments

Almost entirely commercial

Contract herders

Mostly commercial

1. Estimates interpolated from equation: Precipitation = 274 + (Latitude * -47.38) + (Longitude*17.78), P = 0.001, r 2 = 0.77, using 37 weather stations from western China, ~ 1954–1993. 2. See text. 3. See text. 4. Demarcation of family-specific encampments began sometime between 1992 and 2002. As late as 1992, pasture was allocated informally by brigade leaders.

Mostly commercial

Adults

Family

Herding

Pastures controlled by individual families

Kazak/Han3

Mongol2

Family

Common-property pastures among related families

Land tenure

Semi-desert shrub; dry alpine grassland (Stipa) and alpine dwarf shrub (Ceratoides spp.)

Pastures controlled by individual families4

Amdo Tibetan

Kham Tibetan

Ethnic Group

125 mm

Stipa grasslands; cushionplant communities; alpine dwarf shrub; extensive wet Kobresia meadows

95° 30’

39°

Jianshe

243 mm

93° 30’

35° 45’

Yeniugou

Pastures controlled by individual families

Stipa grasslands; Kobresia meadows in wet/cool areas; Salix shrub communities on north-facing slopes

344 mm

98° 30’

35° 30’

Gouli

Pasture Characteristics Picea on north-facing slopes; Sabina forest on south-facing slopes; mixed shrub and mesic grasses

491 mm

96° 45’

Longitude

Precipitation

31° 45’

Latitude

1

Baizha Forest

Area

Attributes of the Four Areas Used as Case Studies

Table 2.2

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families (which had increased to twelve by the year 2004), most of whom were related by descent or marriage, managed yaks on commonly grazed pastures, as well as a small (less than 200) flock of sheep. All animals were owned by individual families and marked to allow identification. Wool was sheared and brought to market annually in the county seat of Nangqian, but other than the buying and selling of live animals, I observed no commercial use of yaks. Yaks were used for milk, for meat and hides, and for transport of camps (which were moved within an approximately five-kilometer radius every six to eight weeks). Each family had a permanent, if crude, winter home made of locally available wood, rock, and mud, which formed an accessible base even during summer and autumn grazing periods (when families lived in yak-hair tents). Families supplemented their income by collecting and selling the fungus Cordyceps sinensis (dongchong xiacao, used in Chinese medicine) during spring (although by 2004 family members involved in this trade were traveling more than fifty kilometers to other locations within Nangqian County on collecting expeditions). They supplemented their diet with parsnips grown locally, with barley purchased from Tibetan agriculturalists living a few hundred meters lower in elevation where it was grown, and with tea and vegetables purchased in the county town. Families typically donated most income above their subsistence needs to the monastery, and kept very little for purchases or savings. During my approximately six months spent in Baizha during the autumns of 1988–90, I gained a general understanding of the type and condition of forage species. When I returned in June 2004, the condition of vegetation appeared largely unchanged from that of the late 1980s. Trees and shrubs appeared to be in similar locations and densities to the earlier period. Grasses appeared to be grazed moderately heavily, but not beyond their capacity to absorb: they appeared similar in species composition, height, and vigor to what I had observed fifteen years before. The numbers of yaks, sheep, and horses were similar to those seen during the earlier period. (Fissioning from younger family members having offspring of their own had led to the establishment of new families and thus new livestock herds, but most pastoralists told me that they kept fewer yaks in 2004 than during the late 1980s, so the total number of yaks may not have changed much.) Although many old trees had been lost due to a combination of logging (which had now effectively been halted) and naturally occurring fires, some very old trees remained. Importantly, I noted regeneration of both juniper and spruce in appropriate locations. Grazing and trampling appeared to have reduced ground cover and led to species loss only in the immediate vicinity of permanent winter houses and temporary pastoral encampments. In sum, the grazing/grassland system appeared to have remained stable during a fifteen-year period. There was little evidence of “overgrazing,” and few places could objectively be labeled “degraded.”59 Fifth Brigade at Gouli In Gouli, Stipa grasslands begin to cover south-facing slopes at an elevation of about 4,000 m. By 2006, these palatable grasses had been removed near encampments, along

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frequently used livestock trails, and on particularly susceptible soils, either replaced by unpalatable plants (e.g., Saussarea, Thermopsis) or giving way to bare soil. On northfacing slopes, willows dominated, under which were various forbs little used by livestock. In cooler sub-valleys at slightly higher elevations, Stipa grasslands gave way to Kobresia meadows, and thence to cushion plant communities. Most Stipa grasslands appeared to be in good condition, but large patches of bare soil suggested that these clay-like soils cannot take very much trampling before they lose their ability to grow grass. Ceratoides spp., a highly palatable shrub important to both livestock and wildlife in autumn and winter, was rare, possibly reflecting a history of heavy winter grazing, use as supplementary winter fuel for heating and cooking by pastoralists, or both. I was unable to learn about the history of grazing in this area, but it is likely a long and relatively uninterrupted one of traditional Tibetan pastoralism (the Gouli Monastery located in this area has a history of almost 300 years).60 The portion of Fifth Brigade near my study site had nine encampments, each of which had approximately 500 sheep and 150 yaks. Yeniugou Vegetation in Yeniugou consisted predominately of graminoids and forbs; trees and shrubs were absent. In addition to the vegetative formations “Stipa purpurea grassland” and the “Kobresia pygmaea meadow” that had been described by Chinese botanists,61a “cushionplant” formation, intermediate in elevation between others, dominated by Astragalus spp., Oxytropis spp., Androsace spp., and Ceratoides compacta, characterized Yeniugou’s grasslands. The grass-dominated S. purpurea formation was characterized by elevations up to 4,500 m, vegetation height of 5 to 25 centimeters, and ground cover of 25 to 90 percent. Other important species in the S. purpurea formation included grasses (Festuca and Poa spp.), sedges (Carex spp.), and dicotyledons such as Potentilla bifurca. The sedgedominated K. pygmaea formation was characterized by elevations generally greater than 4,500 m, vegetation height of 3 to 6 centimeters, and 70 to 95 percent ground cover. Yeniugou was historically a transition zone between traditionally Mongol and Tibetan areas, with Mongols to the north of the river bisecting the valley and Tibetans to the south.62 Tibetans inhabiting Yeniugou were removed and their grazing rights revoked in the early 1950s.63 From 1953 through 1983 grazing rights belonged to a group of Kazaks who were based near Golmud, having arrived there during the 1930s seeking refuge from persecution by warlord Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang.64 Most Golmud-based Kazaks used Yeniugou only for summer pasture, but usually about ten of the forty families with grazing rights would remain year-round.65 In 1984, the area was officially handed over to a group of Mongol pastoralists when the majority of Kazaks moved back to Xinjiang.66 During 1991–2005, Yeniugou was primarily used by Mongol pastoralists based in Golmud. In summer 1992, I estimated a total of 17–18,000 domestic sheep, of which probably 3,000 were grazed within the area where we camped.67 A small number of cattle, horses, and camels also summered in the study area during the early 1990s, but most had been removed by 2002 (a few domestic yaks were present in Yeniugou during 1996–97, and again

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in 2005). Sometime between 1997 and 2002, a small number of Mongol pastoralists again began to live in Yeniugou year-round, building winter houses in the lower-elevation eastern portions of the valley, moving westward in summer to temporary (but increasingly fixed) higher-elevation pastures. With the changes from Tibetan through Kazak to Mongol use rights, and from yearround to mostly seasonal grazing, pastoralism in Yeniugou gradually became transformed from a subsistence to a commercial activity. Kazaks had herded as family units, but by the early 1990s children of Mongol herders were left to attend school at their wintering areas, and only adult family members traveled with their sheep herds. By 2002, contract herders were increasingly hired to supplement, or in some cases, replace herd owners. The traditional Mongol ger, commonly seen in the early 1990s, had become rare by 1997 and was replaced entirely by canvas tents in 2002 and brick houses by 2005; horses and camels had become increasingly replaced by tractors, motorcycles, and jeeps as means of transportation. Range allocation, which in the early 1990s had been informal and variable, with disputes adjudicated by the local team leader (duizhang), had by 2002 become fixed by the livestock bureau, and boundaries among adjacent pastures, although unfenced, were supposedly recognized and honored.68 During surveys in 1991, 1992, and 1997, my colleagues and I noticed evidence of overuse by livestock only in the immediate vicinity of encampments, betrayed by the presence of bare ground and increases of unpalatable species such as Thermopsis lanceolata at the expense of Stipa and other palatable grasses. As long as our observations were made more than a few hundred meters from the sites of previous encampments, grasses and sedges appeared to be thriving with little evidence of loss of vigor that could be attributed to livestock. In 2002 and 2005, however, after a few years of more concentrated livestock grazing within clearly delineated pastures, differences between grazed and ungrazed areas had become increasingly apparent. Particularly in lower-elevation Stipa-dominated valleys and benches, the vigor, height, and ground cover of Stipa had become noticeably reduced not merely in close proximity to encampment sites, but within a radius of 2 to 3 kilometers. The total number of pastoralists using Yeniugou had not increased, but those species most sensitive to grazing had begun declining, and portions of Yeniugou by 2002 seemed deserving of the description “degraded.” Jianshe The best rangeland and economic data of the four case studies came from Jianshe, not only because we prioritized collecting them, but because our Kazak colleagues possessed both scientific and cultural knowledge of the area.69 In addition, we had the advantage of being able to compare our results (mostly obtained during 1998–2000) directly with those obtained by the county-level range-allocation survey, which had been conducted during 1983–84.70 Professor Liu Rongtong of Gansu Agricultural University had previously identified grasslands within Jianshe as belonging to six different formations, and we used the same categories (but described them as we found them in the year 2000). “Mountain desert

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grasslands” were generally at elevations less than 3,600 meters and consisted primarily of the desert shrubs Sympegma regelii (Goosefoot family) and Reaumauria soogorica (Tamarix family), with very little grass. They functioned primarily as forage for domestic camels. The arid, relatively low-elevation “sandy slope shrub and grassland” formation was dominated by Oxytropis aciphylla, Leymus paboanus, and Stipa glareosa, and was used for sheep primarily in spring. “High, cold grasslands,” occurring mostly between 3,500 and 4,000 m, were dry to semi-moist alpine areas whose primary species were S. purpurea, Carex moorcroftii, and other grasses. At similar elevations were “high, cold meadows” characterized by salty soils, some semi-marshy areas, and some sand dunes. Primary species here were Carex spp. and the coarse grass Achnatherum splendens. The driest of all alpine formations, at elevations of 4,000 to 4,500 m, was the “high, cold desert grassland,” where primary species were Ceratoides compacta and Stipa glareosa. Finally, in areas subirrigated from adjacent or draining rivers, were “riverside, sandy, sand-shrub grasslands” dominated by Carex spp., Leymus paboanus, Stipa spp., and Kobresia spp. (but these subirrigated areas were small and uncommon, comprising only about 2 percent of Jianshe’s usable grasslands). Jianshe, at approximately 13,850 km2, has the largest area of Aksai County’s four townships, and like the rest of the county, was initially intended to serve as grazing grounds for another group of Kazaks who had fled Xinjiang during the same time-period as those who ultimately settled near Golmud.71 Initially populated almost entirely by refugee Kazaks pursuing subsistence pastoralism with their remnant sheep herds, Jianshe was unusual in having been the destination for a number of Han economic migrants (mostly from Wuwei in the Gansu corridor) beginning in about 1962. These immigrants took up subsistence (and later, commercial) livestock production, lived a nomadic existence just as the Kazaks did, and some even learned to speak Kazak. After dissolution of the communes in 1983, occasional Han immigration continued (often via connections of friends or family who had previously obtained livestock herds and taken up pastoralism72), so that by the time of the 1992 census, Han outnumbered Kazaks not only in Aksai County as a whole (which included the county town and thus logically attracted Han with commercial, technical, or bureaucratic skills), but also within entirely pastoral Jianshe Township. At the same time, limited emigration of Kazaks was permitted to newly independent Kazakhstan (which welcomed the Kazak diaspora), further tilting the ethnic balance of Jianshe toward Han. By 1997, only 16 out of approximately 100 livestock herds were owned by Kazak families, and of those, only 9 were managed daily by Kazaks. The majority of herd owners lived full time in Aksai’s county town,73 some 200–300 kilometers by road (depending on grazing season) from their herds. Almost all daily management was conducted by short-term contracted herders, most often Han or Hui agriculturalists from further east in Gansu or Qinghai. Most herders were young and inexperienced in livestock matters. Herd owners typically remained with their herds and provided technical assistance to their employees only during the spring lambing period and when commercial traders (most from Xinjiang) arrived in autumn to purchase animals. In addition to salary, most herd-

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ers were allowed to butcher a quota of sheep for their own use, but otherwise, livestock herds were entirely commercial in nature. Beginning in 1983, all pastoral families were allotted specific seasonal pastures. Seasonal range allocations were fixed and could not be expanded; the underlying theory was that pastoralists plying the open market, faced with a finite grassland resource, would have incentive to limit their herd size. Spring pastures were the most rigidly territorial and easiest to identify (because each family also received subsidies to build a lambing structure). Summer pastures (to which migration was required by regulation between July 15 and 25) were least rigidly defended, as most pastoralists agreed that there was ample summer forage (and thus most flexibility in the exact location of summer encampments). Autumn pastures were also somewhat informal, and most herds stayed in them for a relatively short time, as they moved toward winter pastures. Winter encampments were fixed, but township-administered common “emergency” areas could be used if snows were too deep. Distances between summer and winter pastures varied from as little as 20 kilometers to over 100 kilometers. Despite the fact that, according to official statistics, livestock numbers had actually declined from their mid-1970s peak and that the number of livestock was similar to its projected carrying capacity, most of Jianshe’s rangelands in August 2000 were in poor condition and their long-term trend appeared downward. Based on seventeen criteria of soil/site stability,74 the “health ratings” of seventy-two plots provided cause for concern: 30 percent were categorized as “unhealthy,” 49 percent as “at risk,” and only 21 percent as “healthy.” Admittedly, our one-time survey in such a variable climate risked conflating yearly factors with long-term trends. But it happened that the year 2000 was, by unanimous opinion of both local herders and government officials, a relatively wet year. Thus if anything, we quantified Jianshe’s vegetation at its best. In five of the six vegetation formations, our numeric estimates of standing biomass were lower than those that had been found in the early 1980s, and our estimates of dry-weight biomass overall were 16 percent lower than estimates by the county team in the 1980s. During 1983–84, the county team described Stipa, Festuca, and Poa grasses as often forming a “luxuriant grass carpet” underneath the tops of the current year’s growth. This suggested both a density of ground cover and the amount of litter from earlier years that we rarely encountered during our survey. Even at the time of the 1983–84 survey, the county survey team had described a general reduction in height of most grass species with increased grazing pressure, a gradual reduction in the presence of preferred forage species, and a 10 to 40 percent reduction in overall vegetation cover, a 10 to 30 percent reduction in vegetation density, and a 20 to 30 percent reduction in gross weight of domestic sheep relative to the 1950s. In addition to these quantitative measurements, qualitative observations suggested rangelands in trouble. We observed large expanses of unpalatable Achnertherum splendens at lower elevations and of Thermopsis lanceolata at high elevations, usually indications of heavy livestock grazing. We noted a general absence of previous years’ vegetative litter (except where we knew grazing had, for one reason or another, been temporarily suspended), encroachment of sand dunes, loss of soil, and a larger proportion of dead and dying plants than seemed consistent with stability. Herders, while generally not admitting

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to overgrazing, acknowledged that woody shrubs they used for fuel (e.g., Ceratoides and Potentilla spp.) had become noticeably scarcer within recent memory. Further, government officials who had lived their entire lives in the area were unanimous in their opinion that grassland health generally had deteriorated substantially compared with its condition in their youth. They described specific reduction in plant height, the presence of shrub species that were by 2000 gone entirely (e.g., Sabina, Tamarix, Salix spp.), and the contraction or complete drying of natural springs that had historically been used by livestock. Clearly, Jianshe represents the extreme among pastoral areas I have examined: it comes by its fragility naturally, and neither traditional cultures nor market-driven forces can be blamed for its lack of resilience. As well, my colleagues and I remain unclear as to exactly when, and under what circumstances, the negative trends we documented began to emerge.75 Livestock statistics have always been untrustworthy, and we were never able to understand precisely how, and with what intensity, livestock were managed during the commune period. Vegetative communities may exhibit a lag in response to stress, so we cannot state with certainty whether the livestock practices operational during 1997–2003 were the root of the problem, or, conversely, may have actually been improving upon an already bad situation, the pastoralists of Jianshe perhaps having been bequeathed a legacy of already seriously compromised range health by previous management schemes. But there was little doubt that rangelands in Jianshe were highly stressed by livestock grazing. In summary, these four case studies appear to capture a range of grassland conditions, from stable and healthy to declining and degraded. Baizha, where range conditions seemed best, evidently benefited from both the mildest climate and the absence of a commercial market for livestock products; instead, the traditional subsistence economy still held sway.76 Jianshe, where range conditions seemed worst, had both the driest climate and the most commoditized economy; few herders had traditional knowledge, and none had a long history of connection with the area. The other two areas, Gouli and Yeniugou, appeared to occupy intermediate positions along the same continua. GRAZING PRESSURE AND LOCAL LIVELIHOODS It seems clear that, in much of China’s west, livestock density is too high to allow for stability of plant species sensitive to grazing, and thus has led to increasing cover of less palatable and poisonous species, and, in the extreme, to a decline in vegetative cover of any sort. In these areas, most wildlife species have land but not habitat; they have space but neither food nor cover. Beyond grazing pressure, other activities have taken their toll that are more local in scope but also more injurious to vegetation and soil, and their intensity is likely closely correlated with both human population density and economic activity. (In particular, there are the traditional practices of cutting the turf layer to produce material for corrals, small structures, or for lining the inside of tents, and also removing woody plants for fuel and digging for medicinal plants.77) It is no surprise that in such areas, native fauna is stressed. In other areas, however, livestock grazing has not yet led to “degradation,” nor is it

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necessarily on that trajectory. This is either because the underlying vegetative productivity and resilience supports heavy grazing without undergoing directional change, because residual cultural factors act to prevent the buildup of herds past the level at which vegetation can tolerate them, or some combination of the two. In these latter areas, the presence of pastoralists has not necessarily been anathema to conservation of biodiversity (although even here, lands are not pristine, and compromises to both livelihoods and wildlife abundance are inevitable). There appear to be two philosophical camps from which opinions arise on the extent of grassland degradation in western China, the root causes of any such degradation, and proposed solutions.78 Most Chinese literature focuses on the poor condition of grasslands, and if not appealing to heaven’s wrath in the form of lower precipitation, blames overgrazing as arising from irrational, unscientific, and ill-informed traditional pastoral systems. Proposed solutions are almost inevitably technological, and when sociological factors are invoked, quasi-privatization and sedentarization is usually suggested as a corrective to the perceived lack of incentives to limit grazing intensity under traditional systems.79 In contrast, most of the Western literature focuses on the purported wisdom of traditionally mobile pastoral systems, and either denies that grazing pressures are currently too high to support sustainable livestock production and stable grassland communities, or, if admitting to current grazing problems, blames them on the loss of that traditional wisdom at the hands of ill-informed Han Chinese.80 The current Chinese view of western grasslands is almost entirely a naïve adoption of Garret Hardin’s nostrum that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Both in underappreciating common-property systems that characterized pre-liberation pastoralism (and worked, directly or indirectly, to regulate livestock pressure and mitigate rangeland damage) and in opting for a private-property-mimicking solution (allocation and fencing of individual-household pastures), Chinese policy has implicitly applied a Western “ranching” model to pastoralists. To its credit, the Chinese policy known as the “set of four” (si pei tao) seems intended to both reduce poverty among nomads and reduce high stocking rates where per capita livestock productivity is negatively affected by poor range conditions.81 As well, fencing and houses do not necessarily mean the complete absence of migration or flexibility; most Chinese sedentarization efforts are focused on winter pastures, while summer pastures often remain fluid and unfenced.82 Chinese rangeland policy is not necessarily guilty of a fundamental conceptual error when it attempts to apply the largely successful household responsibility system to pastoralists. In theory, a tight linkage at the household level of responsibility and husbandry for land, on the one hand, with capture of benefits and acceptance of losses on the other, should provide incentives for sustainable grazing. In providing pastoralists an equitable but finite and immutable land base, the implicit assumption of Chinese policy—that individual families will discover their own best interest to be in limiting livestock numbers—is a reasonable first approximation. The rub is that, even at its best, a quasi-privatized ranch model would encounter practical difficulties in the harsh and remote conditions typical of China’s western rangelands.83 Because yearly range capacity varies greatly, sedentary pastoralists need to adopt either a

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climate-tracking strategy (in which herd sizes are constantly modulated to the prevailing conditions), or a risk-minimizing low-stocking approach (in which stock is kept below the long-term capacity to avoid causing damage during poor years). But both transportation access and market mechanisms are far from being sufficiently developed to allow pastoralists to adopt the first strategy: it simply is not possible to increase or decrease herd sizes with the nimbleness that would be required to track yearly variation. And few pastoralists would willingly adopt the low-stocking strategy when, as newly empowered actors in a market setting, they encounter alternative (and more easily fungible) ways to store wealth than in grass. In addition, the livestock–grassland interaction appears to be characterized by a substantial time lag: even with the best of intentions, a pastoralist is unlikely to realize he has exceeded the regenerative capability of his pasture until he has already done so for a few years. And the response of his pasture to lowered livestock density may not occur quickly or, indeed, at all: rather than existing only along a linear gradient ending at an ungrazed climax, grasslands may exist in a multitude of stable states, and poor management during a previous era could doom later pastoralists to living within a degraded system regardless of their own decisions. Further, the Chinese attempt to encourage sustainability through an individual-family ranching model is compromised by other aspects of policy that act to weaken the very clarity of property rights that the household responsibility system attempts to build. Privatization seeks to forge a tighter link between responsibility for the resource and accrual of benefits, but this linkage is continually sabotaged by the remnants of “the big iron rice bowl” (da tiefanwan) mentality, in which paternalistic government, if not welcomed or trusted, is still seen as a reliable last resort to rescue individual entrepreneurs who have made bad decisions.84 More directly, the security of usufruct rights is constantly under siege—even when legally protected—by an intrusive and meddlesome government that always retains the power to revoke grazing rights, or change overall policy without consultation.85 Conservative husbandry of grasslands under a private-property-mimicking system seems likely if the feedback loop between grassland health and the ability to generate wealth is a strong and direct one. However, it appears that the feedback loop is loose, flexible, and characterized by considerable time-lags. At least under conditions in which government regulators do not enforce theoretically existing herd limits (true in all places I have visited), the pastoralist can always temporarily compensate for reduced yield per animal by increasing herd size. Replacement of palatable by unpalatable plant species, or nutritious grasses with poisonous forbs, is not a process that occurs overnight, or even within a few years. Pastoralists appear to be capable of improving their livelihoods temporarily while degrading the capital on which their yearly income is based. Such near-sighted behavior hardly seems unique to the western Chinese pastoralist; it takes little imagination to produce analogues in other cultures and economies. Faced with a desire to raise the funds necessary to send his daughter to school in the county town a few hours away (a move that may require increasing yearly livestock sales, herd size, and thus a gradual diminution of grassland productivity), it is not necessarily an environmentally irresponsible pastoralist who opts for school over lighter grazing.

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Given a new opportunity to spend his evenings comfortably watching satellite-fed and solar-powered television, a pastoralist does not require greed or stupidity to overgraze his lands in order to reap a short-term economic windfall.86 The linkage between long-term grassland health and individual pastoralist income is also strengthened to the degree that the pastoralist’s land tenure is assured, and weakened to the degree that his land tenure is uncertain. To be sure, legal documents presently give pastoralists fifty-year contracts,87 and there is currently little reason to suspect that all lands will suddenly be yanked away from them in year fifty-one. The nationwide march away from the communes and toward “market-based socialism” seems irreversible; pastoralists have some reason to look out upon their grazing allotments and consider them their own. But it seems far from certain that such a mindset truly holds sway in pastoral China. In the “mostly market economy” of pastoral China, decisions about how many animals to keep and how many to sell are the province of individual pastoralists. Few pastoralists use computers to chart out their expected growth and yield, and most probably make decisions based on their accumulated experience. Just as voters in a democracy often vote against their own best interests, pastoralists may well decide how to manage their herds based on an intangible sense of risk, so that the psychology of land tenure becomes more important than its legalities. Most pastoralists are aware that their contracts run for fifty years, but they may also place that awareness in the context of the past century’s turbulent history of governmental changes. Pastoralists are considered individual capitalists, but they are cognizant that they do not own the land. They are individual entrepreneurs, but often are bound by township- or county-level regulations on when they must move among seasonal pastures, or when they must visit government-operated veterinary stations. They make their own decisions about herd size and composition, but are aware that government programs initiated in Beijing usually have county-level quotas, and even if programs are nominally voluntary, county-level staffs feel pressure to meet current quotas. If an insufficient number of volunteers come forward, county-level staffs use “education” or “persuasion” to enroll others. And with the recent push to expand nature reserves (examined in more depth in Chapter 6), there lurks an ever-present potential that one’s long-term contract can be put at risk. If Chinese policy errs in assuming that pastoralists can quickly adopt a household ranch model without further degrading rangelands or incurring debt they cannot possibly repay, some Western critics err in assuming that traditional pastoralists wish to retain the rigors of a subsistence lifestyle. These critics have eulogized traditional herding systems, encouraging their retention even in the face of increased human population size, a decrease in absolute area available for pastoralism (due in part to conversion for crops),88 and the ever-increasing reach of the market economy. Incentives to limit livestock herd size that work in the context of a subsistence economy may simply be ineffectual when pastoralists are presented with other choices about how to store their wealth. The consequences of naturally occurring regulating mechanisms such as blizzards and droughts may no longer be acceptable to pastoralists who may wish to see their children educated, their medical needs attended to, and greater creature comforts than a single solar-powered

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light bulb in their tent. The Chinese might be wrong in assuming that everybody wants the same thing, but I have yet to encounter a pastoralist who did not prefer the coziness of his brick or adobe winter home to a drafty tent or windowless yurt.89 Even fencing, which is universally condemned by Western-based analysts of recent Chinese initiatives, is often viewed with genuine appreciation by many pastoralists if they are otherwise prevented from safeguarding their own emergency pastures, or find it burdensome to allow for pasture fallow when needed. Mobility and flexibility were no doubt important components in facilitating stable livestock–grassland dynamics in a pre-modern, subsistence economy, and Western critics are right to point to the risks of poorly considered sedentarization. But such critics also need to consider that many pastoralists also wish to reduce some of the burdens associated with nomadism: it may be as arrogant to condemn these pastoralists to a future filled with these hardships as it is to impose upon them a radically different life. In addition to limitations imposed by nature, culture, and the land tenure system, my view is that the fundamental economic system in place is a critical, if often overlooked, component. The likelihood that any given area is subject to declining range trends is a function of moisture regime, soil quality, human population density, and—most importantly of all—degree of integration with the market economy. In the extreme case, where climate is arid, soils are saline or otherwise not conducive to plant growth, human populations have increased (due either to local demographics or in-migration), and pastoralists produce livestock solely in order to convert them into cash for purchasing other products, the probability of finding a downward spiral of grassland health is high. At the other extreme, where climates are relatively mesic, soils not heavily saline, population density not dramatically increased from historic levels, and pastoralists produce livestock primarily for domestic use, the probability of finding this downward spiral of grassland health is low (see Figure 2.8). This conceptual model neither requires nor prohibits any particular system of land tenure. Anthropologist Tony Banks (among others) has argued that informal, commonproperty arrangements have provided pastoral Kazaks in Xinjiang with numerous economic and social advantages, but he has not shown that such arrangements necessarily prevent range degradation.90 The Chinese Grassland Law (as well as many other governmental initiatives) is largely an attempt to strengthen individual land tenure, and thus the linkage between husbandry and benefits.91 The ardor with which these reforms are touted does make it sometimes seem, as some commentators have remarked, that Chinese policy views privatization as a panacea for grasslands currently used unsustainably.92 But pastures in Jianshe (and elsewhere93), whether damaged by earlier policies or not, are at the least not being rehabilitated (and are probably being worsened) despite reasonably clear individual-family land tenure. Private-property mimicking does not appear capable, by itself, of coping with the competing imperatives of modernization in such a harsh environment. But of course, total government control, as occurred during the collective era, has hardly been exonerated as a contributor to range degradation, based on its recent record.94 Thus, “mutual coercion, mutually agreed,” to use Hardin’s phrase,95 does not necessarily prevent range degradation either.

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Figure 2.8

A conceptual diagram of the relationships among mean precipitation during the growing season (or vegetation productivity), integration with the market economy (as opposed to a subsistence economy), and likelihood of chronic rangeland degradation. This simple model makes no distinction among various possible land-tenure arrangements, but assumes that they are internally consistent and that tenure arrangements are clear and acceptable.

High

Intermediate

Wea

k Stro De g ng ree with of i mar ntera c ket eco tion nom y

Low

h Hig Pre

Most likely

Likelihood of chronic overgrazing / degradation

Low

Least likely

on ati t i cip

Rather than any particular land tenure regime being key to pastoral sustainability, it seems critical that whatever land tenure system in place be internally consistent and predictable (see Figure 2.9). There is no contradiction between holding, on the one hand, that traditional systems were adaptive, appropriate, and sustainable, and on the other, that modifications to fit twenty-first-century life are needed. That does not necessarily mean that the only, or even the best, reform is to abandon mobility entirely and, as Chinese policy intends, to replace subsistence with a commercial ranching model. The crucial change that has occurred in recent decades in western grasslands has been the evolution from a subsistence-based economy to a market-based one. To be sure, feedback loops discouraging overgrazing exist in both economies. However, under a subsistence economy, the pastoralist’s incentive is entirely in keeping his herd and grasslands healthy because he has essentially no other way to accumulate wealth or value. Under a marketbased system, the pastoralist’s priority to keep his livestock and grasslands healthy competes with imperatives to generate money (e.g., to support education for family members, purchase items for leisure time). He can afford to allow his grasslands to deteriorate—at least for some time—if he compensates by increasing his wealth in other ways.

CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

Figure 2.9

53

A conceptual diagram of the relationships among mean precipitation during the growing season (or vegetation productivity), clarity of whatever land tenure system is in place, and likelihood of chronic rangeland degradation. This simple model makes no assumption about the type of economy prevailing in the area, but regardless of whether it is primarily subsistence, market-based, or some intermediate, takes it as a constant.

High

Intermediate

Stro

ng Wea Cla k ten rity an u re d sys stab tem ility of l and

L ow

h Hig

Most likely

Likelihood of chronic overgrazing / degradation

Low

Least likely

on ati t i p ci Pre

In summary then, current land tenure policy uses an awkward mixture of reliance on market forces on the one hand, and command-control regulation on the other. The basic model states that herders are supposed to be guided by market forces; indeed, the ecological-economic rationale for the “set of four” program is that it increases the individual responsibility–benefit loop by more clearly demarcating and enhancing the value of each individual’s “property.” Carrying-capacity limits exist on paper only and are not enforced; thus, stocking levels are also determined solely by the herder on the basis of his own economic calculations. But existing side-by-side with this are government programs that (1) subsidize sedentarization and production of supplemental fodder; (2) govern the proportion of herds kept in sheep, goats, and yaks (and in some localities, promote specific breeds of livestock); (3) encourage specific models of production; (4) mandate the timing of seasonal herd movements; and (5) in extreme cases, remove pastoralists entirely in exchange for a subsidized town life. Thus, the sense of personal responsibility that underlies the ability of the contract systems and “set of four” to work toward grassland restoration may still be weak among western Chinese pastoralists. By initiating a continuous stream of new

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programs, many of which undercut the tenure and assurance needed for a long-term view of grassland health, the government undermines the constancy and assurance underlying the responsibility system despite its purported efforts to support it. THE GREAT OPENING OF CHINA’S WEST As dramatic as changes in western China have been since 1949, the immediate future promises yet more transformation. When Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms in the late 1970s that were to unleash the fastest sustained rate of economic growth the modern world had ever witnessed,96 he was clear that coastal, eastern regions of the country would reap the benefits first, and that only later would attention be turned to China’s remote regions.97 From the uniformly modest developmental levels of the 1970s, China had, within less than two decades, morphed into a country of contrasts, with developed eastern regions increasingly distancing themselves from the generally-still-povertystricken west. By the late 1990s, China’s leadership had decided it was time to redirect a portion of national resources into equitability, even if it cost some resources that might otherwise be poured into the furiously growing coastal areas. Following various speeches and pronouncements emphasizing the importance of developing China’s western regions by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, the Great Opening of the West was formally announced in September of 1999 at the Fourth Plenum of the Fifteenth Central Committee Meeting of the Chinese Communist Party. Aimed at variously defined provinces and autonomous regions of the “west,”98 its announced goals were to equalize economic inequities between west and east by focusing investment and infrastructure development in the west, to enhance national defense (presumably by extending more stable control to the western border regions of the country), and to “safeguard ethnic unity” by lifting up the economic level of the west’s minorities99 (or, as critics would interpret it, by extending Han control of minority areas and furthering assimilation of ethnic cultures100). In April of 2000, the State Development Planning Commission announced that ten “large projects” would herald the beginning of the Great Opening of the West, of which nine were largely infrastructure development and one largely environmental remediation.101 The Great Opening of the West (GOW hereafter) has been translated from its official Chinese terminology (xibu da kaifa) a number of ways, the chosen language usually reflecting the translator’s underlying attitude toward the policy. Press releases in English for Xinhua and articles appearing in China Daily invariably use either “Western Development Strategy” or “Western Region Development,” but foreign observers have dubbed it the “Open Up the West Campaign,” the “Go West Campaign,” or even the “Great Leap West.”102 If the last of these is unfairly derogatory in its obvious allusion to the Great Leap Forward, the official Chinese name renders this comparison apropos by specifically including the adjective “great” (da), which inevitably harkens back to both the Great Leap and Great Cultural Revolution. And if the term “Open Up” conjures a different image than does “Development,” again Chinese officials have had a role: the word kaifa implies exploiting and opening, and somewhere a decision was clearly made to use it in

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preference to fazhan, the standard translation for “develop” when referring to countries that have done it (or are still trying).103 No government-issued documents on the GOW are complete without reference to either “environmental stability” or “ecological construction.”104 If only by their words (and perhaps by a great deal more), Chinese leaders have clearly awakened to the interest in matters environmental. Whereas environmental initiatives in the eastern, more populous parts of the country focus on preventing or cleaning up pollution, the major governmentsponsored environmental initiatives in the west have dealt directly with land use, and thus are relevant to our concern about wildlife. The contest over terminology has also been played out in the variety of seemingly conflicting objectives for the GOW: developing yet conserving, exploiting yet protecting, enriching while paying heed to natural constraints, concern for the well-being of western environment via prioritizing the downstream (or downwind) effects of environment degradation for the developed east. Clearly, appropriation of mineral resources has been a high priority105and the most obvious manifestation of the policy thus far—improved transportation infrastructure—appears designed to facilitate more efficient mining. At the same time, proclamations about the GOW are full of statements about the need to safeguard and even “improve” the region’s fragile environment. Up until about 2003, such initiatives were limited to active environmental remediation via planting trees on steep slopes that had at one time been forested but more recently ploughed and converted to croplands (“croplands to forests”), and grass where native rangelands had been converted to crops (“croplands to grasslands”). These twin tuigeng initiatives106 were designed to take advantage of China’s relatively plush budget at the time (allowing the central government to provide direct subsidies to farmers who retired cultivated land and thus lost that income-earning potential) and grain surplus107 (allowing in-kind subsidy of grain to farmers who would otherwise subsist on grain produced from fallowed land). In replacing agricultural crops with grasses, the “croplands to grasslands” tenet is to admit that it was never appropriate to attempt Han-style agriculture in the thin soils, arid climates, and high elevations of the west. It tacitly provides preeminence to pastoralism and admonishes those who, with Mao or even before him, asserted that natural limits could always be overcome. In political and economic terms, it forms a kind of income transfer, taking advantage of available funds and surplus grain from the east to compensate western farmers now asked to grow a plant they cannot eat. As of 2006, questions remained about the future of the twin programs designed to restore cultivated lands to less destructive uses.108 Nationally, reductions in agricultural lands were expected to reduce grain production by only about 2 to 3 percent, but because of transportation inequities, individual counties were expected to have difficulty remaining self-sufficient in grain.109 Rumors swirled that the grain surplus that formed part of the subsidy had already been exhausted (or perhaps had never even existed to begin with). Others claimed that with the retirement of former premier Zhu Rongji, enthusiasm for the program at top levels in Beijing had waned, and that the government led by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao was simply less interested. In any case, both of the tuigeng programs had, by 2004, been cut back to about one-fourth of their originally intended scales.

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More specifically, many pastoralists had been planting non-native grass either because seed was cheaper, more readily available, or because initial growth was faster.110 There were no proscriptions on using non-native grasses, and participants obtained the same compensation whether they used native or non-native species. At best, however, nonnative vegetation will fail in the long-term if it is intolerant of the climatic and edaphic conditions where it is planted. At worst, non-natives will thrive, potentially out-competing native species and thus replacing site-specific problems of soil erosion and wasteful water use with widespread problems of weed infestation. The central government also funded the “crops to grassland” program for only seven years, leaving uncertain the long-term economics of allotments participating in the program. Presumably, newly sown grass on former crop lands would be used primarily as fodder hay, or perhaps at some future time for grazing. But if the direct compensation and supplemental grain for these lands were to cease, would such lands earn as much income producing fodder as they formerly did growing rape seed or barley? If not, would participants simply accept their loss of income, or would they instead plow these fields back into crops (in hopes of either reestablishing their lost income base, or forcing the government to start a new program)? Further, China’s pastoral regions had, by 2004, gradually come under the influence of a different set of programs, intended not merely to restore lands unwisely put to the plow, but to alter the structure of the livestock industry entirely. These programs, known as “retire livestock, restore grasslands” (tuimu huancao) were—depending on one’s viewpoint—either far-sighted initiatives to restore grassland health and biodiversity, or misguided attempts to eliminate pastoral nomadism entirely. According to government Web sites, large numbers of livestock and their owners were being removed from fragile grasslands, and substantial budget allocations were being made to subsidize pastoralists’ transition to a settled life in township centers.111 In contrast to the “crops to grassland” program, the “retire livestock, restore grasslands” programs clearly abandoned any pretense of balancing the competing interests of local pastoralists and native biodiversity, siding squarely with the latter. Although it is true that native vegetation has evolved in the presence of large herbivores, and indeed may actually require grazing by them, it seems likely that if other human disturbance can be minimized, native herbivores will return to fill that niche, later if not sooner. Purely from the standpoint of wild yaks, wild ass, argali, gazelles, and deer, rendering large swaths of western China’s grasslands free of domestic livestock sounds ideal. But could such a program actually succeed, and if so, at what human cost? Removing livestock from specified grasslands is technically easy, but forms just an iceberg’s tip of cultural, economic, and political complexity. For without livestock, pastoralists, regardless of how well provisioned they are with cash and housing, would be left without livelihood or identity. Would the small towns dotted throughout China’s pastoral west be prepared to deal with the social dislocation caused by uprooted families, most of whom were ill prepared to engage in any life outside of pastoralism? Would families with strong cultural ties to their former way of life accept these changes, even if compensated, even if coerced, or would they resist and thereby risk the very social stability that formed the ultimate goal

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of macro-level national policy? Acknowledging that large-scale, government-sponsored human migration is much more easily accepted in China than in the West, even China had not yet engaged in population transfers in which the migrants were tasked not only with changing their home but also with changing their fundamental lifestyle and culture. Was this a realistic proposition? Thus, as pastoralists entered the twenty-first century, they encountered rival programs, some of which encouraged household responsibility via settling down into permanent houses and investing in long-term improvements such as winter fodder and fencing, while others weakened certainty over property rights by forcing herders off their traditional lands entirely (and subsidizing their hoped-for transition to settled life in towns). Grazing contracts under the 1985 Grassland Law have continually been lengthened in an attempt to bolster confidence and security in land tenure (as of 2004, the term of most contracts was fifty years), but one can sympathize with the uncertainty a pastoralist must feel when, encouraged by one policy to invest and sacrifice on the basis of long-term benefit, he sees a neighbor torn from his land and resettled in a town, his livelihood and lifestyle unceremoniously altered by government fiat. Both programs may be intended to protect grasslands from overuse and to bring some modernity to pastoralists, but the arrows of the underlying incentive systems point in opposite directions, and thus the programs tend to undercut each other. By 2006, one did not need be a foreigner to feel confused about the future trajectory of China’s western grasslands. Uncertainty ruled the day.

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3

THE CHINESE PERCEPTION OF WILDLIFE

Current trends in the utilization of wildlife in China continue a tradition of satisfying material needs for meat, apparel, and medicinal and other products. . . . Decisions about conserving or protecting animals are therefore based largely upon utilitarian premises. —C.E. Greer and R.W. Doughty

One crisp autumn morning in 1989, I found myself riding in the back of a rickety old truck in southern Qinghai’s Nangqian County, huddled together with about a dozen Tibetans against the November morning chill. We were headed to the local Buddhist monastery where a week-long celebration was in progress, marking the recent construction of a new sanctuary on the monastery grounds. Some of the Tibetans were local pastoralists and their families, others were employed as forest guards. That day all were there as pilgrims, en route to pay their respects to their highly revered incarnate lama and to dedicate this newest testament to their reemerging religion. Sitting up front with the driver was my Chinese host, a zoologist with a wealth of experience on the Tibetan Plateau. As I scanned the steep slopes rising from the road for signs of musk deer or blue sheep, I suddenly noticed, up-slope from the road, a pair of wolves. They had evidently not heard the truck coming and were quite close. Upon seeing the truck, the wolves immediately took flight, but not before doors opened, men shouted, pistols and rifles emerged from beneath robes and shawls, the truck lurched to a halt, and armed pilgrims strained to get shots off at them. The bucolic scene was suddenly transformed into one of pandemonium: I scrambled down onto the truck’s wooden floor to avoid being inadvertently shot amid the chaos. The wolves were too quick that day. They escaped unharmed, and we continued on to our destination where several hundred other Tibetans had gathered from their far-flung tent camps in celebration. But later I had occasion to discuss the incident with my zoologist host, and the lesson I took from that discussion made a larger impression than the incident itself. I began our conversation by noting that my host had seemed interested in helping the Tibetans kill the wolves. “Yes, I would have taken a shot too, if I’d had a gun,” he said. Considering myself far from naive about attitudes toward wolves in a livestock-growing area, I responded. “Yes, I can see how the Tibetans would generally be ill-disposed toward wolves, given the danger wolves obviously pose to their livelihood. So it would have been a neighborly 58

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gesture of you to help them out in this instance.” To this, the zoologist responded, “Oh, it has nothing to do with helping the Tibetans. I’d kill a wolf anytime I had the opportunity. Wolves are bad animals.” Negative attitudes toward wolves are hardly noteworthy; indeed, they form the majority opinion almost wherever and whenever wolves and humans interact.1 Tolerant, much less positive, attitudes toward wolves are recent, primarily Western phenomena. Yet finding the notion of indigenous fauna categorized as “good” and “bad” in the year 1989, by an experienced and respected zoologist, one who had devoted over two decades to studying and conserving the mammals of the region, who spoke English and had participated in training sessions in the United States, in short, who—in Western culture—would likely be among the most progressive in his attitudes toward nature, cast a bright light on the complex but critical role played by attitudes and values in underpinning Chinese wildlife conservation.2 In this little incident lay a lesson for those who would try to understand the complexities of conservation in ever-contradictory China. LANGUAGE A good way to start is to look at the words used to describe or portray wildlife. Within the Chinese language are suggestions that, traditionally, wildlife and wilderness have been viewed negatively. The word yeshengdongwu, “wildlife,” currently carries no great emotional baggage. However, it is suggestive that the adjective ye (“wild”) also occurs in such derogatory terms as yexing (“unruliness”) and yexin (“ambition,” in the sense of “overweening” rather than “noble ambition”). Similarly, the word used for “wilderness,” huangdi, is equally accurately translated as “wasteland,” or “place of desolation.” Of course, Chinese culture is hardly unique here. Environmental historian Roderick Nash has discussed at length how the traditionally Western values of wildlife and wilderness also were predominately negative.3 He summarizes, “If paradise was early [Western] man’s greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode, was his greatest evil.”4 Indeed, the Chinese language is considerably older and more resistant to change than European languages, so one would not be surprised to find ancient concepts embodied in current usage. Still, the specific words used, both in formal documents and in local speech, often betray deeper values, and to the extent that one can legitimately infer the latter from the former, most of the contemporary Chinese lexicon continues to suggest a hostility to the wildness inherent in wildlife and its natural habitat that is simply absent from modern English. While a Westerner might punish a child for acting too “wild,” the word is not uniformly or inevitably derogatory: the same parent, at least if raised during the 1960s or 1970s, might laughingly describe a fascinating, perhaps unique, but generally enjoyable experience as “wild.” I know of no context in which ye is used in Chinese in a remotely analogous way. And while a Westerner might well characterize the natural environment of western China, with its scorched deserts and towering mountains, as being “harsh” or even “unforgiving,” it is difficult to imagine employing English vocabulary that casts these lands as somehow inherently unhealthy or morally inferior. Yet an adjective used to describe northwestern China’s natural environment

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often seen in government-sponsored writing regarding its development is “e lie,” which in other contexts is translated as “evil,” “odious,” or “disgusting.”5 Such vocabulary appears to betray a focus on intensive agriculture as practiced in temperate eastern China as being right or normal, and grasslands, deserts, or forests as being wasteful or even sinful, rather than as simply the local geographic realities.6 Utilitarianism Although there have been no scholarly studies of contemporary Chinese attitudes toward wildlife,7 a broad view of the literature and of language used in Chinese publications suggests that they are predominately “utilitarian” and secondarily “dominionistic” and “aesthetic,” to use the formulation of Stephen Kellert, a leading scholar of attitudes toward nature. Simply put, most Chinese traditionally view wildlife in terms of its impact on human life and livelihood, and secondarily as an object of beauty—but only when under the control of man. Others have already noted the predominance of the utilitarian view of wildlife among most Chinese. Writers in English have generally been explicit about this, with Chinese less so. For example, Shen and colleagues noted that while “conservation figures importantly in the national development plan . . . in practice it is being promoted for utilitarian reasons,” and later, “China’s cultural heritage values wildlife . . . but the people have always adopted a utilitarian attitude.”8 Additional indications of the depth and breadth that the utilitarian view of wildlife holds in the Chinese mind come from reading works in Chinese, including those not directly related to the issue of wildlife values. Almost invariably, when rationalizing research on one of China’s many zhengui (“precious and valuable”) species, the words weile baohu (“in order to protect”) are followed immediately by yu heli liyong (“and rationally use”).9 Wildlife is also more frequently referred to as a “resource” (ziyuan) in the Chinese technical literature than it is in the West. Evidence of the utilitarian view exists in the nonscientific literature as well. A short, educational reader, intended to simultaneously provide reading practice for elementary school students and indoctrinate them with the proper attitude toward nature and the environment, serves as a good example.10 The book follows the experiences of a group of youngsters as they are educated about environmental issues at the hands of the father of one of them, Mr. Lin, an environmental engineer. It features chapters focusing on water and air pollution, solid waste, protection of greenbelts, and other fashionable topics with environmental themes. Of course, there is also a chapter focusing on wildlife. After hearing the children exclaim that such creatures as bears, snakes, and wild boars can be dangerous to people, Mr. Lin sagely interrupts them: “These animals can be dangerous, but they are also beneficial! Take the tiger, for example. People call it ‘King of the Mountain,’ but one could also say it’s quite a treasure.” The children protest, “But tigers threaten people!” Wanting to appear reasonable, Mr. Lin responds, “Yes, that’s true, but the benefits to people from tigers are also great.” What argument does he use to convince the youngsters? “The entire body of a tiger is a treasure! Why, one could say that the tiger is a

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drugstore capable of curing one hundred ills!”11 In other words, not only do tigers threaten people, but they are useful to people, at least when dead.12 Going on, Mr. Lin asks the children “Have any of you ever seen a snake?” Needless to say, the response of the children to the notion of a snake is less than positive; one wonders why the authors bring up this particular example if not to attempt to provide a more balanced view to the prevailing one of snakes as evil. But once again, it is the snake’s usefulness that is called upon to justify its protection. Mr. Lin explains, “Snakes can cure diseases with the medicine produced from them, and they can also catch rats [which in turn, saves grain for human consumption]. In southern China, we also like eating snake meat.”13 Nowhere in this lesson are messages of ecosystem integrity attempted or nonanthropocentric values suggested. Films are increasingly available and popular in China (on DVD), and while often portraying positive images of wildlife, they are not beyond reach of the powerful anthropocentric impulses that, in the end, justify the existence of wildlife in terms of usefulness for mankind. In the mid-1990s, a group of Tibetans organized themselves into what became known as the Wild Yak Brigade (yemaoniu dui) and briefly gained fame throughout China for their efforts to protect chiru (Tibetan antelope) in the Kekexili Nature Reserve from poaching. There was even a feature-length film produced in Hong Kong (but clearly with the cooperation and blessing of the relevant Chinese authorities), depicting the activities of this group, and particularly their martyred leader, Sonam Dorjie. In real life, Sonam was a government official from Zhiduo County in southern Qinghai, who ultimately died at the hands of chiru poachers while on patrol. According to the screenplay, whenever Sonam was either called upon to defend his interest in protecting Kekexili, or simply expressed his attitudes voluntarily, he never failed to explicitly link protection of the area with what he termed kaifa (“opening up, developing, exploiting”). In one case, while visiting the tent of a poor nomad, Sonam is seen expressly telling the old man that his life, and indeed those of all local pastoralists, will be greatly improved once the great Kekexili has been developed. Although the film never makes explicit just what the fictionalized Sonam had in mind, it clearly could not have been simply allowing the Kekexili Nature Reserve to function as it had historically, as a de facto wilderness area. Whether he had in mind further pastoral expansion, mining, or sustained use of wildlife was left vague by the film. But it was clear in the film that Sonam explicitly linked protection of the Kekexili Nature Reserve with an improvement in the economic well-being of his constituents, and it was precisely this, rather than any chiru spared the poachers’ gun, that made him a hero. Whether or not wildlife conservation was central to Sonam’s martyrdom, it was clearly viewed by the filmmakers as a weak rationale for idolizing their protagonist. Instead, the viewer was invited to regard Sonam almost as an updated, ethnically Tibetan Lei Feng, doing good deeds out of the goodness of his heart (which, if during the 1950s had meant selflessly serving the people, by the 1990s had come to mean advancing economic development). But the most persuasive evidence of the prevailing Chinese instrumentalist attitude toward wildlife comes simply from the length of time, variety of modes, and continued interest in its use for people’s individual well-being. China has modernized faster and more thor-

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oughly than any nation in history, but that doesn’t mean that the long tradition of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been abandoned. A recent study estimated that as much as half of all health care expenditures in China during the 1990s were on TCM (with the other half being on Western medicine).14 Although the majority of raw resources for these drugs come from plants, that still leaves approximately 1,280 animal species named in various TCM formularies.15 Even in relatively urbane Hong Kong, with its roughly one hundred years under the considerable influence of British culture, a 1996 survey found that almost 7 percent of the population regularly used TCM, 33 percent had consumed “exotic” species, and 80 percent believed that TCM could sometimes cure diseases resistant to treatment by Western medicine.16 Perhaps no case exemplifies the willingness to use animal products—and how strongly that utilitarian view tends to run afoul of Western sensitivities—more than that of bears. Bear meat is eaten, bear paws are considered a delicacy, and, most importantly, gall produced by bears has been considered an important component of TCM since at least 659 C.E.17 Evidently, bears produce a unique biliary acid, and although rigorous clinical studies are still lacking and substitutes may have some effect, belief in its efficacy among many Chinese remains strong.18 Bear farming in China began in 1984, and as of the late 1990s, well over 7,000 bears (mostly Asiatic black bears, relatively few brown bears, and a handful of sun bears) were in captivity.19 Gall from many of these bears is obtained via a fistula and catheter; techniques vary, but none requires killing the bear to obtain the gall. A legitimate—and, I believe, quite unresolved—dispute surrounds whether maintaining the market for bear products via use of animals reared in captivity reduces or exacerbates pressure on the wild population. Proponents of bear farming favor the former view, opponents support the latter, and both camps are absolutely convinced they are correct.20 Only detailed field study coupled with social surveys can provide data to evaluate the rival claims (see Chapter 4). But it is clear that arguments about bear farming’s effect on wild bear populations are most often voiced only when the debaters believe it culturally inappropriate to defend their own perceptions about the moral appropriateness of using bears in this way. When freed to say what they really mean, Western-based critics of bear farming stress physical and psychological cruelty to individual bears; when beyond earshot of their Western critics, Chinese defenders of bear farming stress the medicinal, cultural, and economic values of bear gall.21 Utilitarian attitudes are hardly unique to China. It is worth noting, however, that the utilitarian and dominionistic attitudes expressed in China come not merely from the general public, but also from the educated and interested segment of society that deals with wildlife, directly or indirectly. Here, current American attitudes clearly diverge from Chinese. Among college-educated Americans, utilitarian and dominionistic attitudes ranked last, and among bird watchers, trappers, hunters, and those active in environmental/wildlife organizations, naturalistic and ecologistic attitudes ranked high.22 Returning to the story at the beginning of this chapter, one would not be surprised to find a typical Chinese or Westerner who holds that some animals are “good” and others “bad”; it would, however, be rare indeed to find such an attitude expressed by a contemporary Western zoologist closely associated with wildlife conservation.

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Here it is worth recounting another anecdote involving, again, a professional Chinese zoologist and employee of the Academy of Sciences. As with most zoologists, his background had primarily been in collecting specimens, but during my work with him no collecting was needed or requested. We were conducting surveys, attempting to understand what species still survived in the area, and what conservation measures might be developed to maintain them. One evening, after the day’s work, a group of children alerted us to the presence of a snake, which we went to investigate. The children were alarmed and concerned, assuming that any snake must be a dangerous one. Along the way, I asked the zoologist if the area harbored poisonous snakes, and he provided the scholarly response that only one local species was dangerous, so it was most likely that this snake was not poisonous. Upon finding it, he expertly lifted it up, give it a cursory examination, and with a confidence that spoke of having done this many times before, deftly flicked his wrist which quickly snapped the snake’s neck. “So it was a poisonous species?” I asked him. No, he responded, it was one of the harmless species. “You have use for it as a laboratory specimen then?” I continued, not so much morally offended by the killing as curious to know which of the many unknowns about these species such a specimen would help to resolve. “No,” the zoologist responded, casually tossing the dead snake to the ground, “I just don’t like snakes.” Dominionistic/Aesthetic Views An additional attitude toward wildlife can be discerned among typical Chinese that lies somewhere between Kellert’s dominionistic and aesthetic types. Here, the notion is of nature the beautiful, but always in its tame state, as in a symmetrically ordered garden. Historian Edward Schafer reviewed the long history of captive rearing of animals from a diverse array of taxonomic groups in China.23 Throughout, the controlled environment (e.g., zoo, garden) is seen as preferable to the natural one.24 Some examples from translated literature25 serve to illustrate this view of nature. From an essay describing the same forest in which the wolf–Buddhist pilgrim incident26 with which I began this Chapter occurred, comes this romantic view: The . . . Forest is often compared to a vast natural zoo and arboretum combined. It is more than that. It is really a colorful, fantastic fairyland! It is grown with towering spruces and Chinese pines and other groves where scores of different shrubs were blossoming. . . . Oh, how luscious and attracting the berries are? And how gorgeous are the azaleas in this flowering season! During the . . . journey on horseback . . . we were always surrounded by hospitable animals. Some of them acted as our guides . . . some as followers. . . . The small number of Kangbaren [Kham speaking people] who live here . . . are kind at heart and never dream of harming the “residents” in the forest, excepting, of course, vermin. This area is also a paradise for birds. Tibetan pheasants . . . looked very much like bouquets of flowers.27 Note that throughout, in addition to the inability of the author to resist the reference to bad animals (“vermin”), nature is compared favorably to a garden or zoo, rather than vice

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versa. Another reference, here to the newly established Qiangtang Reserve in Tibet, again uses the garden analogy, stretched as it might seem given what precedes it: “With an average annual temperature between minus three degrees and zero Celsius and a yearly precipitation between 100 and 300 millimeters, Qingtang [sic] is too cold and dry to accommodate human souls, but it is what Chinese and American zoologists call ‘a rare animal garden.’”28 Similarly, semi-popular accounts of China’s nature reserve system frequently refer to such reserves set aside specifically for protection of endangered wildlife as “natural zoos.”29 In this secondary thread, animals do not necessarily have to be consumed to be valued, but their beauty comes from their resemblance to human creations, and they are attractive to the degree they are controlled. Popular accounts intended to elicit concern for the plight of endangered wildlife sometimes seem to be on a trajectory that moves them increasingly far from an ecological perspective, traversing the dominionistic and aesthetic domains, and settling on a Disney-esqe anthropomorphism that is almost quaint (when it is not simply funny). As though assuming that the only way to engage the Chinese reader’s sympathy is to turn their animal subjects into furry people, the authors of these accounts take liberties with biology that Western popular media would shun as soon as the target audience is past the cartoon-watching age. Most commonly seen on the popular wildlife-oriented television shows, such anthropomorphism sometimes finds it way into print, as for example, in the following passage from a book intended to publicize the plight of the chiru. What purports to be a straightforward presentation of information obtained by Academy of Sciences personnel in the course of a field survey soon strays curiously close to soft-core pornography.30 Dr. Su and his colleagues have observed some particular characteristics of chiru during the breeding period. When the male chiru feels the stirrings of love, the female who is the first object of his attention does not bend down and raise her buttocks in expression of gentle acceptance; rather, she runs for all she’s worth in a circle around the male, and in this way, elicits even greater ardor from him, and causes him to exert much physical effort in chasing her. It is only when the chase tires her out and she stands still, or even drops to the ground, that she is willing to bend down, and submitting to the male’s will, allow him to mount her. The pair then enters a painfully sweet sexual condition. In this manner, the male completes his love-giving task with each and every one of his harem.31 HUNTING With its roots in irrigated agriculture and fortified city-states, it is not surprising that Han culture has little room for hunting, either as sport, subsistence, or spiritual quest. But it is not quite the case that there is no hunting tradition at all. Evidently beginning as early as the Shang Dynasty of 2000 B.C.E.,32 enclosed hunting parks and preserves became a common feature of imperial life, although their popularity and size waxed and waned with various dynasties. But access to the wildlife within these preserves was solely the domain of the emperor and his court. While thousands of people might be employed in

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enclosing the areas, protecting them from incursions, or providing supplemental feed for the animals within, hunting itself was strictly a royal prerogative.33 More germane to our investigation here is that such royal hunting actually had little to do with wildlife per se, and nothing to do with conservation of wildlife habitat. Certainly, animals were required in order for there to be hunts, but the motivation for hunting and maintaining hunting parks lay entirely with conceptions of the emperor’s divine rights and powers to control and order his empire and its people. By corralling, controlling, cultivating, and ultimately subduing wild animals, Chinese rulers both trained themselves in the martial arts necessary to maintain political control, and provided tangible (if symbolic) evidence of their dominion. Schafer wrote that the uses of the hunting park in imperial China, “[a]side from its meaning as a symbol of the perfection of Chinese control of nature, were the production and carefully controlled cropping of live creatures for high ends—sacrifices to the gods and the nurture of mankind.”34 Hunting was seen as training for war, a way for the emperor to hone his skills of control and management.35 Sinologist Roel Sterckx, in his study of early Chinese attitudes toward wildlife, has asserted that The importance of the hunt and the hunting park had to do with symbolism rather than economics. The seclusion of wild animals in a confined space such as a park or a court garden, aside from availing the ruler with a sufficient supply of sacrificial victims, was primarily an endeavor to sanctify the numinous powers of the ruler . . . royal hunts and ritual killings of wild animals within such animal preserves describe how game animals symbolically represented all species within the ruler’s realm.36 As intermediaries between divine spirits and common people, it was important that Chinese rulers interact with both the natural and the supernatural. In short, concluded Sterckx, “The ruler exerted his authority beyond his domestic realm by hunting wild animals.”37 In few historical accounts can one read of common Chinese peasants possessing the right, or even the inclination, to hunt. DISSENTING VIEWS There remains a body of opinion in the West that holds that traditionally, if admittedly not currently, Chinese views toward nature were primarily compassionate, and that Chinese morality held wild animals in high regard. In dissent to what I have written thus far, this view would hold that anthropocentric and utilitarian viewpoints arose later in Chinese history, largely in response to contact from Western culture. If so, perhaps the rarity with which most Chinese took up hunting reflected a moral view of the sanctity of animals rather than a fear of retribution from their rulers. Philosophical precepts of Buddhism, and more specifically of Daoism (which was uniquely Chinese), are often considered to have had considerable penetration in the ancient Chinese mind, leading to an imagined state of harmony between people and nature.38 For example, a coffee-table book on China’s wildlife by a team of British-based filmmakers concludes

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that, although much of China’s native flora is currently seriously endangered, “the Chinese have a history of appreciation of the natural world; their major religions and many of their artistic values are nature-oriented. They are already primed, culturally, for the conservation ethic.”39 Roderick Nash has written that “Far from avoiding wild places, the ancient Chinese sought them out. . . . Eastern cultures did not fear and abhor wilderness.”40 Sinologist Joanna Handlin Smith has documented and interpreted the tradition, which evidently flourished among scholars during the late Ming and into the Qing dynasties, of liberating caged animals (otherwise destined for consumption) as an act of Buddhist piety. She also describes how some traditions abjured killing even prior to Buddhism’s ascent in China, and that vegetarianism was often seen as a virtue.41 Then there is the odd case of Pu Songling. His charming and off-beat stories would seem to suggest a very different view of the natural world than the instrumental, arrogant, or even occasionally hostile view that has been suggested thus far. Living in Shandong Province during the early part of the Qing Dynasty, Pu (1640–1715) wrote short, moralistic stories, many featuring Daoist legends (and a surprisingly risqué view of romantic and sexual behavior) that invariably emphasized the strange, the unusual, and the occult. What is noteworthy, however, is that at a time when tigers still commonly killed and devoured peasants, and the natural world must still have been an obstacle to livelihood and comfort, Pu sometimes portrayed animals—including potentially dangerous carnivores—as heroes, or, at the least, as deserving of sympathy. In his stories one finds clever myna birds that help their owners outwit corrupt feudal lords, oxen that fly, moralistic owls, and most frequently of all, magical foxes who, while sometimes harbingers of evil, are more often transformed into objects of romantic and erotic attraction for Pu’s poor, lonely, and morally steadfast scholar-heroes. Most amazingly, in his story “Mao Dafu,” a pack of wolves befriends a country doctor, pays for his services to heal a sick member of the pack, and then, rather than abandon him to his fate after being falsely accused of murder (to say nothing of eating him), assists the county magistrate in identifying and apprehending the real murderer. Throughout, these wolves are depicted not as entirely imaginary or mystical (they don’t, for example, speak or hold things with their paws, but rather make their intentions known much as we might imagine domestic dogs would do, by pawing the ground or grabbing objects with their mouths), although they are admittedly provided with the kind of intelligence and morality that only fictional wolves could possess.42 At the time of its writing, wolves in analogous fiction or fairy tales in Europe were almost universally seen as the embodiment of evil. Does not, then, the work of Pu Songling provide some suggestion of a positive or compassionate view toward wildlife, at least as of the early Qing period? These examples would appear to show ancient Han culture as valuing awareness of nature and harmony with its essence. Yet, when put into context, such stories either melt away as metaphors for affairs of the civilized, human world, or stand as exceptions proving the rule that nature was seen instrumentally at best and as an enemy at worst. Pu Songling, it turns out, was primarily a social critic, and his themes usually focused on corruption of the gentry, or the conflicts associated with the emotional and physical bonds between the sexes and the Confucian morality that restricted those bonds. Both because of the time

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in which he lived, and in order to gain the reader’s interest, Pu often infused his stories with the supernatural, and rarely failed to keep his plots full of mystery, intrigue, and even horror. It was neither stylistic nor effective to be overly concrete or realistic. Thus, his animal characters, even those retaining elements of their zoological nature, were always stand-ins for human characters who were more freely portrayed in the abstract, or for concepts that required some kind of physical incarnation. His animal spirits were not the only quasi-humans inhabiting his stories; he also animated flowers, rocks, and musical instruments. His fairy foxes, at times playful and seductive, at times malevolent and sinister, had nothing to do with species of the genus Vulpes and everything to do with the protagonists’ internal conflicts between their desires (often erotic) and their notions of propriety.43 Thus, although I must confess ignorance as to just why Pu chose the oddly virtuous wolves to be the hero’s savior in “Mao Dafu,” it seems doubtful that he had any intent to either reflect or encourage a more positive view of real wolves. (Other stories by Pu include wolves in their more familiar role as ruthless predators, anthropomorphized to act as stand-ins for corrupt officials who “preyed” on peasants.) Pu’s view of wildlife and nature (or lack thereof) does not even merit mention among the English-language analyses of his work.44 Despite his frequent use of ghosts and a panoply of zoological oddities, Pu’s attention was focused squarely on people. As for the peculiar preindustrial animal liberation movement described by Joanna Smith, she herself avows that much of this nonkilling actually had to do with moralistic humanto-human behavior, with liberated animals serving as metaphors for weaker members of society requiring help and compassion.45 In his review of early Han attitudes toward nature, Sterckx concluded that “The scattered references to practices which approximate a notion of ‘compassion’ toward animals need to be read with the knowledge that such compassionate attitudes were thought to benefit human nature rather than the welfare of the animals themselves.”46 Finally, to the degree that scholars or rulers expressed such lofty sentiments toward nature, it does not necessarily follow that they reflected attitudes held by common people, or acted on by almost anybody. In fact, such entreaties to act sensitively toward the natural world may have been primarily a reaction to the very lack of that sensitivity seen in everyday life. The historian of the Chinese environment Mark Elvin has written that “The restraint preached by the environmental archaic wisdom found in certain Chinese classical texts is both familiar and in all likelihood commonly misunderstood: it was probably not a symptom of any ancient harmony but, rather, of a rational reaction to an incipient but already visible ecological crisis.” 47 What people wrote, indeed what people may have believed in their most contemplative moments, may not have been reflected in the decisions they made regarding themselves and the natural world. To quote Elvin: A paradox thus lay at the heart of Chinese attitudes to the landscape. On the one hand it was seen . . . as a part of the supreme numinous power itself. Wisdom required that one put oneself into its rhythms and be conscious of one’s inability to reshape it. On the other hand the landscape was in fact tamed, transformed, and exploited

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to a degree that had few parallels in the premodern world. . . . This paradox shows that the relationship of a representation to a reality . . . may be complex, . . . What is portrayed can at times be the opposite, in a sense, of what is.48 Attitudes die hard, and it doesn’t seem likely that mere education or the influence of the West is about to turn Chinese into deep ecologists. Utilitarian motives, with a subordinate theme of appreciating beauty (as long as it is tamed or anthropomorphized), retain their dominance. If there has been a subtle shifting of the words used to justify conservation, it has not taken the form of valuing nature as a good in and of itself, regardless of any concern for mankind’s future. Rather, it has taken the form of denying any kind of conflict between the interests of nature in its pristine state and the requirements of civilized mankind. This relatively newly encountered paradigm—which says that saving nature is really in our own best interests— arises from a concept I call Confucian optimism.49 CONFUCIAN OPTIMISM AND THE PROBLEM WITH TUANJIE This newer conception, used invariably as a public exhortation to conservation actions that remain unstated or vague at best, is most often encountered in the motto “Protecting wildlife is really protecting mankind itself.”50 It also appears in close variants (depending on the context), such as “Protecting forests is really protecting mankind itself,” which I once saw extended to “Protecting the woods is really protecting wildlife,”51 and even—from a provincial Party secretary in reference to wildlife conservation—“Protecting wildlife is really protecting our [economic] productive capacity.”52 Notwithstanding the simple elegance and possibly the persuasive power of “protecting wildlife is really protecting ourselves,” there is a small problem with it, at least as the conceptual basis for useful conservation action: it is simply not true. At least, it is not likely to be true within a time frame and spatial scale that encompass people’s decisions about their lives and the impact of those decisions on wild animals and their habitats. It certainly is true that maintenance of the earth’s biotic health, including its biological diversity, is ultimately good for all of us. Nobody doubts that humans require clean air, unpolluted water, and the continued growth of plants that can be processed into products that we eat or use to shelter ourselves. Environmental toxins are likely to first affect wild species, which, finely tuned to expected environmental conditions, are likely to be ill equipped to protect themselves or adapt quickly enough to cope. Like the canary in a coal mine, poisoned wildlife is likely to be a warning of future health concerns for people. There is similarly no doubt that human civilizations are premised upon the natural world remaining more or less as it currently is. Urban and agricultural communities near rivers that originate in distant mountains are built with the assumption that those rivers will obey historical flow patterns. If deforestation, grassland degradation, or wetland destruction (all of which are clearly harmful to wildlife species that live in these habitats) result in unprecedented floods (as occurred in the Yangtze drainage during the late 1990s), mankind ultimately pays. In this sense, degrading the natural environment to the point where it fails to support humans and wildlife alike clearly brings about disastrous outcomes for both, justifying some sense of

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common cause between human development and wildlife conservation. As well, it remains true that our lives as human beings are immeasurably impoverished by the loss of species and of natural habitats. But simply asserting that it is in mankind’s interest to conserve wildlife without pursuing the argument more deeply glosses over the crucial roles of geographic and temporal scale. In fact, only on very broad geographic and painfully long time scales is it accurate to contend that the health of wildlife populations and the development of human material wealth find common cause. On a local scale and within a shorter time frame, it is very difficult to support the argument that lives are made “better” (an admittedly culture-bound term) by limiting our behavior so that natural habitat will thrive. More often, calculated on the basis of family well-being and restricted to the scale on which families can control their destiny, their interests and that of wildlife will conflict. For example, for the pastoralist whose family’s well-being depends on the immediate products and/or monetary returns obtained from his livestock herd, the healthy and vigorous condition of grasslands under his control is a prerequisite. However, the pastoralist maximizes benefits to his family to the degree that he can sequester that vegetative biomass and direct it toward the bodies of his domestic livestock. Wild animals that compete with his livestock for forage, or worse yet kill them, are in no way beneficial to his economic livelihood. Similarly, a woods worker depends on the sustainable production of new trees lest his own trade disappear with the last clear cut. But he maximizes his production of wood by harvesting (and immediately arranging for reseeding) just at the point where those trees have attained their greatest net accumulation of wood, and he loses value if he waits until trees are older to cut them down. Thus, to the degree that both the woods worker and forested wildlife depend on the perpetuation of forests, their interests coincide. But in preferring a forest in which all trees are growing at their maximum rate (and then immediately recycled into seedlings), his optimal economic scenario spells doom for wild species requiring old, slow-growing, or dead trees for part of their life-history. Without doubt, mankind is inextricably linked to the biosphere and cannot destroy it without destroying himself. But the complex civilizations that have allowed humans such an unprecedented dominance among the earth’s species have developed primarily because of humans’ success in appropriating and channeling the natural flows of energy and nutrients toward themselves, and away from all other flora and fauna. It could arguably be asserted that the ability of humans to exist at high population densities is inextricably linked to their reduction of forest cover, usurpation of productive land for agricultural use, and, in general, simplification of complex ecosystems. This may seem a bitter pill, perhaps even wrong-headed, when viewed from the confines of a wealthy, developed country, but is easier to see when assessing the generally negative relationship between the persistence of native fauna and any chosen index of “modernity” within units of an area one might examine in China. Emblematic of this dynamic was a brief, but remarkable, interaction I witnessed in 1993 between a survey team of scientists intent on documenting and generating strategies to sustain the remaining biodiversity in a remnant forest in western Yunnan Province, and an ethnic hilltribesman (who was also a part-time government official) greeting them upon their arrival.

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The conservation biologists had arrived from Kunming, prepared to appeal to the locals to limit their logging, to foreswear hunting, and to understand and appreciate the national and global significance of the rare species that still survived in their midst. It was utterly without rancor, but not without a tinge of irony, that upon hearing of the team’s origin and affiliation, the tribesman said simply, “Kunming? Yes, I’ve been to Kunming once.” That simple statement, taken in context, put the lie to the entire governmentally supported program to deny conflicts of interest between biodiversity preservation and the kind of economic development the government was simultaneously promoting. The mountains and plateaus surrounding Kunming, the prosperous and thriving provincial capital, had in centuries past been deforested and long since lost almost all of their native fauna. Indeed, the concern about dwindling species and the need for such long-distance biodiversity surveys arose precisely because Kunming, along with similarly developed and modernizing regions, had already destroyed the very sorts of precious natural features that interested these scientists. In contrast, these local hill-tribe people, who lived among the last remnants of diverse and unlogged forests with their now-endangered species, were clearly, according to Chinese thinking, backward and undeveloped.53 They lived simply, ate poorly, many suffered from leprosy, and few if any lacked a desire to somehow latch onto the booming economic growth they could sense, if not quite see, elsewhere in the province. This man’s comment, and the skeptical angle of his eyes, seemed to suggest, “Perhaps if we do the opposite of what you’re asking, if we cut down our forests so that our hillsides look like those surrounding Kunming, we’ll someday be as rich as you, and drive around in new Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive jeeps as you do; after all, you Kunming people were evidently not able to develop your economy without destroying endless tracts of forests, and without eliminating most species from your environs. You, who have fewer forests and less wildlife than we, enjoy a much higher standard of living; your children are healthier, you eat better, you have more freedom to travel, you have TVs and refrigerators, while we have none of that. Yet you come here asking us to do precisely what you could not. Perhaps in order to get these things, our best course is to eliminate the forests and wildlife, the quicker the better.” This was not an easy response for the scientists to counter. Could they honestly argue that it was these local people’s fault that they harbored the last or best remaining habitat for some endangered species? Were they responsible for the global decline of these forests, or only for their local portion of it? (And perhaps not even that, if larger economic forces beyond their control had contributed to the decline.) Schooled only in the philosophy that saving wildlife was saving mankind itself, and equipped with no authority or practical measures to balance the conflicts that had suddenly become crystallized, the conservation biology team found itself at a loss for a useful response. Although the “protecting wildlife is really just protecting our own interests” mantra can be seen as referring to larger spatial and temporal scales, its insistence on unanimity of goals, and its denial of conflicts of interest among different stakeholders (or even within individuals) reflects Confucian optimism.54 Underlying the canons of Confucianism, which say that wise leaders and stable, unquestioned hierarchical relationships are the

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principle avenues toward harmony, is the concept that, given sufficient information and wisdom, everybody will agree. Confucian optimism holds that the primary task is not so much to resolve conflicting claims or allocate limited resources as it is to raise awareness that all citizens agree that these claims should be peacefully resolved and resources be prudently managed. Confucian optimism suggests that, given sufficient information and under enlightened leadership, different outlooks, competing values, and conflicting desires will melt away. There is thus, for example, little need to limit the powers of government, because in the final analysis, it will function merely to harmonize the needs and interests of the governed, all of whom are assumed to have similar desires. In this, Confucian optimism diverges fundamentally from the Western vision of democracy, which at its core sets up institutions deliberately to resolve competing claims and mediate disputes that are assumed to characterize the polity.55 Confucian optimism has long held a prominent place in Chinese thought, but beginning with liberation, it has seemingly been amplified with the Communist elevation of the concept of unity (tuanjie) to its presently exalted position. Following on the Confucian notion of the unity between man and heaven, the Communist Party has emphasized the concept of tuanjie, in part, to legitimize its power as it successfully reunited the country following decades of rule by warlords and occupation by the Japanese. It further justified the Chinese version of manifest destiny, which was instrumental for the newly proud state in solidifying control over (or even reclaiming) peripheral (and non-Han) regions such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Its continued popularity in government propaganda, well into the reform era and past the demise of earlier, revolutionary slogans, suggests continued concern for the fragility of the multi-ethnic state. Not entirely trusting that the desires of Han and minority peoples indeed are identical, the slogan seems used as a superficially-acceptable verbal battering ram (who could object to a sentiment as lofty as “unity”?) intended to bludgeon through repetition the notion that all Chinese share the same aspirations and values. But honorable as it may be to credit the desires of your neighbor as much as your own,56 and necessary as it was to resurrect the respect of Chinese for the integrity and strength of their own country, tuanjie (and its ideological ancestor, Confucian optimism) is not merely useless but positively counterproductive as a basis on which to formulate natural resource policy. This is because natural resource management is nothing but finding ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts that exist and compromises that must be made among competing stakeholders and among the competing desires within each of us. Natural resources, even those that are renewable under wise management, are all finite; one cannot simply create more when needed to satisfy unending demand. Thus, allocation is required, meaning that compromises must be made, and, in any given situation, losing will generally balance winning. This is the very basis of the entire field of property rights studies, which, while not universally accepting that private property rights are the only or best solution, does generally take as axiomatic that rules specifying and limiting access to natural resources must underlie any successful management system. Nor does it require a vision in which there are competing camps of people—some desiring wildlife conservation but not economic development, others only too happy to see the demise of

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wildlife in exchange for their personal greed—to admit that interests invariably compete. Indeed, these interests almost inevitably compete within each of us as individuals. Most of us want everything; we just aren’t clear about exactly how each decision we make benefits one interest to the detriment of another. The point is therefore not that rural agriculturalists in Yunnan or remote pastoralists in Gansu value only their own economic betterment and do not appreciate wildlife (because they’ve not yet lost it); if anything, such people with hands-on experience of native species usually value them highly. Rather, the point is that neither Confucian optimism nor tuanjie allows even the recognition that conflicting desires or competing claims require balancing. If everybody is simply supposed to “protect wildlife” (while, of course, continuing to get rich), the crucial function of allocating, adjudicating, and compromising is left void. NON-HAN PERCEPTIONS Thus far, I have limited this overview to perceptions among Han Chinese, but, as pointed out in Chapter 2, western China is geographically (if not politically) dominated by ethnic minorities. These minorities (shaoshu minzu) have distinct histories and traditions, and most still maintain pastoral lifestyles; thus, we should not expect them to necessarily share the perceptions of wildlife (and nature generally) that we have explored among the Han. And indeed, they do not, although the contrast is neither as marked nor as simple-minded as some observers would believe. Unlike Han culture, with its rich literary tradition, these largely pastoral cultures have not documented nearly as much in writing, so we are faced with interpreting their perceptions and values largely through indirect sources. Thus, the potential for subjectivity in interpretation, already quite high, becomes ever yet greater. Most Tibetans are both Buddhists and pastoralists. They are thus exposed to religious teachings on the sanctity of compassion toward all creatures, and also intimately familiar with both the beauty and the unforgiving limits of the natural world. That Tibetans would generally feel a kinship with wildlife and an appreciation of natural forces unaffected by human civilization is therefore not surprising. Indeed, if one were to choose an ethnic group whose culture and history really did “prime” them57 for successful wildlife conservation, one would be hard pressed to do better than Tibetans. Alas, there has been so much writing on Tibetans’ supposed veneration of nature and their imagined pre-1950s utopian state of harmony with it,58 that my task here is principally to modify those myths rather than to reiterate them. A dose of reality is called for. Most fundamental is that traditional Tibetan pastoralists, while living by the grace of natural grass production, largely replaced wild animals with domestic ones. Tibetan pastoralists were hardly primitive members of the existing ecological systems; they were in fact relatively sophisticated users of those systems, albeit with limited ability to engage in large-scale changes of the native grasslands. At most places and at most times, traditional Tibetan pastoralism was no doubt sustainable and led to few if any extinctions of native flora or fauna, but this should not be confused with a naïve view that pastoralism had no effect whatsoever on wild plants and animals. Tibetans may have held wildlife in high regard, but they lived by, and for, animal species created solely for the sustenance of people.

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As pastoralists living largely in environments where agriculture was impossible, Tibetan life would have been unimaginable had it been restricted to a vegetarian diet. Thus, animal killing was part and parcel of daily life in traditional Tibet, probably from very ancient times.59 My own observations in both Amdo- and Kham-speaking Tibetan areas during 1988–2006 support the view that the killing of animals is rarely viewed with relish, and that most contemporary Tibetans (and, as I interpret from the literature, historical ones as well) have gone to considerable efforts to minimize killing. But that hardly justifies the erroneous view held by some that hunting of wildlife was not a part of Tibetan life. It is consequential that hunting was probably never a ubiquitous activity, or even a major concern among traditional Tibetan pastoralists (in contrast to some pastoral groups); they could usually rely on their domestic animals for meat, and Buddhist ethics no doubt did play an important role in lessening enthusiasm for hunting. But hunting was always present, and while efforts were sometimes made to regulate and control it,60 there is no evidence that hunters were ostracized or considered in any way less “Tibetan” than nonhunters. For example, earlier European-based explorers such as L.A. Waddell reported on the large number of wild species products on offer at Tibetan bazaars around the turn of the nineteenth century, a time when very few Han Chinese traders visited Tibet. Other early Westerners reported the rather routine hunting of musk deer, wolves, bears, deer, wild sheep, and gazelles by Tibetan pastoralists.61 As retold by an early Western observer of Tibet, people in the ancient kingdom of Nangqian (located in what is today southern Qinghai Province) in the latter half of the nineteenth century lived “chiefly by hunting”: In spring and summer such as possess rifles and horses hunt the stag. In the second or third Chinese moon, say about March–April, the stag’s horns bleed; and there is a great demand in China for the bleeding horns, which are regarded as a strengthening medicine and fetch over 100 Tls . . . a pair. In winter time they snare the muskdeer, sending the musk to the Jyekundo market. Poor persons hunt the badger and the fox with sticks and dogs, the badger in summer, the fox in autumn, employing the winter in trading the fox-skins; there is nothing for them to do in spring except to go after badger in their burrows, not an easy business, as they go so deep. . . . it is hunted both for its skin and for food. The skin is not traded, but made into garments: the flesh is almost as fat as pork.62 Species that are today in peril, such as wild yaks, bears, snow leopards, and chiru, were by no means beyond traditional Tibetans’ interest. While Buddhist clergy promulgated rules to limit hunting, in some cases prohibiting it altogether, and while small naturereserve-like enclaves were designated, what shines in the available historical writing is not that Tibet was exceptional in its experience with wildlife, but rather how it faced roughly the same challenges as many other premodern cultures (and indeed, the same challenges resonate even today). While religious leaders issued public edicts to protect wildlife, they were not universally obeyed; while leaders in Lhasa attempted to assert their authority, vast distances and the logistics of enforcing rules meant that they could easily

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be disobeyed, and instead that local customs or requests from local monks were taken more seriously; while most pastoralists no doubt valued having wildlife present, that did not prevent them from engaging in consumptive use when doing so became economically attractive; while the intersection of Buddhist doctrine and technological limitations may have functioned to keep wildlife harvest low prior to the twentieth century, increasing access to markets (and weapons) probably led to higher wildlife mortality in the early 1900s. The combination of monastic injunction (largely in the form of direct statements of the fourteenth Dalai Lama) and the recent confiscation of weapons (beginning in about 1998) has meant that hunting among Tibetans is currently very rare, but my conversations with Tibetans in Qinghai suggest that, while hunting is never likely to become a dominant activity, interest in it remains strong today. Thus, although a strong contrast between traditional Tibetan and Han perceptions of nature is justified, there is one important way in which they did not differ: consumption of wildlife, whether directly for subsistence or indirectly for trade, was viewed as normal and natural. It is true that much of the trade value for wildlife products arose from their proximity to Chinese consumers, but Tibetans did their own share of consuming, and in any case, could have refused to enter into such trade arrangements with Chinese had doing so been seen as sufficiently immoral. This description appears to broadly fit Mongol perceptions of and relations with wildlife as well. If anything, it would appear that the role of hunting in traditional Mongol culture was considerably greater than within Tibetan culture, notwithstanding both groups sharing the same religion. The descriptions of Mongols as traditionally having a “herding and hunting” culture suggest both that hunting was more widespread and that religious restraints more muted than among traditional Tibetans.63 In addition to its importance for trade and subsistence, hunting among Mongols evidently also shared with hunting in Imperial China an organizational and military function, the utility of which is made obvious by the extent of the Mongols’ horseback-based empire of the thirteenth century. But there are also indications of culturally mediated restraint in hunting, not so much for moral reasons as practical ones: wanton hunting would soon end the opportunity for future hunting. Jagchid and Hyer, historians of Mongolia, quote a Ming Dynasty general who lived near the Mongolian cultural domain as writing that “archery and hunting, although a customary way of life of the barbarians, is still handled judiciously. They may be expected to be wasteful in hunting wild game, but on the contrary they are not so inclined.”64 Restraint evidently took the form of seasonal restrictions and encouragement to avoid killing females and young. More intriguing are suggestions that meat obtained from group hunts was shared equally, with the pelt being provided specifically to the individual credited with killing the animal. If so, equitable sharing might have served to lessen an otherwise dangerous incentive for every pastoralist to insist on being the successful hunter. Observers of Mongol culture have generally emphasized Mongols’ love of open spaces and mobility; cultivation of land was seen as an inferior mode of life and evidence of a soft or feminine nature, to be avoided if possible.65 The degree to which this fits within Kellert’s typology is not clear; certainly there would appear to be at least echoes of utilitarian, dominionistic, and ecological attitudes present here, although at least one observer

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has argued that Mongols traditionally had a decidedly nonanthropocentric world view.66 Whether or not that is true, interest in consumptive use among Mongols remains strong: in my study areas within Qinghai and Gansu where Tibetans, Mongols, and Kazaks overlapped or abutted, opinion was universally expressed that the Mongols were the most avid hunters, and most likely to run afoul of China’s recent hunting prohibitions.67 Hunting, both legal and illegal, remains popular in Mongolia.68 Hunting has also traditionally featured prominently in the lives of Kazaks,69 the third major pastoral ethnicity of focus, who, being Muslim, have turned to the Koran rather than to Buddhist ethics for guidance. Although visible manifestations of Islam among Kazaks are subtle, I was once told by an elderly Kazak who had moved from Xinjiang to Qinghai during the 1940s that the moral codes gleaned from the Koran were relevant to his group’s interactions with wildlife. As of the mid-1980s, government policies forcibly moved most Kazaks back to Xinjiang. Noting that their former grazing land contained among the healthiest concentration of wildlife anywhere in China, the elder explained to me that, historically, “we took wildlife, of course, but why take more than you need? The Koran teaches one to use things wisely; we never took more than we needed.” ARE CHANGES AFOOT? In recent years there have been expressions in Han China of a changing view on wildlife, particularly among scientists. The same book on Chinese nature reserves that referred to “natural zoos”70 contains a good many rationalizations for the existence of nature reserves that sound as if they could come from Western scientists, for example, integrity of ecosystems and “balance of nature.” Another recent, somewhat more scholarly, Chinese book on nature reserves also includes a variety of rationales, including those that are recognizably ecologistic, scientistic, and naturalistic.71 Some Chinese scientists, notably Zhao Qikun of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, have openly questioned the traditional Chinese utilitarian attitude, and spoken admiringly (as well as in practical terms) of a more spiritual perspective toward nature.72 In the popular literature, suggestions of a new openness to recent, Western “ecologistic” thinking, at least among some writers and presumably some readers, are clear. The canonical text of the modern American environmental movement, Aldo Leopold’s 1949 classic, A Sand County Almanac (usually published alongside Essays on Conservation from Round River), has been translated and published in Chinese, not once but twice.73 An incipient field of Chinese environmental ethics appears to be developing, at least if Li Minghua’s ambitious (if somewhat superficial) A Return to the Wilderness (2003) is any indication.74 And the micro-explosion of environmental NGOs, both those connected to larger, global efforts as well as small, homegrown efforts, suggests that traditional attitudes are not utterly immutable.75 But it is not at all clear that these changes, even if more widespread than a cursory examination would suggest, auger any substantive abandoning of the use of wildlife for human benefit. After all, Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, whether it is read in Chinese or English, is hardly preservationist; even as Leopold regrets his ignorant wolf-killing

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youth, he treasures his grouse-hunting maturity. And a survey of Hong Kong residents that suggested increasing support for wildlife conservation and concern for endangered species revealed no particular compunction against using animals for human benefit, simply an increased concern for the future of their populations. Interestingly, although only a minority of polled Hong Kong residents reported having used animal products medicinally, TCM users (including those who used only plant derivatives) expressed higher levels of concern about species endangerment than did nonusers.76 Further, among the roughly one-third of respondents who either occasionally or frequently consumed such wild foods as snakes, civet cats, pangolins, muntjaks, and wild boars, consumption rates correlated positively with educational level (rather than negatively, as might be expected if such consumptive use reflected primarily rural traditions that would likely decline with urbanization and “Westernization”). Among these Hong Kong Chinese in the mid-1990s, it seemed that the primary obstacle to consuming expensive wild delicacies was not awareness or attitude, but rather disposable income. It would thus seem hasty to confuse the Hong Kong survey’s optimistic findings of clear support for saving wildlife with any substantial turning away from consumptive use on ethical or moral grounds. Some Western-based environmental NGOs include in their strategies public campaigns to dissuade Chinese from using wildlife products in TCM, evidently hoping that as China continues to modernize, this tradition will be left behind, seen as out of step with modern values as bound feet. But while many educated people eschew TCM, I see no evidence that Chinese culture is, in general, on a path toward renunciation of TCM (even those that include animal parts). Beyond the large number of users and the inevitable economic interests of TCM producers and retailers, policy statements by government officials show no sign of disapproving traditional consumptive use. Does the official position support doing a better job of conserving wild animals and more humane methods of using them? Yes. But abjure traditional use entirely? No.77 Environmental awareness, and in particular concern for the plight of endangered species, has undoubtedly increased spectacularly in China proper in recent decades: a poll might be useful to quantify the extent of this change, but none is necessary to assert the general trend. But it does not follow that the fundamental attitudes I describe above have undergone a similar sea-change. The tendency for utilitarian, aesthetic, and dominionistic values to dominate Chinese thinking, even today, is clear.78 The connection between conservation (or, more precisely, baohu in Chinese) and mankind’s ultimate betterment is pervasive in both governmental proclamations and scientific writing. Plans, strategies, and suggestions for the future, particularly in dealing with China’s west, continue to justify environmental safeguards strictly from a utilitarian premise.79 The newest Chinese university textbooks used for classes on conservation biology or wildlife conservation include prefaces that begin with the importance of such endeavors for the needs of human societies.80 Even the Biodiversity Working Group of the State Council–directed China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development listed the need for biodiversity to earn economic returns as a higher priority than legal reforms or additional research.81

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*

*

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It bears reiterating that the prevalence of utilitarian and dominionistic and/or aesthetic views is hardly uniquely Chinese, nor do these views, in themselves, prevent good land management. In particular, the utilitarian outlook was recently found to be among the most common in a large-scale survey of the U.S. public,82 and even ranked number one when data were obtained from references in newspapers rather than from random surveys of individuals.83 Further, the prevalence of both the utilitarian and dominionistic attitudes expressed in the American press was found to increase as one looked further back in time toward the year 1900.84 To the degree that China is still not as “modern” as the United States, one should therefore not be surprised to find these attitudes still strong. Chinese perceptions of nature and wildlife are not monolithic, and simplifications are always dangerous. Regardless of the historical period or particular ethnic group, however, it seems safe to say that very few Chinese object to consumptive use. Views toward nature were, and are, almost entirely based on the needs and desires of civilized mankind; a unity was always seen between the two, but that unity did not necessarily mean that wild or dangerous nature was respected (or left alone).85 If not being used, wild animals must certainly be controlled. By far the predominant view among Chinese is that of wildlife as something to be used by mankind. This utilitarian86 attitude is so entrenched that it is more easily recognized by Westerners than by Chinese themselves. While some Chinese scientists (and to a lesser degree, members of the general populace) are beginning to emphasize other values for wildlife, the utilitarian perspective remains strong today. Difficult as this is to accept for urban-based Westerners, it should be remembered that, on a global spatial scale and an historical temporal scale, it is the newer, more ecologically based view of wildlife that is the exception, and the current Chinese utilitarian view that is the norm. Raising wild animals in captivity is a common theme throughout Chinese history and remains pervasive today. But we should not be surprised to encounter such strong emphases in Chinese culture, with its long history of domestication. Han culture is deeply rooted in the intensive agriculture of the Yellow River basin, the “cradle” of Chinese civilization, which is considered to have advanced only after the great river was “controlled” by the great emperor Yu.87 With the land needing cultivation, ideas of mastery and manipulation over nature come easily. It is but a small transition to imagine that, like crops, wildlife can be better off under the care and kindness of educated and benevolent mankind. And with increased science and technology, the ability to cultivate wild animals has gradually increased to meet the longstanding interest in doing so. It is this topic, captive breeding of wildlife in China, to which we turn our attention next.

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4

ANIMALS Wild, Captive, and Domestic

Captive breeding should be a last resort, used only after genuine efforts to maintain a species in the wild are clearly failing. Such efforts have not yet been made. Often forgotten is the fact that the panda, tiger, and others are merely . . . flagship species of the natural environment in which they occur. The real national treasure of China or any country is the habitat with all its animals and plants. . . . —G.B. Schaller Despite their natural inclination and ability to fly off, the [cranes] remain in the surroundings of the pond . . . although the cranes have wild instincts and are free to leave the king’s park, the king’s moral government makes them stay, their captivity . . . being their reason for joy. —Early Han Dynasty poet, quoted in R. Sterckx

On October 5, 2003, a program aired on Chinese national television (CCTV channel 8, the “educational” channel) that revealed a great deal about the way in which animals are perceived in China. The program began with what the announcer more than once noted was an excellent example of Chinese efforts to protect wildlife: captive propagation of giant pandas. This entire segment was filmed at the Chengdu Panda Base and it featured interviews with a few of the lab scientists, and talk about genetic screening, concerns about pedigree and inbreeding, and, most of all, successful captive breeding. Footage displayed a pregnant female panda (via remote cameras, so as not to disturb her), excited scientists watching the video remote as she gave birth, slow motion of the scientists running over to her cage and, shortly thereafter, removing the infant panda to bathe, inoculate, and generally tut-tut over the tiny cub. This was followed by images of six-month old pandas rolling around with their keepers, being fed, and following people around like so many furry, panda-colored puppy dogs. The announcer then acknowledged that this was, indeed, a captive situation. The true test of its merit, he seemed to suggest, was successful protection in the wild. A wonderful example of this, he continued, was found with the highly endangered Yangtze river alligator. Images now filled the TV screen of young men headed to the field in a Volkswagen Santana, driving through rural fields, and later walking along marshy creeks and wetlands. The scene then cut to that of a small Yangtze alligator swimming in a stream, 78

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and one of the fellows picking it up. The program then related, in rather hagiographic terms, the story of a rural family who lived on the edge of a wetland containing some of the few remaining alligators. So imbued with the spirit of wildlife conservation was this family that they had informally adopted this young alligator, going so far as to give it a name. The program showed the family cooking themselves a meal, then marching happily down to the waterside whereupon they called out the alligator’s name and it dutifully swam over to them, gingerly stepped up to the food offering, devoured it, and then shyly retreated back into the river.1 Finally, the narrator acknowledged that most important for wildlife was protection of the environment. There then followed additional interviews with scientists, all of whom emphasized a message any Western-based conservationist would find familiar and comfortable, namely, the protection of natural habitat for wildlife,2 frequently invoking the general Chinese term for nature, da ziran. The finale showed what appeared to be a reintroduction or translocation of some birds in a forested environment. To the accompaniment of soaring orchestral strings, the program showed repeated images of a couple of fellows reaching into a cage, cradling a bird in their hands, and then—the imagery shifting to dramatic superslow motion—throwing the bird up into the air at which point it took flight. This was presumably the pinnacle: mankind helping to put wildlife back into the wild. In roughly forty-five minutes of airtime, the program had not shown a single image of a wild animal in a context not inextricably linked with—indeed, dependent on—human beings. First, the viewer was shown pandas3 in a captive facility, an environment entirely controlled by humans. When the topic turned to in situ conservation, images were entirely of people handling and feeding an individual animal. Finally, as if in a logical progression, the program purported to show the release of animals into the wild, thus elevating wildness to the highest state. But even here, the animals in question regained their wild state only by being plucked from cages (where, presumably, they had lived until then), freed from the captivity of evil, imprisoning humans by virtuous, rescuing humans. Consistently, the images were not only of humans as friends to wild animals, but also as nurturers, protectors, and mentors to wild animals. The images from the TV program, together with the word “protect” (baohu) drummed at every turn into the viewer’s consciousness like a religious mantra, worked together to produce a most ironic result.4 Rather than protection implying, as I think most Westerners would assume, the provision of safety from the overconsumptive impulses of mankind, protection in this sense has come to imply safety from the rigors of nature itself. As portrayed in popular Chinese culture (and, I fear, increasingly accepted in government policies), the meaning of protecting wildlife, rather than meaning protecting animals in the wild, has come perilously close to meaning protecting animals from the wild. DISTINCTIONS: CLEAR AND BLURRY Even if they rarely have reason for giving it much thought, most people raised in Western cultures have little difficulty conceptualizing the difference between a wild animal and

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a domestic one. The distinction has little to do with taxonomy; many domestic animals can breed successfully with their wild ancestors under the right conditions (hybridization of wild populations by domestic cousins is often a conservation concern). Rather, the distinction arises from the place of mankind in shaping these animals. Although the boundaries are a bit fuzzier, most such citizens can also easily distinguish an individual animal they would term wild from one they’d term captive. Here, there is essentially no biological difference at all, the categorization being entirely the degree of human control. These distinctions become formalized when we move from public perception to public policy. We entrust management of wildlife to wildlife management agencies, management of domestic animals to individual farmers and ranchers (with oversight and regulation by departments of livestock or agriculture), management of pets to individual owners (with oversight by municipal animal control agencies), and management of captive specimens of species we consider fundamentally wild to zoological parks. These same categories exist in China of course, but curiously—given the otherwise strong tendency in Chinese culture to pigeonhole everything—their boundaries are considerably blurrier and more porous than they are in the West. The weakness of the boundary delineating animals that we in the West would consider wild owes much to the underlying Chinese conception, felt if rarely expressed overtly, that these animals too would be better off if cared for by people. That Westerners easily conceive of free-ranging and captive animals as different is exemplified by two separate citizen initiatives recently approved in the U.S. state of Montana. A primarily rural state, Montana has among the highest rates of participation in big-game hunting, and no species is of greater interest to hunters than the American elk (also called wapiti). Although outdistanced by white-tailed deer in numbers killed, their size, majestic antlers, quality of meat—but perhaps most of all, their association with unspoiled, uncivilized places—have made elk virtually synonymous with the concept of recreational hunting in Montana. So central is hunting to a cultural ideal most Montanans hold dear, that in 2004 they overwhelmingly approved a citizen initiative adding to the state’s constitution wording that “the opportunity to harvest wild fish and wild game animals is a heritage that shall forever be preserved to the individual. . . .”5 It was largely a symbolic move, a political statement aimed at anti-hunting groups in an effort to impede any future attempts to ban or severely restrict hunting. It in no way prohibited the state wildlife agency from managing hunting (even to the point of closing seasons entirely if necessary) and it produced no concrete change in either state law or day-to-day wildlife management. But in approving this amendment, voters clearly were emphasizing the value they placed on hunting, among other species, wild elk. What is instructive is that just four years earlier, this same electorate had approved with a similar majority a citizen initiative that phased out the practice of raising and hunting elk in captivity.6 “Elk farms” had begun proliferating in Montana’s wide-open spaces, in part because traditional forms of agriculture (using domestic species of plants and animals) had become so economically challenging. Opponents of elk farms argued that captive elk might escape despite their keepers’ best efforts to fence them in, and thereby pose the risk of disease and hybridization to Montana’s wild elk. They also argued that

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shooting elk contained within fences was not the kind of hunting that Montanans wished to be associated with, and that allowing the practice within the state gave Montana hunters a poor image. Thus, within four years, the same voters acted to reinforce what they viewed as a cultural tradition of hunting wild elk while serving notice that they considered elk farming dangerous and without merit. With these two votes, Montana’s largely rural electorate made clear that it had no difficulty at all in distinguishing between free-ranging and captive elk despite their being fundamentally the same animal. Shortly after the election, unhappy at having been deprived a source of income by the newly phased-in prohibition of elk farming, an organization representing farm owners sued, claiming the state had no right to prohibit raising captive elk. In denying the elk farmers’ claim, the presiding judge in the case noted that the prohibition on elk farming advanced “legitimate nonillusory state interests in protecting Montana wildlife.” In phasing out captive elk farming, the state could legitimately claim it was protecting elk even as it continued to advance hunting them in the wild. Evidently, elk were not protected by being fenced and fed. Instead, they were protected by their freedom to roam Montana’s hills and mountains, exposed to its frigid winters and its scorching summers, and stalked by predators, diseases, and—for five weeks each fall—Montanans themselves. To citizens, politicians, and judges alike, the distinction between animals in the wild and those within fences never seemed in doubt. Domestic animals are those that have been “bred in captivity for purposes of economic profit to a human community that maintains total control over its breeding, organization of territory, and food supply.”7 They have been “transformed into something more useful to humans,” which in turn requires “human selection”—via breeding and culling—“of those individual animals more useful to humans than other individuals of the same species,” and that they respond primarily to the “altered forces of natural selection operating in human environments.”8 Crucial here is that domestic animals have been totally transfigured, molded into something new that natural selection would never have created, and that these human-selected characteristics are not necessarily adaptive in wild settings. In contrast, wild animals are subject to natural selection, and they interact with mankind as they would with any other species with the potential to kill them. Wild species, depending on their own innate characteristics, may flee from humans, confront them as competitors, or even consider them not worth bothering with, but they almost never regard people as being in any way beneficial. There is also the nebulous category of “tame.” It seems accurate to define a tame animal as one that is subject to human manipulation at the level of the individual animal (although not genetically, on a population level), and has been taught to react to stimuli in order to obtain a reward. Jared Diamond uses Asian elephants as an example of animals that have been tamed but never domesticated: captive breeding is rare and, in any case, elephants have never been artificially molded by selective breeding or culling. Many wild species, if captured sufficiently early in their development, can learn to live among humans if trained to do so—sometimes, as with Asian elephants, in the service of mankind, more often as exotic pets.

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I avoid using the word tame and focus instead on animals that are simply captive, for two reasons. First, “tame” suggests that the animal presents little or no danger to people in close proximity, but in reality some species that are raised in captivity in China remain dangerous whereas others do not.9 Second, the Chinese language contains no distinction between the process of “taming” and that of “domesticating” an animal. There is a separate Chinese word denoting “livestock,” but one cannot tell, from the Chinese verb xunhua, whether one has created a brand new domestic species or merely tamed an individual animal.10 I do not know if the conflating of tame and domestic in Chinese thinking arises from the ambiguousness of the Chinese language or if the direction of causation runs the other way, but the linguistic connection is surely not coincidental. The distinction between wild and captive seems similarly soft in much of Chinese writing and policy. CAPTIVE BREEDING IN CHINA Given its rich history and civilization, it is not surprising that China has an impressive tradition involving the taming and captive rearing of wildlife. As one of the originators of agriculture, early Chinese civilization was heavily involved with some of the earliest successful domestication of wild animals as well. The first domestic species, the dog, was probably domesticated in China (albeit for meat rather than companionship) at a similarly early time as its domestication in the Fertile Crescent and in North America. Domestic pigs may also have originated in China, and we know that domestic chickens, and of course working silkworms, were Chinese inventions. Captive rearing of species we now think of as wild may have an almost equally long history. Interpretation of historical records suggests that Pere David’s deer, which later became extinct in the wild, were raised in captivity about 4,000 years ago. While probably never bred in captivity, Chinese may also have tamed elephants for work even earlier.11 Of course, the mere fact that captive rearing has an ancient lineage in Chinese culture does not in itself justify its inclusion in a conservation system, even if one wishes to develop a truly Chinese system of wildlife conservation. It does, however, show the depth to which such practices are embedded in Chinese culture. In contemporary China, captive specimens of nondomestic species can be encountered in a multitude of settings beyond zoos. Visit a nature reserve and you are likely to see some of the featured species live and in the flesh, albeit behind bars. Research institutes where scientists work in laboratories or offices are often populated by captive primates, cranes, or peacocks. Almost every species listed as “key” by China’s state law has a program, if not yet implemented at least in the planning stages, for captive propagation. Peek behind the out-buildings at a tourist park and you are likely to encounter bears in cages or pangolins in warehouses. Spend enough time among pastoralists in the western regions and you will find tamed gazelles and imprisoned snow leopards. Wild animals “rescued” from some calamity, natural or man-made (typically small wild cats or injured raptors) are often housed for the remainder of their lives in centers within public parks. Facilities specifically set up to raise wild species in captivity are afforded high status. Commercial farms raise deer, bears, civets, snakes, and frogs.

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But more pertinent to our examination of wildlife conservation than its history, tradition, or widespread nature, are the facts that captive breeding is afforded such a prominent position in all Chinese discussion of wildlife, and that artificial rearing is invariably assumed to be important before questions are ever asked about why it is being done. The fundamental Chinese law bearing on wildlife, the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law, to which I return in detail in the next chapter, makes this explicit. Right up front, under General Provisions, Article 4 declares “The state shall pursue a policy of strengthening protection of wildlife resources, actively domesticating and breeding wildlife. . . .” In fact even before that, in the law’s very first article, which functions as a preamble explaining why a law is needed, it is hinted that mankind is expected to be intimately and actively involved in a hands-on way with wildlife. The law’s second verb, right after the ubiquitous “protect,” is the word “rescue.”12 Later, Article 17 states this explicitly, leaving no room for doubt: “The state shall encourage the domestication and breeding of wildlife.” The remainder of Article 17 specifies that breeders need a license from an appropriate government agency but never bothers to explain why such breeding should be encouraged. There is no mention of reintroduction to the wild, of preservation of genetic material, or how research on these captives might assist in situ conservation. Captive breeding is assumed to be an end in itself.13 Books on raising animals abound in China and few make distinctions between wild and domestic species.14 Two textbooks have recently been published on the captive rearing of “wildlife.” They provide a wealth of detail on nutrition, proper veterinary care and facilities, and cover the gamut of species from the highly endangered to the common and commercially used. What is most notable, however, particularly given the usual Chinese practice of writing lengthy introductions, is that neither book contains any introduction section at all. There is none of the usual division into “types” of captive rearing we would expect, no discussion of the “importance of captive breeding” or its various rationales. Both books start with “nutrition” and take it from there. Implied by the lack of context is that there is no need to specify an objective to captive breeding, one simply needs to know how to do it. Reintroduction into the wild has occurred in China, and is taken seriously, particularly by Chinese biologists. But reference to such experiments in Chinese is vague when it comes to the degree of connection achieved between animal and habitat. A Western reader, upon learning that a group of Pere David’s deer or saiga antelope had “returned to their homeland” (yinhui guxiang) might reasonably assume that a reintroduction to the wild had occurred, when in fact such language refers merely to a group of captive animals being delivered from overseas to captive facilities within China. One commonly reads that species have been “saved” or are no longer “rare,” only to discover that it is the captive population that is being discussed.15 On the principal government Web site touting national wildlife programs, three of the nine categories of projects reported on deal with captive animals.16 Proposed expenditures by governments in support of wildlife over the fifty-year time period of 2000–2050 are heavily skewed toward activities with a captive breeding component. If the costs of proposed reintroduction are included, over 37 percent of proposed spending, as outlined by the State Forestry Administration (SFA)

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in its budget plan of 2000, is associated with captive animals in some way (see Figure 4.1).17 During the five-year period of 2000–2005, the SFA proposed spending ¥235 million (and asking provinces to provide an additional ¥175 million) on captive breeding facilities for the newly designated fifteen “key species” alone (with an additional ¥310 million in combined funds to be spent during the next ten-year period).18 With increasing population and wealth (but little if any discernible reduction in the per capita demand for wildlife products), SFA, the central government’s principal agency dealing with wildlife, has recently emphasized sustainability as a principle.19 There is little doubt from published government documents, however, that the sustainability envisioned is of the populations of these species in captivity. A circular published in 2003 clarifies that management of consumptively used species is to follow a list of species, all of which are protected from take in the wild, but all of which are produced on farms or breeding centers.20 WHY BREED WILD SPECIES IN CAPTIVITY? If I have criticized the Chinese for their lack of clarity in specifying objectives for captive breeding, it behooves me to provide some clarity of my own. I can identify four distinctly valid rationales for raising wild animals artificially, outlined below, and each has a slightly different relationship with in situ conservation. Chinese use all four rationales—sometimes simultaneously for an individual animal—but there is so much confusion and conflation among them that it becomes difficult to assess the success of any given program, suggest how it might be improved if doing poorly, or even develop an opinion as to whether the program is beneficial or detrimental to wildlife. If we first identify the possible objectives, we can begin to assess Chinese captive breeding programs. Most directly connected with conservation of wild species is captive propagation specifically for purposes of reintroduction into the wild. In China, this rationale is explicitly stated as the reason for breeding Pere David’s deer, Przewalski’s gazelle, saiga antelope, Yangtze alligators, and Przewalski’s horse, among other species. A second rationale for captive breeding is for educational and research purposes. Captives bred under this rationale are primarily found in zoos or specific research facilities, and play a support role to their wild relatives, helping scientists understand how to better conserve them in the wild and raising awareness and support for them among the populace at large. The contribution of zoo animals to wild conservation is indirect: there is no expectation that these individuals will ever live under wild conditions. A third objective in breeding wild species artificially is commerce. By this I do not mean to condemn the practice as unworthy or to devalue traditional Chinese use of animal parts: many of mankind’s enterprises that are hardly optional (such as raising crops or building houses) are primarily commercial in nature. But commercial propagation of wild species aims to meet a market demand, thereby pleasing customers and making a profit for producers. In intent, it is entirely neutral with regard to conservation of those same species in the wild. In the West, fur-bearing animals such as mink and red fox are routinely raised in captivity for their pelts rather than for any particular conservation

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Figure 4.1

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Proportional fiscal allocations for wildlife activities proposed by the SFA during the 2000–2050 time period. The large, central pie shows general categories within “wildlife and habitat protection.” Further subdivisions within the 26 percent allocated to “species protection” are shown in the upper pie; subdivisions within the 31 percent allocated to “production bases” are shown in the lower pie.

Breeding centers 27%

No hunting areas 4% New nature reserves 13%

Research and monitoring 13% Ecosystem protection 30%

Hunting areas 10%

Markets 7%

Reintroduction 66%

Rescue centers 10%

Species protection 26%

Production bases 31%

Breeding centers 7%

Existing nature reserves 56%

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objective. In China, red deer, civets, and fur bearers such as raccoon dogs would fit under this category. That would seem to cover the gamut, but there is a fourth category with relevance to China that explicitly bridges commercial and conservation rationales. I term this category “meeting a commercial demand with the explicit objective of lowering (or eliminating) exploitation pressure on the wild population.” Here, captive breeders need not engage in any actions that explicitly help any wild populations. Rather, the concept is that the wild population is helped to the degree the captive population thrives, optimally flooding the market with cheaper, artificially bred products and thus reducing the incentive to kill free-ranging individuals (or, if the cost of production cannot be reduced to below what wild individuals will fetch, at the least providing a legal alternative to would-be buyers). In China, this rationale is used for musk deer and Asiatic black bears, both of which are used for medicinal purposes. Notice that I have deliberately avoided treating the difficult issue of animal welfare and suffering. On one hand, it should be self-evident that minimizing stress and pain to captive animals serves as a basic tenet to any captive rearing program, animals in poor condition being clearly counterproductive for attaining any of the possible objectives listed. On the other hand, concepts of animal welfare lose their meaning when we turn our attention back to the wild (which ultimately is our focus here), so any direct comparison on these grounds between captive and free-ranging animals is fraught with peril. Who can say whether a juvenile killed by a predator feels pain, or an ageing monarch whose teeth have been ground to uselessness suffers when starving to death? Yet these or other equally grim fates await every single animal born into the wild at some point. Also missing entirely from my list of valid rationales for captive breeding of wild species is the notion that they will be better off if taken care of by people. That’s what domestic species are for. At first blush, it would seem that the first rationale, providing stock for reintroduction or supplementation, would be by far the strongest from the perspective of in situ conservation. But reintroduction of extirpated species, it turns out, is never easy, and has a checkered history even in places that can bring considerably more resources and expertise to the problem than Chinese programs can normally muster. A recent literature review suggested that only seven of 52 reintroduction attempts using animals born and raised in captivity (13 percent) could be considered successful (success was more likely if using free-ranging animals translocated from elsewhere).21 Among the most crucial variables identified in reviews of all translocations is that the cause for the species’ initial demise be identified and those problems rectified. The availability of high-quality habitat for the new arrivals is also critical.22 Thus, Western-trained conservationists approach any casual suggestion of reestablishment of a wild population using captive animals with a jaundiced eye: it is hardly something to be taken lightly. Even if it is the only alternative, focus needs first to be placed on the prospective habitat to be repopulated and the reasons for its inability to support a wild population. Usually, in comparison with the problems of habitat loss or competition with man and livestock, producing the bodies to be poured into the proposed area for reintroduction is the easier portion of the overall task.

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There are many species in Chinese captive facilities for which reintroduction is the stated rationale: they range from alligators and tigers to pandas and gazelles (and both ungulates named for the explorer Przewalski). But unlike the few successful reintroduction experiences elsewhere in the world, these programs generally focus on the animals rather than the conservation issues. Saiga antelope are raised without a clear plan for where they might live free-ranging within China.23 Juvenile wild camels are snatched from the wild to produce a captive population, but does anybody know how future descendents of those raised in captivity will cope with their harsh desert environment? Red pandas adapt readily to captivity and have become common in breeding facilities, but is anybody studying whether there are places for them to live with appropriate habitat but no red pandas? Recently, a single captive-bred giant panda was released into a nature reserve (a supplementation rather than a reintroduction), but do we know whether the risk of its transmitting disease to the existing pandas at its release site was justified by increasing the existing population by one? In short, reintroductions using captive animals are experiments, and the outcomes generally have little to do with the captive propagation portion of the program.24 I have little to say about captive breeding done for research and education. For species such as giant pandas, Chinese efforts have clearly borne fruit for scientists. Chinese zoos, admittedly not up to Western standards, continue to improve and provide valuable education for city-dwellers. But to reiterate, contributions to in situ conservation from this type of captive breeding are indirect, and thus necessarily modest. Assessing the success of Chinese captive breeding done when in service of commerce should be straightforward: calculate whether it is making a profit. If all such captive facilities practiced transparent and standardized accounting and were free of hidden subsidies, one could easily assess their economic success. Alas, neither precondition is met, so even this conceptually simple assessment is cloudy. In any case, my categorization system implies that these enterprises are assumed, a priori, to have no particular relationship with conservation in the wild.25 The type of captive rearing that elicits the strongest criticism from the West (and correspondingly, the staunchest defense by most Chinese) is that which fits under my fourth rationale, that is, meeting the demand for traditional consumptive use by using captivereared animals to lessen the incentive to kill free-ranging ones. Although this rationale is quite logical, there is also a plausible argument that such captive breeding is wrongheaded and counterproductive: by legitimizing the demand for traditional products, as well as their legal trade, in the absence of a strong capacity to enforce the prohibition on killing free-ranging animals, such programs may actually increase rather than decrease poaching, doing more harm than good. TWO CONTROVERSIES: MUSK DEER AND BEARS Two animals merit being singled out for special attention: musk deer and bears (most commonly Asiatic black bears). Musk deer are the objects of considerable attention in China, particularly in captivity, as musk is among the most important traditional Chinese

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medicines. Like deer in the genus Cervus, musk deer are docile herbivores that breed readily in captivity. But unlike other deer, musk deer are solitary in the wild and do not aggregate; they may even defend individual territories against conspecifics. Notably, musk deer are exceedingly “nervous” animals—their flight response seemingly cocked perpetually with a hair-trigger—who in their native habitats will explode off into brush or up steep cliffs at even the slightest hint of danger. Data on captive musk deer tend to be regarded in China as state secrets, thus even Chinese questionnaire surveys have difficulty establishing exactly what goes on at musk deer farms.26 But it seems clear that keeping these fragile and high-strung animals healthy and thriving in captivity is difficult and expensive.27 Despite almost fifty years of energetic efforts, Chinese musk deer breeding is not yet economically viable.28 Chinese musk deer breeders, like the diminutive animals themselves, seem to have been banging their heads against walls for years, trying to make work what eons of evolutionary history have already foreclosed.29 Brown, sun, and Asiatic black bears all are native to China and all produce ursodeoxycholic acid, a bile acid considered to have medicinal properties.30 All are classified as carnivores and love meat, but subsist in the wild chiefly on vegetation. Because they eat almost anything, fattening them up in captivity is not difficult. As of mid-1996, over 96 percent of the 7,642 bears then estimated to be in captivity were Asiatic black bears.31 Sun bears are rare in China. They are small (thus probably producing less bile per bear), and their bile is also of lesser quality: together, these three reasons probably explain why so few sun bears are farmed. Brown bears in China are called grizzlies in North America, and their fearsome reputation is well deserved. Although Asiatic black bears are also fully capable of killing people, brown bears are far more dangerous. Asiatic black bears have a temperament much more suited to farming than do brown bears. Because most bears are typically solitary in the wild, it is surprising to see groups of fifteen or twenty Asiatic black bears milling about in common areas of bear farms (at least the better managed among them) like so many furry cows. This becomes less surprising when one remembers that even ill-tempered grizzly bears tolerate each other at close proximity when food is abundant (e.g., at salmon spawning sites, insect hatches, or—in days thankfully mostly gone by—at garbage dumps). Asiatic black bears, it turns out, are quite amenable to living in captivity. So does captive breeding of species such as musk deer and Asiatic black bears douse the demand and thus help free-ranging animals, or does it simply fan the flames of unsustainable and unenforceable wild harvest? Before searching for an answer in the biological or economic realms, it is worth considering that a strategic decision is implied regarding the social acceptance of using these animals for their by-products in the first place. If this rationale for captive breeding is sound, it presupposes that consumptive use of these products (albeit from artificially reared individuals) is culturally acceptable. In contrast, if consumptive use is objectionable regardless of the animal’s source, then captive breeding in this sense will also be objectionable regardless of its effects on wild populations. Western-based organizations advocating that China phase out its bear farms are not suggesting harvesting of wild bears as an alternative; they want Chinese officials to persuade those who consume bear gall to stop doing so, and to use artificial

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alternatives instead.32 But Chinese policy statements invariably support traditional use of both bear gall and musk.33 Western-based critics of such farms have reason to hope that Chinese policy will change. For many years, Chinese trade laws allowed the use of tiger bone in medicinal products even as tigers were, officially, completely protected. This changed abruptly in 1993, when central authorities decided to ban the use of tiger parts in trade outright. Thus, virtually overnight, tiger breeding in China went from an enterprise premised on profiting from the sale of bones to one premised on, well frankly it was never clear just what it would be premised on. If Chinese authorities argued in 1992, as they currently do for bears, that sale of bones from captive-reared tigers quenched demand and thus helped free-ranging tigers, they switched sides in 1993, implicitly accepting the opposing argument.34 One crucial conceptual difference, of course, is that tigers must be killed in order for their bones to be used, whereas musk and gall come from captive animals that live through the extraction process. This distinction seems to have helped Chinese officials defend traditional use of these two products while making an about-face on tigers. In any case, the policy for now—and as far as I can determine, for the near future—is that traditional use of bear gall and musk will be supported. (It is probably a wise move, as governments at all levels in China may lack credibility to persuade traditional users to change their habits even if doing so were indeed the only way to save the species.) In the case of bears, pressure to improve the sanitary and welfare conditions of bears has resulted in a high-profile program to close small and poorly run facilities and invest more funds into larger ones (but, pointedly, putting off any expectation that bear farming would be phased out entirely as a vaguely defined “long-term objective”35). This then forces the next question: is captive breeding (and associated trade) helping or hurting the wild bear and musk deer populations? The question is currently unanswerable because we lack reliable trend data on wild populations of musk deer and bears. To answer the question, we would also need data on possible connections between the independent variables (e.g., status of the captive populations, the strength of demand for musk and gall, preference for free-ranging over artificially reared animal products, prices, and perceived risks of apprehension) and the dependent variable, population trends of musk deer and bears.36 Particularly in the case of Asiatic black bears, lack of data has not prevented the argument from becoming heated and heavy. A number of international NGOs have agitated for the Chinese government to remove bear gall from the approved pharmacopoeia, whereas Chinese officials have steadfastly maintained that because captive bears produce gall continuously and because bear gall in approved drugs comes from breeding facilities, farmed bears save wild bears. Lacking data (and not trusting in the transparency of Chinese systems), are there case studies from other countries that we might use to extrapolate general principles? Can we make any generalities about the effects of pursuing commercialization of captives on a vulnerable, wild population? Alas, there seem to be few parallels to the situations facing either musk deer or bears in China. In the nineteenth century, a number of fur-bearing animals in North America were overharvested; commercial farming of such species as red fox and mink emerged to meet market demand, and later, most fur bearers made a

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recovery.37 But the analogy between North American fur bearers and these Chinese species is too poor to allow any conclusion, and for a very important reason: unlike in China, wild harvest of these North American fur bearers continued even as commercial farms became established, and habitat for such species as red fox and mink never became rare. Trapping in the wild was not historically banned, but rather controlled and monitored. There is thus too much dissimilarity to conclude that it was captive propagation of fur bearers that enabled the recovery of wild populations. An additional candidate species to consider for insight into this issue is the South American nutria, another fur-bearing species that had become almost extinct due to excessive exploitation but later recovered. Captive breeding of nutrias began in the 1920s (primarily in Europe) and, most recently, was estimated to account for about half of the over 6 million pelts traded annually. Did captive breeding save nutrias? Perhaps, but again there are impediments to extrapolating any general principle to support current Chinese policy from the nutria story. First, nutrias, being rodents, breed far more prolifically than either musk deer or bears, and are biologically capable of a rapid response to any protection. Second, they were not only bred in captivity, but they were also introduced into the wild in many areas to which they were not native (or they escaped from captive facilities to become feral populations on their own initiative). Nutrias are now so numerous in many southeastern states in the United States that they qualify not merely as an economic resource but also as a pest. In Argentina, nutria populations have rebounded (although, this being their native habitat, they are not nearly so damaging to agriculture there, instead inhabiting mesic and semi-aquatic grasslands with little damage to crops), but they are still subject to commercial trapping in the wild.38 The short answer is that we do not know if captive breeding will help or hurt wild populations, and have precious little history to guide us. The Chinese strategy of completely prohibiting wild harvest while continuing to advance commercial use of products from these species via captive breeding is an unprecedented experiment. In recent years, there have been anecdotal reports that both brown bears in China’s west and Asiatic black bears throughout China have increased (based primarily on the increased incidence of conflicts with humans). But firearms have also been confiscated from those who earlier had them, and educational campaigns publicizing the illegality of killing protected species (including bears) have continued, so any increase in wild populations could be unrelated to the availability of gall from captive bears. It has not yet been convincingly established that the allure of profiting from selling bear gall is the prime motivation for Chinese who kill bears. Meanwhile, musk deer appear to be continuing their range-wide population decline. Faced with these tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfactory tidbits of data, I would assert that neither camp in the “breeding-them-saves-them” vs. “breeding-them-kills-more-ofthem” debate can claim the support of empirical evidence. Rather, the most parsimonious interpretation of existing information is that captive breeding of a commercially used species has no predictable effect whatsoever on the health of the parallel wild population. We cannot conclude that rearing more of a species in captivity either helps or harms those in the wild. Rather, the status of free-ranging wildlife will be determined primarily

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by the quantity and quality of their habitats and secondarily by the intensity of human exploitation. All of which brings us full circle. My assessment of captive populations raised under the fourth rationale is that, from the perspective of in situ conservation, they are identical in effect to those raised under the third (commercial) rationale, which is to say, neutral. If we want to conserve animals in the wild, we need to focus on the wild.39 Decisions about the wisdom of captive breeding need to be made by considering human demands for the product and welfare of the captive animals themselves, rather than on presumed effects on their wild cousins. It would seem, based on observations of these animals in captivity, fundamental biological characteristics, and the economic data available thus far, that the case for farming bears remains strong.40 But those same criteria suggest that the long and frustrating enterprise of farming musk deer—fundamentally an attempt to mold these secretive and twitchy micro-deer into trusty assembly-line producers of traditional Chinese medicine—be put out of its misery.

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CHINESE LEGAL INSTITUTIONS AND WILDLIFE

Wildlife continues to disappear in China notwithstanding [its] laws. —J.C. Nagle For a Western-trained lawyer encountering Chinese law for the first time, a reaction other than perplexity is a bad sign—it means that one has not really grasped the depth of the problem of understanding. —Donald Clarke

Posted above an office door adjacent to an office complex in Tianjin some years ago, an engraved sign identified the office as the “Promises-Keeping and Contract-Honoring Unit.” Presumably, the sign provided assurance that, should some commercial transaction run into problems, there was, indeed, a place one could go to ensure that promises once made would be kept and that contracts already signed would be honored. The unstated corollary, of course, was that outside of that office, all bets were off. In similar fashion, wildlife is well protected under Chinese law. It’s just when one gets to the countryside, where wildlife might actually live, that protection breaks down. Many Western-based observers of Chinese wildlife conservation (and indeed of the Chinese environmental record generally), having once understood the existence of strong protective legislation, wonder why Chinese cannot simply do what they say they’ll do. Upon learning that laws exist in China to protect wildlife, prohibit pollution, establish a huge and strictly protected nature reserve system, encourage the use of recycling and renewable energy sources, and foster other noble earth-friendly goals, Westerners scratch their heads, baffled at how loosely these laws are enforced. Clearly, as Donald Clarke has suggested, perplexity is appropriate. To reduce it somewhat, a short foray into the Chinese legal tradition is in order. For a Westerner interested in wildlife conservation and the law but unfamiliar with the slippery terrain upon which the Chinese legal system sits, an understanding of the fundamental differences between the Chinese and Western legal traditions is crucial. The very concept of law has always been much more peripheral in traditional Chinese thought than in the modern West, with law playing a far lesser role in ordering society. 92

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The Chinese have a word for law (fa), but because the term embodies a strong suggestion of fear of punishment, it is seen as a secondary, almost regrettable, necessity. More central to Chinese thought has been the enduring Confucian notion that ordering society and resolving human conflicts should ideally be managed by reliance on proper human relations (li).1 Controls for human behavior and methods for resolving conflicts should be internal rather than external. The pervasive pattern throughout Chinese history has been to rely on li, or on people who embody these proper human relationships, rather than on law in governing society. And while it is likely that the strength of li (as opposed to fa) is faltering with time, it is far too early to conclude that its influence within Chinese society is minor. Unlike in the West, where laws are viewed as impersonal and precise prescriptions for conduct and dispute resolution that are, at least in theory, applied identically to all citizens, the letter of Chinese laws is generally balanced against other factors, such as interpersonal relations, power relations, their overall contribution to larger Communist Party policy, as well as the two related and particularly Chinese notions of guanxi and saving or giving “face.” In the West, one can hardly imagine a document that calls for a more literal and objective reading than does a legal contract; indeed, the reasons for desiring a written contract are precisely so that definitions, rights, and responsibilities will be stated clearly and any subsequent problems can be resolved free of passions or other extraneous influences. Yet as recently as the mid-1980s, a sample of economic judges from Shanghai and Tianjin who were surveyed on what factors they considered in rendering their rulings on contract disputes, offered an old Chinese adage: he qing, he li, he fa (meaning, “according to people’s feelings, according to propriety, and according to law”). These judges did not suggest ignoring the legal code entirely; they merely relegated it to third place, behind “the relationship of the [parties] and the moral demands of accommodation.”2 Chinese laws are usually written in language that a Western lawyer would find impossibly vague. General principles are provided, directions are hinted at, but precise definitions, specific criteria, and bounds of acceptable conduct are not written down. In Western culture, we fully expect that much of our day-to-life will be conducted with some subjectivity and flexibility; we resort to legal interpretations only when finality, precision, and compulsion are required. Billboards erected by government-run highway departments might first attempt to persuade drivers to use their seat belts on the grounds of personal safety, but if that fails, they will resort to the one threat virtually guaranteed to capture the attention of an otherwise thoughtless driver: “It’s the law.” The driver might not know the exact wording of the law, but he is likely to be familiar with the compulsory nature of the legal code: one can either satisfy the law’s requirements, or be liable to the law’s prescribed punishment. Whereas Western laws and regulations define impermissible behavior with language such as “prohibit” and mandate required behavior or protocol with words such as “must” or “shall,” many Chinese laws opt for using words reasonably translated as “should” or “ought to,” particularly when referring to the responsibilities of government agencies.3 The clarity expected by the observer familiar only with Western legal concepts is expressly absent from such language.

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In analyzing China’s constitution, Andrew Nathan has used the term “programmatic” to describe the kind of rights it provides to citizens, concluding that the constitution “can announce what rights the state hopes to provide in due course, without embarrassment that these rights are not yet available.”4 But this lack of embarrassment is not limited to China’s constitution.5 In his assessment of China’s Rangeland Law, Peter Ho concluded that it was accurately characterized as a “symbol law.” Following the Dutch sociologist Marius Aalders, Ho described symbol laws as those that “stipulate certain norms and values not yet widely accepted in society, without the lawmaker having considered their practical feasibility and implementability.”6 William Alford and Shen Yuanyuan have described as “aspirational” the language contained in Chinese environmental laws, and pointed out how this tends to render them toothless.7 The term “aspirational” applies well to those laws and regulations related to wildlife conservation, and I have adopted Alford and Shen’s usage (although I suspect all authors agree on the concept even if they prefer slightly different nomenclature). Not all Chinese are comfortable with the state of their legal system, and it is fair to characterize the state of Chinese legal institutions as one of contention and reform.8 Some Chinese legalists truly wish to have China emulate the Western notion of “rule of law” with its promise to limit State power, impersonalize relations, and provide greater equity in resolving disputes. But others in China continue to favor “rule by law” (or at least a very “thin” conception of “rule of law”9), under which laws function to advance policies promulgated by Party and government officials, and to restrict the behavior of individuals in deference to the assumed unlimited powers of the State. Describing the contested progress of the Chinese legal system in detail is well beyond the scope of this book and my expertise. That said, it seems safe to conclude that as of yet, neither Chinese leaders nor the Chinese people generally have divorced themselves from the Confucian notion of the importance of human relationships (along with Party power) in governing and settling disputes. The result is that today China is full of laws that are not enforced, laws that—in fact—are not expected to be enforced.10 Stating simply that China is a country of men rather than laws11 may be too simple. But it remains true that the aspirational nature of China’s laws removes from the legal system any useful vision of how wildlife is to be prioritized when conflicts arise (which they do daily), and instead empowers individual bureaucrats to make decisions (whether they do so knowingly or not). These bureaucrats in turn will generally make the decisions that are simplest in the short-term. It may be relatively easy for them to deny a permit to somebody who wants to kill some animals, but the larger issues of habitat degradation caused by other government policies or other initiatives favored by the government are more likely to be resolved detrimentally to the interests of wildlife. Because there is presently no system to enforce or uphold rights that are included within China’s constitution, the fact that its character is primarily aspirational is of little dayto-day concern. Even if it were more realistic, the Chinese constitution would remain a statement of policy rather than of absolute law, because citizens are provided no recourse to guarantee implementation of its promises. However, when laws that actually direct public agencies and public funds are also aspirational in character, we run into serious

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trouble with the meaning of the “law.” If laws contain prohibitions that are viewed almost unanimously as simply too draconian to actually apply, it is unclear what prohibitions ought to replace them. Thus, aspirational laws and regulations, while perhaps useful in pointing a conceptual arrow in the direction of a desired future situation, do little to wrench the system from the rule of men toward the rule of law. By attempting to do too much too soon, such laws may—faced with the inevitability of strong opposition and discretionary officials—achieve too little too late.12 Donald Clarke has pointed out that, unlike in most Western democracies, Chinese courts are not well suited (in fact, may not even be intended) to adjudicate and balance competing rights. Rather, the principal effect of laws is to specify which organs of state government will have the power to make those kinds of decisions. But if so, the effect of aspirational law is merely to put on hold the ultimate questions bearing on conflicting claims, leaving them essentially unanswered until a decision on any given case comes from a bureaucrat. The ball, instead of being handled, is effectively kicked down the playing field. Aspirational statements in Chinese environmental laws function merely to admit that the interests of economic development and natural resource preservation are both important, that they may, in any given case conflict, but they then provide no criteria to guide the decision-making process amid that conflict in any given situation. These “laws fail to anticipate the possibility that certain government interests, particularly those of departments with major economic responsibilities, might diverge sharply from those of local environmental protection officers.”13 A State Forestry official was recently quoted by political scientist Jerry McBeath as admitting that “Different levels of government have different interests; but our government structure is unitary, and it assumes that everyone will share the same interest. This is delusion of thought.”14 THE 1988 WILDLIFE PROTECTION LAW China has had national legislation bearing on wildlife conservation since at least 1969, and the State Council issued some additional circulars and announcements encouraging wildlife protection in the 1970s and 1980s.15 But it was with the passage of the national Wildlife Protection Law of 1988 (hereafter, “the 1988 Law”) and its official implementation in 1989, that Chinese really turned their attention to the legal protection of wildlife. Today, the 1988 Law is praised throughout Chinese writing on conservation efforts, dutifully reprinted in books ranging from student texts to species descriptions, and generally held up as the pillar of the Chinese wildlife conservation system.16 It is therefore worth having a detailed look, article by article, at exactly what it says, what it leaves out, and how it operates in practice.17 The 1988 Law does four important things: (1) it designates all wildlife as belonging to the State, thereby emphasizing the State’s interest in its protection and rational use; (2) it designates species that merit special State protection, and generally prohibits killing of individuals belonging to these taxa, thereby appropriating sole power of use of these species to governments; 18(3) it encourages bureaus entrusted with wildlife conservation (generally forestry bureaus) at the national and provincial levels to establish nature reserves

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for rare wildlife, but otherwise includes no clear or enforceable restrictions on habitat reduction or degradation; and (4) it encourages and sets up protocols for managing captive breeding facilities. The 1988 Law is notably silent regarding any specific measures for species not meriting designation as either national or provincial key species. It simply requires that provinces develop measures to manage these species, noting that citizens wishing to kill these nonprotected species must obtain provincial hunting licenses. Article 3 declares that all wildlife in China is, in essence, State property, and that use rights to individuals and units are granted at the pleasure of the State. Article 4 provides a general policy statement that the State considers wildlife protection important, and goes on to encourage captive propagation, exploitation and rational use,19 and scientific research. In Article 5 we find what appears to be an odd juxtaposition of 1960s-style exhortation,20 and a suggestion of 1980s-style rule of law by which individual citizens can theoretically hold government bureaucracies accountable to implement the stated policy. It states, first, that individual citizens are charged with the duty of protecting wildlife resources, and second, that citizens also are provided rights to “inform the authorities of, or file charges against, acts of seizure or destruction of wildlife resources.” Because most of the rest of the 1988 Law concerns itself with declaring to citizens what they may not do (at least without bureaucratic approval), Article 5 stands out as unique in appealing directly to individual citizens to take proactive measures in favor of wildlife. However, nothing further is said regarding just how individual citizens are supposed to fulfill their duty, under the first part of Article 5, of “protecting wildlife resources.” In subsequent articles, the 1988 Law effectively prohibits hunting, so perhaps the affirmative duty to protect wildlife means nothing more than that citizens are charged with the responsibility of obeying these prohibitions. Otherwise, it is unclear what harmful actions or situations citizens are burdened with protecting wildlife from, and thus there is no way to even begin asking questions bearing on how they are expected to provide this protection. It seems that this statement is little more than well-intentioned exhortation. Looking more closely at the second clause of Article 5, we see what would appear to be a translation problem: citizens, it says, upon discovering a presumably illegal act of seizure or destruction of wildlife, are afforded the right to file charges, not against the perpetrator or against the government agency responsible for assuring wildlife conservation, but rather against the act itself. But there is no translation error; it is in fact behavior (xingwei), not law-breaking citizens or unresponsive bureaucrats, that should be reported and become the subject of a (unspecified) legal complaint. One can imagine that an illegal act can be reported to authorities (and if this is all that is intended, perhaps this clause is intended merely to protect the well-intentioned citizen whistle-blower), but without specifying who the reporter has the right to charge and with what, the “citizen-accountability” suggestion of Article 5 is rendered meaningless. To my knowledge, Article 5, despite being routinely parroted in the provincial-level versions of the Law, is never engaged in practice, and its presence appears to fill the function primarily of emphasizing through repetition the State’s resolve, rather than of elucidating rights and responsibilities that are to be taken as real.

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Articles 6 and 7 stipulate the agencies that are responsible for wildlife from the national down to the county level. Forestry bureaus, as variously named and empowered from national through provincial levels, are given management authority over terrestrial wildlife; aquatic wildlife is to be managed at the county level by county-level fisheries bureaus (although many counties do not have separate fisheries agencies, and any fishery issues are instead dealt with through agriculture bureaus).21 After a brief reiteration in Article 8 of the State’s dominion over wildlife and its intention to protect it by strictly prohibiting individuals and work units from actions elsewhere deemed illegal, Articles 9 and 16 provide the most substantive portions of the 1988 Law. These establish two lists of “key species” that shall enjoy special State protection and management. These articles go on to generally prohibit any killing of these species, and provide administrative protocols for permitting the rare cases in which killing—for scientific, captive breeding, exhibition, or “other special” purposes only—is to be allowed. (They also provide for governments at the provincial level to draw up subsidiary lists of species that may merit protection regionally and were otherwise overlooked in either of the two national lists.22) These lists, which name species to be afforded either “first-class” or “second-class” protection, have taken on an aura of tremendous importance within China, and are reprinted at virtually every remotely relevant occasion. In addition to books dealing with law and administration, the lists can be found in books dealing with management of nature reserves, establishment of new nature reserves, distribution and status of local fauna, and on various Web sites. At times, it seems as though these key species have become synonymous in the minds of many with the totality of Chinese fauna.23 In part because the rationale for putting species on these lists includes their being endangered (binwei), and in part because of the two-tiered nature of these lists, some American observers have been tempted to view the 1988 Law as analogous to the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA), which similarly places species requiring federal protection on either its “Endangered” or “Threatened” lists.24 But beyond declaring a general prohibition on killing species on either of two lists, the two laws have little in common. We should resist the tendency to equate or even compare the 1988 Law with the U.S. ESA; the presence of two species lists in both laws represents either convenient borrowing on the part of the Chinese, or perhaps mere coincidence. As well, Western and Chinese observers alike have sometimes placed considerable weight on whether any given “key species”25 identified by the 1988 Law is listed as being of the first class or of the second class, but the distinction appears to be both arbitrary and unimportant. For one thing, the 1988 Law is silent about the criteria for a species being put on one list rather than the other. The implication (and indeed the interpretation invariably adopted by local officials) is that species deserving of first-class protection are more important, or more in need of attention, than those only meriting second-class protection,26 but criteria for making these distinctions are lacking in the 1988 Law (as well as in the subsequent set of regulations, adopted in 1992). The only operational difference between a first- and second-class key species comes into play if a permit is desired to kill one: at this point, permits to kill individuals of first-class species must be obtained from the State Forestry Administration (SFA), whereas permits to kill second-

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class animals are handled by provincial-level Forestry agencies.27 Thus, from a practical standpoint, being named as a key species is important: it engages the heavy machinery of State bureaus in order for anything but strict protection to be official policy toward the species. But beyond having been named a key species, the listing as first- or second-class is of little consequence. Even if the first- vs. second-class distinction is intended to be symbolic or psychological rather than substantive, there still remain apparent inconsistencies in the decisions made. For those species included in the first-class list, some designations are beyond dispute. First-class species include the giant panda, emblem of all Chinese wildlife; the tiger, which exists within China only as part of tiny, fragmented populations; the wild camel, relegated now to only the most austere habitats and even there threatened by hybridization with their domestic descendents; the Yangtze river dolphin, thought to number less than 200; Przewalski’s horse, extinct in the wild until recent reintroduction programs using captive-reared animals; and the exceedingly rare crested ibis, which had been thought extinct in the wild until a group of seven individuals were discovered in Shaanxi in 1981. No one would seriously question that these species merit the best conservation nostrums in the national medical cabinet, regardless of how such a designation was made or exactly what it would mean in practice. However, the value of naming species in such clear peril as first-class protected species is considerably lessened when they are lumped together with such species as Tibetan wild ass (which are viewed as a pest by many pastoralists, and for which some provincial wildlife officials are considering deliberate reduction measures), the takin (observations of which no longer even elicit much interest in many nature reserves), and such raptors as golden eagles and lammergeyers, both of which appear, in much of China’s west, to be about as abundant as a top-level predator can possibly be. At the same time that these and other species appear to be erroneously classed with the most truly endangered, a number of species that would seem more deserving of being named to the first-class list—such as the elusive and rarely seen Asiatic wild dog known as the dhole, the argali (at least in many of the mountain ranges forming its Chinese distribution), and the old-growth dependent giant squirrel—are listed as second-class species. Certainly there is logic—maybe even necessity—in issuing a blanket ban on killing individuals belonging to species in real trouble. As well, if there is a great deal of uncertainty about the status of a species coupled with legitimate concern that it might be in trouble, a sweeping federal prohibition on killing might be the obvious course. But an objective look at the taxa currently afforded key status suggests that some relatively abundant species that have a tradition of consumptive use owe their presence on the list more to the State’s desire to assert control and deny citizens access to them than to biological necessity. Justifying this claim numerically is dicey at best, because population estimates for most of these species are unreliable. But even if existing estimates do no more than provide the correct order of magnitude, species in China’s west such as Tibetan wild ass, Tibetan gazelle, ibex, and particularly blue sheep are sufficiently numerous to absorb limited consumptive use. But the 1988 Law not only fails to provide a mechanism for regulating any such hypothetical use. By declaring relatively abundant and traditionally

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used species as off limits to citizens, and equating them with truly rare species for which consumptive use cannot be justified, it prevents the future development and implementation of effective mechanisms to regulate consumptive use. To this point in the document, the 1988 Law is focused entirely on protecting individual animals from direct killing and is silent about habitat needed for wildlife to survive. That changes beginning with Article 10, which advises forestry bureaus28 to delineate nature reserves in areas where key species “live and breed.” But neither the authority nor the encouragement to establish new nature reserves specifically to provide habitat for vulnerable wildlife was new with the 1988 Law. A measure promulgated by the State Council in 1985 had already sanctioned nature reserves established and managed by forestry bureaus as important for wildlife conservation, and by 1988, hundreds of reserves already existed (well ahead of publication of specific regulations for their establishment and management). Rather, its inclusion within the 1988 Law served the purpose of indicating that nature reserves are to act as the principal places where wildlife species, protected by the State or not, will have their habitat needs considered. Articles 11 and 12 appear designed to limit habitat degradation, at least for listed key species. These two articles seemingly invite consideration of wildlife habitat directly into any and all land-use that potentially impacts wildlife regardless of where such impact may occur. Article 11 calls not only for monitoring of potential adverse environmental impacts on wildlife, but for relevant bureaus to “deal with” such impacts.29 Article 12 calls not only for those wishing to engage in development activity with potential to harm key species to write an “environmental report,” but for Environmental Protection agencies at the relevant governmental-level to not approve such development projects without first obtaining the concurrence of their parallel bureau dealing with wildlife. These simple declarations appear superficially similar to one of the principal means by which wildlife habitat is considered on federal land in the United States, where wildlife is only one of numerous considerations. But any such interpretation of Articles 11 and 12 would reflect the naiveté Donald Clarke warned against: here we have aspirational law in all its glory. Their vague and brief language gives no clue how such treatment of conflicts or approval of such developments is to occur. Provincial wildlife offices lack personnel and budget to “deal with” such habitat conflicts even if other interests are willing to consider them. More fundamentally, wildlife offices have no authority to enforce mitigations for wildlife and no additional source of power that might assist them in advocating for wildlife habitat. As Clarke has reminded us, the issues here are not what the letter of the law says, but rather which set of actors, in practice, is empowered to advance the agenda they represent.30 I know of not a single case in which either Article 11 or 12 has been invoked. They are symbols, providing soothing language to assure the reader that the central government understands that wildlife habitat can be affected by human activity. But in context and in light of implementation, wildlife habitat is relegated solely to nature reserves. Similar aspirational sentiments are found in Article 14, in which the State acknowledges that damage can be a two-way street: wildlife cannot only be damaged by humans, but can also be a damaging force in its own right, producing “agricultural or other losses,”

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and therefore the interests of wildlife conservation themselves require that such losses be compensated. Here again, though, the 1988 Law neither sets up a procedure by which such losses can be reported, nor provides for a funding mechanism to support any compensation. In fact, having declared a general policy of compensating for losses caused by protecting these key species, the central government walks away from the problem, leaving for provincial governments the task of formalizing such compensation programs, and for “local” governments (which are not defined) the burden of funding them. Unsurprisingly, compensation for losses is rare and almost always inadequate when it is provided, notwithstanding the relatively frequent losses to property and even to human life caused by such species as macaques, bears, and wild boars. The final plank of the State’s general strategy for wildlife represented by the 1988 Law comes in Article 17, where the State not only permits, but actively encourages,31 captive breeding. Needless to add, the State reserves various rights to control and monitor breeding facilities, but the policy implications are clear: raising wildlife in captive settings is asserted as beneficial in its own right, without necessarily being linked to scientific research or educational outreach, much less restoration of wild populations. Finally, Articles 18, 19, and 30 leave to provincial-level governments any additional details needed to manage all other species.32 Each province followed up on the 1988 Law by drafting its own regulations (tiaoli) or means of achieving the national law (shishi banfa). Some provinces took the initiative of declaring (if not clearly demarcating) “nohunting” areas in addition to the formally designated nature reserves. Among western provinces, Gansu, Sichuan and Tibet took Article 9 of the 1988 Law at its word and developed auxiliary lists of species that would also be strictly protected. Thus, Gansu added muntjaks, tufted deer, and roe deer—the only resident deer not already listed as national key species—to its list of provincially protected species, as well as the reasonably abundant bar-headed goose. Tibet and Sichuan added prohibitions against killing both of their fox species (frequently used in traditional Tibetan dress), throwing in all the resident species of weasels for good measure. In general, these provincial laws parroted the spirit (and in some cases, simply copied the wording) of the 1988 Law, providing little beyond confirmation of its contents at the next-lower level in the power hierarchy.33 Were it possible to find a species of consumptive value that did not appear on either the national or provincial protected list and that existed outside a nature reserve or no-hunting area, these provincial regulations—in theory—provided the legal basis for hunting. Specific requirements for obtaining a hunting license are not clarified in these provincial-level documents, save that applications are to be to county-level administrators who, in turn, are expected to make decisions only with the consent of administrators at the provincial level. While never spelled out, the emphasis on written plans and lengthy procedures suggests that the hunting envisioned as allowable would be something quite distinct from the subsistence or recreational pursuits of interest to local pastoralists.34 In practice, during my years in the field since the 1988 Law’s passage, I have never encountered a single instance of a Chinese citizen engaged in a licensed and legal hunt.35 Furthermore, hunting usually requires firearms, and China is a country in which firearms are not, in general, legally owned by citizens. Indeed, the 1996 Firearms Law in Article

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3 declared it general policy to prohibit possessing, manufacturing, purchasing, selling, transporting, or renting guns without specific authorization from county (or higher) public security bureaus.36 What may be less well known is that, until roughly 1998, most pastoralists in China, although doubtless lacking the proper paperwork, owned guns. Until the late 1990s, legal or not,37 pastoralists were informally considered to live in a sufficiently different world as to be effectively ignored by the usually vigilant public security organs when it came to the sensitive issue of firearms. The guns they owned were usually smallcaliber, invariably old and rusty, were outfitted only with iron sights, and were probably more useful in frightening wild animals than in killing them. Still, it was a rare Tibetan tent or Kazak yurt that did not contain at least one old rifle. This situation changed beginning in about 1998, when Public Security personnel began traveling out to remote pastoral encampments to confiscate all firearms owned by pastoralists. Pastoralists were offered no compensation; the guns were simply taken. Although it might have been offered as a convenient explanation, there is no evidence that concerns about poaching prompted the blanket gun confiscation. Indeed, although poaching per se was a large problem and guns provided the easiest way to poach (for most species), the 1988 Law did not, of itself, preclude having guns or hunting, Rather, it was the 1996 Firearms Law that formalized the need for specific permission from public security bureaus before pastoralists could legally retain guns.38 Taken together, these laws present a striking and unresolved irony. As I argued in Chapter 3, Chinese attitudes toward wildlife are predominately utilitarian; consumptive use has a long history, and there is essentially no support for the kind of anti-hunting or vegetarian movements that exist in the West. Indeed, this instrumentalist view is reiterated in the very first article of the 1988 Law: “rationally using wildlife” is invoked as among the three reasons for needing such a law in the first place. Additional notices and lists promulgated after the 1988 Law continue to trumpet “sustainable use” as a worthy objective. Yet the 1988 Law, in combination with the interpretation and application of provincial- and county-level laws and regulations and the recent confiscation of firearms under the Firearms Law, act to alienate citizens from wildlife. If consumptive use is to occur, it will only be through the medium of some State apparatus, presumably in the guise of commercialized captive breeding.39 In short, the 1988 Law “protects” wild animals from killing, yet does nothing to address habitat loss or degradation. It prohibits killing of endangered wildlife, but fails to establish an infrastructure that can monitor or enforce these strictures. Moreover, it allows virtually no participation of local people in even limited taking of a great number of species that are numerous enough to be sustainably used. Thus it acts principally to alienate people from the wildlife with which they live, providing them little benefit beyond the vague sense of helping to preserve national treasures. Such a blanket prohibition in the absence of accompanying incentive programs tends to encourage movement of existing use patterns out of the mainstream and into the underground economy.40 The Chinese legal system thus posits that the costs and benefits of having wildlife accrue to all 1.3 billion Chinese souls equally. It sets up the scale for management as the entire country,

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asking citizens who live near wildlife to make sacrifices for the benefit of those living in faraway cities. It provides no preferential treatment at all for those who must pay the daily costs of biodiversity conservation. IS THE LAW PART OF AN EVOLVING UNDERSTANDING OF CONSERVATION? One way to view the 1988 Law is as part of an inevitable evolution of Chinese thinking about wildlife conservation, in which elementary steps must precede more complex and subtle ones. In his seminal textbook on wildlife management, Aldo Leopold proposed a sequence that appeared to characterize the historical development of wildlife conservation. First, Leopold asserted, came restrictions on hunting (by which he meant instituting bag limits and season lengths, not prohibiting hunting altogether), followed by predator control, reservation of game lands (as parks, forests, refuges, or other types of protected areas), artificial replenishment (via restocking and game farming), and finally, what he termed “environmental controls.”41 If the 1988 Law goes little beyond the first phase in Leopold’s proposed sequence, perhaps that simply reflects the historical reality that wildlife conservation in China remains young. If Leopold’s sequence reflects something organic in human behavior that is invariant with culture and history, perhaps we need only be patient until a more integrated approach takes hold. Alas, the premises underlying Leopold’s sequence differ dramatically in the Chinese case from what Leopold was imagining. In asserting that restriction of hunting was typically the first step taken, Leopold could not have imagined making such a large array of species potentially considered “game” completely off limits. Rather, the hunting restrictions envisioned by Leopold as a logical first step were intended to maintain access to those very game animals for a broad public by ensuring that offtake would not exceed reproductive potential. Although Leopold recognized the value of having areas completely off limits to hunting, he was clearly talking primarily about limitations on habitat alteration when speaking of “reservation of game lands.” And while it is true that he defined wildlife “refuges” as areas closed to hunting, the purpose of these areas was to provide for breeding stock that could be hunted elsewhere. Finally, when it came to the role of captive propagation, there can be no doubt that Leopold had an entirely different concept in mind from what occurs in the current Chinese system. He viewed artificial rearing as useful for scientific study, and in some cases for restoring depleted populations to the wild, but saw the production of captive animals as an end itself as anathema to the very purpose of managing “game.” Invoking Leopold to justify the argument that Chinese wildlife conservation is simply part of an organic, evolutionary process is simply not credible. If an inevitable, Leopoldian sequence cannot be invoked, perhaps it was simply necessary to take a very strong stand, to make almost everything off limits, in order to allow wildlife populations to recover. Perhaps draconian restrictions were necessary for some period of time, after which the sustainable use that is ubiquitous in Chinese writing and thinking about wildlife could gradually emerge.

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But if Chinese lawmakers are prepared for reforms and are truly looking toward loosening the current restrictions so as to allow some rational use, they recently missed a golden opportunity. On August 28, 2004, after the usual months of deliberation, the State Council adopted a long-awaited revision of the 1988 Law. Unfortunately, beyond adding a few supplementary directions regarding penalties, the 2004 revision contained only a single change from the 1988 version: in setting up any new international hunting areas, provinces were no longer required to gain approval from the SFA, but rather were simply supposed to42 report the new establishment to the central authorities so that records could be complete at the national level.43 (Additionally, because there is little scope for expanding the number of international hunting areas within China, even this inconsequential revision appears to be little more than a “symbolic” tilt in favor of provincial autonomy, which, as noted by Peter Ho, allows various factions in contention to claim some measure of moral victory without actually changing anything of substance.44) If after some fifteen years of living with the 1988 Law, the State Council (or, more properly, those charged with advising it) saw so little need to alter the original, it seems reasonable to conclude that they still supported its aims. Continuing support for the 1988 Law is also suggested by the frequency of its reiterations and exhortations by the State Council or national-level bureaus, as if repetition could suffice for rationale. Even if Chinese authorities do intend, at some point, to loosen the restrictions of the 1988 Law but are simply being very slow in getting around to it, they may find that decades of prohibiting public use of wildlife entirely has created a vacuum where a culture of sustainable use might otherwise be. By erasing all traditions of sustainable use that might have existed (at least among many non-Han ethnic groups), any resumption of controlled hunting would therefore require either the generation of a new cultural ethos or reliance entirely on the very legal culture that is so weak. Finally, planning for future expenditures in support of wildlife conservation continues to move along the lines suggested by the 1988 Law with its emphasis on strict protection of key species, expansion of captive breeding, and habitat conservation achieved predominately, if not solely, through establishment of nature reserves. If the tenth Five-Year Plan, approved by the State Council in March 2001, broke new ground by including a program explicitly for wildlife and nature reserves, it treaded upon familiar ground when these plans focused on species present on a list (in this case, an even smaller list consisting of just fifteen taxonomic assemblages45), expansion of the nature reserve system, and yet more captive breeding. The 2001 planning effort included spending goals over five-, ten-, and fifty-year periods. Although none of the monetary amounts should be taken too seriously (there are too many ways in which what occurs on the ground may differ from what is budgeted), these goals provide a rough indication of priorities through 2050. Future spending suggests the same trends seen since the 1980s (and formalized by the 1988 Law): heavy emphasis on breeding facilities and business ventures that make use of captive animals, secondary emphasis on nature reserves, and very little emphasis on building systems that allow wildlife habitat a voice in land-use decisions.

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DO LAWS CONSTITUTE A WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SYSTEM? China’s wildlife laws fail to help wildlife much not because they are too weak, but—ironically —because they are so draconian. They are aspirational in a way that renders them merely pointers toward an ideal, if unrealistic, goal, and thus allows real power to remain with local officials or private parties whose priorities are usually elsewhere. They fail to help wildlife much because they tacitly assume that costs and benefits of wildlife conservation can be realized on a scale that is unprecedented and unrealistic: thirteen hundred million people, spread from the tropical forests of Hainan to the bleak deserts of Xinjiang. Because laws bearing on wildlife conservation are viewed as relative and subject to local interpretation (and, at times, complete disregard), any such laws that are too heavily weighted toward the interests of wildlife actually work against conservation. Anyone who would point out clauses in existing law that appear to disallow activities harmful to wildlife or wildlife habitat is liable to be met with an ironic smile, an embarrassed laugh, and the slightly condescending tone of the experienced toward the naïve, reminding the complainer that this is still China after all, and that regardless of legal questions, people’s livelihoods must take precedence. Given the deep gulf between the Chinese and Western concepts of what law is, what law does, and how law is expected to operate in society, it is understandable that Western critics have suggested that, if wildlife conservation efforts are insufficient or ineffective, the answer must simply be better laws, or better implementation of existing laws.46 But even in Western countries, laws themselves are not capable of constituting a wildlife conservation system;47 at best, they can formalize the boundaries implicit in the underlying social agreements about wildlife’s worth. What is surprising is that so many Chinese themselves adopt the position that better conservation is synonymous with better laws.48 We should know by now that laws relevant to wildlife conservation in China are but a small piece of the puzzle. They can hardly be expected to shoulder the load themselves.

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6

NATURE RESERVES Poor Substitutes for Comprehensive Natural Resource Management

Almost three hundred nature reserves established in recent years have attracted much interest in particular, both in China and overseas. These reserves represent all kinds of well-preserved primitive ecosystems containing rare animals, plants, and other natural relics, some unique to China. They embody the truth, goodness, and beauty of the natural world. —Dong Zhiyong, Vice-President, China Wildlife Protection Association Experience in China clearly illustrates that merely establishing a protected area does not ensure that the area will be effectively protected. —Xie Yan, Wang Song, and Peter Schei

To begin my discussion of nature reserves in China’s west, I will start with a place that isn’t a nature reserve at all: a valley high in the Kunlun Mountains of Qinghai named Yeniugou, described in Chapter 2 in the discussion of rangeland conditions and pastoral practices. Whereas in Chapter 2 I focused on Yeniugou’s role in providing a livelihood for pastoralists, here I will focus on its importance for biodiversity conservation. YENIUGOU: A CAUTIONARY FABLE During the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, a traveler motoring up the unimproved dirt route that follows the Yeniugou River from the Golmud-Lhasa highway to the saline lake called Hei Hai (Black Sea) about 100 kilometers to the west would have observed a gradual yet discernible change in vegetation from scrub desert at about a 3,600meter elevation to lush grasslands and sedge meadows. For the first 50 kilometers one would pass pastoral encampments every so often, usually fifteen to twenty all told; but only a few of these encampments would be seen past the point at which the valley floor crosses above 4,000 meters. As scruffy, brown cliff ridges gave way to gentle, yet more massive peaks, snowfields would begin to emerge if one looked south toward the snowy crest of the Kunlun Mountains. Below these perpetual snowfields, moist sedges would be seen coating the slopes like velvet ribbons, a bright green sheen of glistening vegetation. Looking 105

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northward, one would see broad, sandy valleys covered with grasses, each separated from the next by ramparts of black slate rock, rising a thousand meters or more above. Other than this rough, four-wheel-drive road, however, only a few isolated vehicle tracks would be found snaking their way into the tributary valleys, none of which had yet been used frequently enough to deserve being termed a road. Pastoral encampments, whether lower in the desert scrub or higher up, would have consisted of a single tent, with perhaps an auxiliary storage tent, there being not a single permanent structure to be found anywhere within the valley. Even in the lower-elevation sections, our traveler would rarely see human beings. Once beyond about 4,000-meter elevation, only an occasional summer pastoralist or intrepid gold-miner passing through on a tractor—perhaps one or two daily in summer, with most cold-season days witnessing none at all—would detract from an enormous landscape otherwise devoid of humans. Beyond the stunning scenery, our traveler, if focusing attention away from the towering peaks and broad vistas toward wildlife, would gradually have discovered the presence of a unique and diverse fauna. If upon first entry one noticed only the occasional Tibetan gazelle and wild ass scampering across one’s path, a hike up any of the tributary valleys—and a good pair of binoculars—would have revealed as many as five more Tibetan Plateau ungulates. On the rocky crags or nearby slopes would be blue sheep in small bachelor groups of 10 or large mixed-sex groups of up to 200. On gently sloping grasses, one would find argali, with male groups of 5 to 15, and maternal groups of 15 to 40. Surprisingly for a valley this far west, one would also encounter an occasional white-lipped deer, a species never previously known for its abundance here, but by the early twenty-first century apparently increasing. And everywhere one looked, one would see the slow-moving black dots that, in most other Tibetan valleys, would indicate domestic yaks but here would mark this valley as the largest remaining concentration in the world of their wild forbearers. Yeniugou literally means “wild yak valley” in Chinese. Occasionally one would chance across a huge old bull, usually sitting in solitary pose or grazing alongside one or two others, who could be approached rather closely, thus helping to clarify that these were indeed wild rather than domestic animals. But the large herds of these wild yaks, in which calves were kept, would brook no such close approach. These groups would keep close to their alpine sedge sanctuary, where they benefited not only from the highly nutritious forage but also from the ability to look down upon any perceived danger, and to flee over talus, fell-field, and even glacier if necessary to recover their desired solitude. Even more numerous than wild yaks—at least early during the period—would be chiru, although they were not spread so uniformly through the valley. The herd in Yeniugou was a small one by chiru standards, numbering only about 2,000 animals, with a local rather than a long-distance migratory pattern. While small bands of male chiru could be found grazing in the cushion-plant communities of the north-facing slopes, the broad grassy valleys north of the river were home to females and their calves, grouped together in groups of several hundred, sometimes wandering out onto the rocky plains that led up to Hei Hai. If enough time were spent in Yeniugou, our traveler would eventually have discovered

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that these herbivores supported a diverse carnivore community as well. Wolves, oft-times alone but sometimes traveling in packs of up to nine or so, would be seen occasionally, seemingly in constant motion. Eurasian lynx were also about, although less commonly seen and supported primarily by the presence of Tibetan wooly hares than by the occasional opportunity to kill something bigger. And most rarely seen of all—but its presence felt just the same—were snow leopards, who haunted the craggy cliffs, never too far from their favored prey, blue sheep. But as impressive as seeing seven species of artiodactyl in a single valley would be the equally fantastic story of biodiversity occurring beneath one’s feet. For spread throughout the valley’s north-facing plains and slopes were hundreds of thousands of plateau pikas, the accumulated multitude having virtually pockmarked the soil as each family excavated its own system of burrows. These pikas and their burrow systems formed the basis for an elaborate web of other plants and animals, their presence and abundance in turn made possible only by the pioneering done by the pikas. On and near the areas of pika activity, passerine birds would be abundant, rufous-necked snow finches, white-winged snow finches, and Hume’s ground jays flitting about, sometimes into and out of pika burrows. Smaller species, such as lizards of the genus Phyrnocephalus and Mongolian jerboas, would be taking advantage of the nutrients unearthed by pika digging and the shelter provided by the resultant burrows. Attracted to this relative plenty amid the harsh alpine desert would be an array of avian and mammalian predators. Saker falcons would swoop down from their perches in river-cut banks, eagle owls would waft above in semi-circles, and larger raptors such as upland buzzards and golden eagles would soar higher yet, or occasionally be seen perched on hillocks, awaiting an opportune time to become airborne again. Among mammalian carnivores, one could encounter four predator species, each with its own unique strategy to capture pikas: Altai weasels squeezing their tube-shaped bodies into burrows; Eurasian badgers setting up local excavation sites like miniature quarries; Tibetan foxes trotting along in constant vigilance for an opportunity to pounce on a pika that had moved just a little too far from its nearest escape; and, most amazing of all, rust-colored brown bears on their haunches, mobilizing their huge frames and stout claws to dredge for pikas, frantically chasing after those that escaped. All of these species and more had managed to persist in Yeniugou despite centuries of low-intensity pastoral use, originally by Tibetans, then by Kazaks, for the roughly thirty years beginning in 1954, and more recently yet, by Mongol herders. Domestic livestock had removed some forage, and the herders themselves had no doubt killed some for themselves, yet that these species lived on indicated that these pastoralists had been either few in number, good conservationists, or both. More amazingly, these species had managed to recover from the military campaign waged on them during the Great Leap Forward, when the flesh of wild yaks and Tibetan ass became part of the government’s aid program to reduce the impact of the great famine that it had itself done so much to cause.1 And, for the most part, this native biodiversity persisted despite the complete absence of any formal government protection: no laws prevented legal entry by outsiders, no gates denied physical access to the valley, and no management programs restricted land use in deference to wildlife. Yeniugou and its intact wildlife were protected primarily by its harsh climate

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(making alternative land uses difficult), legal proscriptions against hunting (only vaguely known by pastoralists and unmonitored by any enforcement agency), and any behavioral restraints voluntarily adopted by individuals living in or traveling through the valley. But by the mid-1990s, Yeniugou’s biological integrity had become vulnerable. When a black market emerged for shahtoosh, the fine wool of the chiru, poaching began in earnest, and the relatively small chiru herd inhabiting Yeniugou was among the most convenient to would-be poachers. Between 1992 and 1997, wintertime poaching decimated the herd, and taught any survivors the lesson that Yeniugou was no longer a safe place. When government policies began to emphasize settling pastoralists down and delineating permanent pasture boundaries, Yeniugou’s pastoralists began claiming for their herds high-elevation and remote meadows they had earlier left for wildlife. As transportation links to the rest of the world improved, intrepid tourists increasingly found their way to Yeniugou to marvel at its snow-blanketed hills (although, curiously enough, not to view its wildlife), and as the imperative to develop western China’s economy strengthened, schemes emerged to publicize the valley as a location for two-day motorized tours for city-dwelling Taiwanese.2 Thus, by 2005, Yeniugou had lost its chiru to poachers and most of its argali to displacement from increasingly sedentary pastoralists. Winter homes and spring lambing sheds dotted the landscape, augmenting the tents of pastoralists and allowing larger herds of livestock in areas previously thought too remote or unproductive to merit grazing. The primitive motor road had become double- or triple-tracked in places and increasingly easy to negotiate, as hundreds of Daoist pilgrims trundled through the valley each summer to pray at the shrine of Yao Chi, the Jade Fairy Pond, which had, conveniently, been built for them by staff of the Golmud Foreign Affairs Bureau. In short, Yeniugou, which in the past had maintained its spectacular fauna due to a happy coincidence of biological productivity, habitat diversity, and lack of disturbance from people, had begun to look like a place in need of proactive conservation measures, and perhaps, of formal nature reserve designation. And by late 2001 a proposal to establish a “Kunlun Nature Reserve” that included Yeniugou had in fact been written by the Forestry Bureau in Golmud and submitted to provincial authorities in Xining for consideration. But as of 2006, the nature reserve proposal had not been approved, and all indications were that it never would be. Now this is the point in the story where one normally expects to find the standard complaint aimed at those provincial authorities. With Yeniugou so clearly meriting better protection, why not move forward with the nature reserve proposal? Was it lack of funds, lack of interest, or simply bureaucratic ineptitude? Wouldn’t designation as a nature reserve be useful at this point, and weren’t provincial officials being short-sighted in not seeing that? But hold off on your judgment for a little longer: the story is more complex than that. Before you assume that nature reserve designation would ensure the wild and primitive nature of Yeniugou, accompany our traveler up the valley again—this time in about the year 2020—as the valley is envisioned by the “Kunlun Nature Reserve” proposal that provincial authorities were evidently rejecting.3 Viewing it this way—first from the status

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quo perspective and then through the lens of the nature reserve proposal and plan—will help shed light on the conceptions underlying nature reserve designation in western China, and lead us into a wider-ranging assessment of both the achievements and the tremendous problems of western Chinese nature reserves. A traveler entering the Yeniugou portion of the Kunlun Nature Reserve in the year 2020 would immediately notice that what had once been a valley inhabited only by a few pastoral families had become a rather more populated and busy place. A modern entrance station, occupied by a staff of seven or eight, would sit at the valley’s entrance, along with a newly constructed bridge over the Yeniugou River (where an oft-treacherous ford had earlier prevented vehicular access). The main road would now be paved throughout its 110-kilometer length, and an additional 140 kilometers of improved (albeit unpaved) road would now lead into the various tributary valleys, on which some of the new reserve’s thirteen vehicles would drive for patrolling and photographing wildlife to popularize the area. Most of these vehicles would be based at the station headquarters in Golmud, which in addition to a full office, would include a research center, a staff training center, and a museum, complete with mounted specimens of wildlife for educational tours. Four additional guard stations further up the valley would be manned, each equipped with coal stoves for heating, generator-powered electricity, telephones (connected via lines supported by an 80-km-long line of concrete posts), computers, television sets, and DVD players. At each, in addition to the permanent staff of two or three and possibly visiting researchers or government dignitaries, one would find staff members’ families, as well as small herds of livestock kept for their personal consumption. Piles of household garbage as well as coal for fuel would, no doubt, encircle each building. A particularly treacherous road would snake up toward one of Yeniugou’s higher peaks to a fire lookout, where intrepid staff would be posted.4 Back at the main station, our traveler would find not only a well-equipped office building, but also a kitchen, a storage warehouse, a garage, and a small weather station. Most attention, however, would be focused on the newly established captive breeding center, which would function as a display of wildlife, probably including chiru, that otherwise would be difficult for visitors to observe.5 Support staff and facilities for the breeding center staff would no doubt be found nearby. Most users of the newly paved road would not be reserve staff, however. They would instead be tourists attracted by the Daoist symbolism of Yeniugou, their numbers swelled by advertising efforts supported by the reserve administration.6 Their numbers would not be unlimited: reserve capacity had been set at 1,260 tourists per day, so it is unlikely that more than 200 vehicles would make the round-trip daily. To cater to them, five yurt-like tents would have been set up along their route, along with a small restaurant and entertainment center, where tourists could watch ethnic dancing in the evening. To further their interest in wildlife, an additional six tents would be set up specifically where wildlife was most likely to congregate and at which the tourists could attempt to photograph wildlife. Nor would the pastoralists and their livestock be gone. True, a few would have been moved from the westernmost section of the valley, but most would remain. All would live in permanent homes, and have clearly demarcated grazing areas. In addition to these

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pastures, one would find non-native grasses (planted by reserve staff) on approximately 27 km2 to provide supplemental forage, and these areas would be surrounded by some 80 km of wire fencing. To reduce their use of livestock dung for fuel, these pastoralists would make use of wood from some 5 km2 of planted fuel-wood forest, irrigated by a system of canals and aqueducts from various tributary streams.7 Something that our traveler of 2020 would not see in Yeniugou would be the diminutive rabbit relative, the pika. This is because reserve management would already have eliminated this unwanted species through a program of poisoning (as well as unspecified “biological controls”). While perhaps unintended by the reserve proposal, this likely means that many other species, from the flocks of rufous-necked snow finches to the lithe and colorful Tibetan fox to the awe-inspiring brown bear, would also have become greatly reduced in abundance, if present at all. Would our visitor to the Kunlun Nature Reserve of 2020 see wild yaks, white-lipped deer, or argali? No management policies for these (or any other) species are included within the proposal and clearly its writers hoped these species would still be present. But given the magnitude of increased human presence and activity the proposal suggests we would encounter in 2020, it seems unlikely that these species would have survived in anything resembling their abundance of the late 1990s. Argali and chiru would likely be gone entirely, and wild yaks would have retreated to the most remote meadows and grasslands. (In one of the greatest ironies of the Kunlun Nature Reserve proposal, a principal raison d’être was declared to be protection of the chiru, and the document assumed that Yeniugou had 2,000 to protect. Alas, the proposal’s authors neglected to investigate whether those animals were still present: by the time of the proposal’s writing, the chiru had already been extirpated from Yeniugou.8) In short, the Kunlun Nature Reserve would, by 2020, have destroyed the very wild quality that had allowed Yeniugou’s amazing fauna to survive into the 1990s. Locating permanent staff (inevitably accompanied by families and serviced by a support network) directly in the most sensitive areas (ostensibly to protect the wildlife) would have had the perverse effect of displacing the very animals they were intended to protect. Encouraging large-scale tourism would have yielded educational benefits for the visitors at the price of reduced function of the very habitat needed by those animals being visited. Pastoralists, whose earlier lower density and dispersed use of rangelands had allowed for coexistence with all the native wildlife, would have been squeezed into an experiment in North American–style ranching, the sustainability of which in such a fragile environment is quite unknown. A keystone of the area’s biodiversity, the plateau pika, would have been removed in deference to preconceived notions of harmful and beneficial species. Museums, captive-reared animals, and scripted ethnic dances would have replaced the natural flora and fauna as Yeniugou’s principal attraction to visitors. Perhaps those seemingly stubborn provincial officials knew what they were doing after all. How could a proposal to prioritize nature conservation in Yeniugou produce such a perverse result? Why would the architects of this plan, entrusted with providing for one of

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China’s most important wildlife areas, propose increasing rather than decreasing human disturbance? Why would they propose to eliminate pikas, a key component to the area’s biodiversity? How could they have gotten it all so wrong? To answer these questions, we must look at both the formalities and the realities of Chinese nature reserves, examining what is written on paper, what is actually occurring on the ground, and the sources of the discrepancy between the two. NATURE RESERVES ON PAPER: STATISTICS AND REGULATIONS Contrary to what one might assume in a country so focused on economic development, proposing and approving nature reserves had, by about the year 2000, become a very popular activity in China. Perhaps in reaction to a perception that Chinese civilization had historically been at war with nature, nature reserves had, sometime during the 1990s, become “politically correct.” Thus, in proposing nature reserve status for Yeniugou, planners in Golmud were riding a national tide, not bucking one. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find anything that Chinese take more pride in than their nature reserves. Today, Chinese conservationists proudly point to the fact that China boasts a larger land area nominally dedicated to nature conservation than any other country except the United States. Although China’s first formal nature reserve was established only in 1956 and very few were added until the 1980s, the next twenty-five years witnessed an explosive growth in both the number of reserves and the amount of land nominally under nature reserve protection, both unprecedented historically and without analogue in any other country. From an estimated 34 nature reserves nationwide in the year 1978, the number of nature reserves in China had reached 481 in 1987, 926 by the year 1997, and by the end of 2003, was only a single designation away from 2,000 reserves.9 Early during this development, the focus for reserve establishment was on isolated forest fragments among the otherwise agriculture-dominated eastern and central portions of China. But after a number of studies and critiques in the late 1980s noted the relative paucity of reserves covering mountain, plateau, and grassland biomes, western provinces also began designating nature reserves.10 Because of western China’s geographic scale—and possibly because the actual effect of designating a mapped area as a nature reserve remained unclear in so many minds—these western reserves tended to be huge in scope. Thus, as western Chinese reserves were added, the growth in area of nature reserves nationally displayed even more impressive rates than did statistics for the number of reserves. By the end 2003, nature reserves—at least on paper—made up almost 15 percent of China’s total land area. Although Gansu and Xinjiang had previously designated some very large desert biome reserves, as of 1987 the only large reserves located on the Tibetan Plateau or similarly high mountains of the west were the Arjin (1983) and Taxkorgan Nature Reserves (1984) in Xinjiang, and the Qilian Shan Nature Reserve (1987) in Gansu. However, in the 1990s, western provinces began engaging in what appeared (at least from afar) to be a competition to designate as much area as nature reserves as possible, as though a prize would be

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awarded to the province that had most rapidly declared the largest chunk of its territory off-limits to humans. After designating the 34,000-km2 Zhumiulangma Nature Reserve near the north slopes of Mount Everest in 1988, Tibet followed up with the largest of all, the 300,000-km2 Qiangtang Nature Reserve in 1993. As though determined not to be outshone, Qinghai declared the 83,000-km2 Kekexili Nature Reserve shortly afterward, in 1995. Whereas these latter two reserves were largely uninhabited, other smaller reserves, both in the western provinces and elsewhere, were being hastily nominated and approved in places that had long since been occupied and used by people. These designations appear to have been made with complete disregard for the number of human occupants, level of incompatible development, importance of existing economic activities for people, or the historic value placed on living in the place by locals, and conflicts in land management were inevitable with such designations.11 The movement to declare large swaths of already settled territory as new nature reserves reached its high point in the year 2000 when Qinghai Province, with very little advance word or study, declared its entire southern tier—at 318,000 km2, an area somewhat larger than that occupied by Poland—as the new Sanjiangyuan (Source of the Three Rivers) Nature Reserve. (Within a few years, these planners, perhaps realizing that their audaciously sized nature reserve encompassed villages, towns, and small cities12—in all a human population of about 556,000—had reduced its size to a still enormous 152,000 km2.) By 2003, the impressive national statistics—some 1.4 million km2 of nature reserve throughout China—owed themselves largely to the contribution from a few huge reserves in the west. The eight largest nature reserves in Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Tibet encompassed an area equal to that covered by China’s remaining 1,991 reserves.13 What is more, the State Council in December 1994 set down very strict measures intended to conserve native biodiversity within these reserves. A reading of the 1994 Nature Reserve Regulations leaves little doubt that Chinese nature reserves were intended to prioritize natural systems and severely limit human influence.14 In most ways, the proscriptions against human activity detailed in the regulations were more restrictive than those found in any of the oft-cited International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) protected area categories,15 North American national parks, or U.S. wilderness areas. These regulations prohibited timber harvest, livestock grazing, hunting, fishing, dredging, collecting medicinal plants, cultivating crops, grass burning, mining, and rock collecting anywhere within reserve boundaries.16 Although not legally required, these regulations also set up a three-tiered system of zoning that virtually every nature reserve plan has followed since.17 The most restrictive protection is to occur in designated “core zones” (hexin qu), somewhat more relaxed regulation is to occur in “buffer zones” (huanchong qu), and a bit more flexibility yet is to be provided in “experimental zones” (shiyan qu). (Although the regulations provide no guidance regarding the proportional allocation of reserves among these zones, most appear to be divided roughly equally.) The core zones of reserves appear designed to provide protection that is as close to absolute as can be imagined. Article 27 of the Nature Reserve Regulations begins with language that can only be described as draconian. It states: “People are strictly prohibited from entering core zones of nature reserves.” Not

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“. . . people wishing to exploit natural resources . . .” or “. . . people unaffiliated with nature reserve management . . .” just “people.” Unsurprisingly, the regulations immediately equivocate: If it is necessary to enter a core zone for the purposes of scientific research, measurement, or survey, permission must first be obtained from the relevant nature reserve management authority at the provincial or higher level, and application must include a detailed work plan. Those wishing to enter the core zone of a national-level nature reserve must obtain permission from the national bureau entrusted with nature reserve management authority from the State Council. Exceptions to the absolute exclusion of human beings from the core zones of nature reserves thus appear possible, but only for valid scientific reasons, and only with written permission. But the intent of the core zone to act as an ecosystem entirely free from the influence of human activity is reinforced by further language: “People who have residence within the core zone of a nature reserve must be removed. Proper arrangements for such expulsion are to be made by the local people’s government where the reserve is located.” But even outside of the almost-sacred core zones, the 1994 reserve regulations are clearly intended to preclude the kind of natural resource exploitation that would be required for people to make a living within them. In buffer zones, which presumably surround the core zones and allow a slightly relaxed set of proscriptions, neither tourism nor any other business enterprise is allowed. Instead, buffer zones are intended for scientific and research purposes only (and these activities are allowed only under official sanction of provincial authorities). Only in the last, experimental zone, can tourism be allowed, and even here, the regulations state that such tourism must be consistent with the nature reserve function.18 So it would seem that, in the experimental and buffer zones of nature reserves, people may live on, but not off, the land. Yet in rural or pastoral China, it is difficult to imagine how people can possibly make a living where they are not allowed to farm, graze livestock, hunt, fish, cut timber, or extract minerals; human residents must surely be few in these zones as well. One could hardly ask for more thorough conservation of wildlife than to demand that large areas be free to respond only to the forces of nature: core zones, in the language of the Nature Reserve Regulations, sound like federally designated wilderness areas in the U.S. system, a concept that was not embraced by the U.S. Congress until 1964 and even now engenders considerable hostility in some quarters. Beyond core zones, nature conservation remains a clear priority. So to an advocate of wildlife and wild places, the 1994 Nature Reserve Regulations sound like a gift from heaven; a prescription for welcome respites from China’s otherwise human-dominated landscapes. And indeed, had Chinese nature reserves been limited to areas where such management was feasible and acceptable to a broad range of interests, such a legal standard might actually have been kept. But because no nature reserve existed in China prior to 1956, and most existing as of late 2004 were established only after the early 1980s, the

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strict protection suggested by the regulations was immediately out of touch with what anybody—national, provincial, or county officials, not to mention local people—had in mind. Almost all nature reserves already had people living in them (one calculation was that as of 2004, between 1.25 and 2.85 million people resided within the core zones of nature reserves nationwide;19 needless to add, many more must have been living within nature reserves but outside these core zones). These people were already exploiting the natural resources in ways that were contrary to the intended management. As the number of areas under nominal nature reserve protection rose, the discrepancies between what was codified in official regulation and what was occurring on the ground—indeed, what anybody believed could occur—became greater and greater. As the area to which the regulations applied became larger and more complex, the regulations themselves became increasingly irrelevant. It was left to individuals at various levels of government to make personal decisions impacting land management because the rule of law had been rendered moot by the utter remoteness of its text from reality. Thus, as with the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law that preceded them, the 1994 Nature Reserve Regulations were aspirational in character, reflecting an ideal of biodiversity protection that no local administrator was expected to fulfill. The aspirational nature of the regulations—and indeed the key to understanding why Chinese nature reserves in reality bear so little resemblance to the vision they describe—is explained by the two critical elements they leave out. First, they do nothing to wrest control of land management from whichever governmental level possesses it at the time of reserve designation (typically township-level collectives) in order to transfer it to whichever agency is accorded management responsibility (typically the provincial-level forestry bureau, less frequently the provincial-level environmental protection bureau). That is, the prohibitions contained in the regulations sit uncomfortably atop whatever other activities are already legal and ongoing on the land at the time of designation, as provided for by local, regional, or provincial economic imperatives. They in no way countermand or supersede other authority; rather, they simply provide dual, conflicting, and unresolved mandates.20 Second, neither the 1994 regulations nor any subsequent documents provide a guaranteed funding source for administering the reserves. While administrative rules and oversight are to come from Beijing, most funding for reserve management is to come from lower-level governments. Even as further regulations from the State Forestry Administration in Beijing have provided specific and detailed staffing standards (as well as detailed standards for the number and size of guard stations, type of equipment to be purchased, width of roads to be constructed, ad infinitum, all calculated based on the size and type of the nature reserve21), funds for those staff must be provided by county and provincial governments. Even upon obtaining elevation to national-level status (among other categorizations, all Chinese nature reserves are classified as county-, provincial-, or national-level, the latter being reserved for the most important reserves, with elevation requiring an acceptable management plan and lengthy application procedure), day-to-day funding responsibility remains with provincial-, county-, and township-level governments. Unsurprisingly, reserves are chronically underfunded and undermanaged. In accord with

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the general reform of government operations in China, reserves have increasingly been expected to generate their own income, often resulting in reserve staff exploiting the very resources they are tasked with protecting, or promoting schemes to generate revenue externally (usually by encouraging tourism).22 Further, the detailed “engineering standards” that followed upon the documents of the mid-1990s and were intended to apply nationwide, echoed themes in resource management that had been promulgated outside the realm of biodiversity conservation. Thus, for example, we find detailed standards (and implicit assumptions that reserves will thus contain them) not only for informational signs, boundary markers, and necessary guard stations, but also for fire protection lookouts, meteorological stations, fencing, reforestation, and pest control. When it comes to captive rearing of wildlife (usually termed “rescuing” in these documents), national standards go so far as to mandate the size of cages by species (e.g., 16m2 for a bear, 5m2 for a wolf, and 0.7m2 for a marmot). Thus, priorities arising from the fields of livestock raising, commercial forestry, zookeeping, and other interests find their way into national-level standards, which planners and administrators of local nature reserves ignore at their peril.23 Given the general tendency—inculcated by centuries of Confucian thought and supplemented by a half-century of Leninist Party rule—to follow existing patterns rather than break new ground, it is not surprising to see that nature reserve proposals and management plans treat the regulations and subsequent documents as templates, adding specific local data only where absolutely necessary. The task of producing a management plan has thus become one of filling in the blanks of a standardized form. Under such a conception, conserving nature becomes not so much a question of determining what the threats are and how they might be resolved, as an exercise in matching expectations already published by higher authorities. Let’s see: Guard stations? Check. Fencing? Check. Preventing forest fires? Check. Restoring degraded grasslands? Check. Controlling harmful rodents and insects? Check. A rescue and captive-breeding center for saving wildlife? Check. (Alas, after these are built, few funds are available for anything else.24) Further, the problem with such human “engineering” (sometimes also called “constructing”) is only partly that by building houses, offices, exhibition halls, meteorological stations, fire lookouts, tourist facilities, roads, and other structures, humans necessarily congregate and create their own demands on the natural resources they are supposed to protect. The larger problem is that “constructing” nature reserves is often intended to be taken quite literally, that nature reserves as existing at the time of legal recognition are not considered sufficient or whole but instead require additional improvement by human means. Thus, we have planting of forests (even where none ever existed), “restoration” of grasses (regardless of grassland state), erection of raptor platforms (because more raptors must be a good thing), and artificial propagation and “rescuing” of individual animals (whether they need it or not). This leads, naturally, to pika poisoning as a sanctioned activity within nature reserves, even though livestock, with which pikas might conceivably conflict, are nominally prohibited. Thus we get our Kunlun Nature Reserve, which proposes to remove the keystone of its own biodiversity.

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ON-THE-GROUND REALITIES IN WESTERN CHINA That Chinese nature reserves have not necessarily lived up to their expectations has now been widely reported in both English and Chinese, but most case studies have come from southeast of my artificial dividing line.25 Arguably the most well publicized case study is that of Sichuan’s Wolong Nature Reserve, the first and largest protected area for the giant panda. As Liu Jianguo and his colleagues have demonstrated, designation of Wolong as a nature reserve not only failed to halt deforestation, but the rate of forest loss actually increased after designation, to levels similar to those outside its boundaries. The root cause of forest degradation was not, as might be assumed, traditional activity by local people already living in the reserve but rather by an increase in their exposure to market forces that occurred when tourists began arriving.26 Additionally, artificially planted forests from the 1960s and 1970s, although seemingly thriving, have not provided the necessary preconditions for bamboo growth, and thus, although qualifying as reforestation, have not functioned as new panda habitat.27 A number of other case studies suggest that the problems documented in Wolong are shared broadly. Continued poaching, pollution of important waterways, inappropriate use of critical biological resources, poor or no management, and destructive attempts to raise funds—often by abusing the very resources entrusted for protection—have been reported in most reserves studied.28 Nature reserves in China’s west have been the subject of fewer reliable reports about the degree to which they fulfill their mandate of protecting biodiversity. This is in part because their huge scale and forbidding terrain make travel and investigation quite difficult. What little information is available, however, paints a picture of reserves that exist primarily on paper. Where reserves were designated to minimize or reverse some perceived degradation of, or threat to, flora or fauna, they have generally not yet had a positive effect on biodiversity. Where reserves were designated in areas still quite wild, native flora and fauna have generally persisted, but even in the most wild and remote of western nature reserves, serious losses have occurred despite their legal status. Examples from some of the larger reserves in the west must suffice where a full analysis is impossible. Among the largest of the early designations in the west was the Qilian Shan Nature Reserve, straddling the mountains of the same name in Gansu. Formally established in 1987 and elevated to national level the next year, the reserve is said to cover an impressive 26,530 km2 along the spine of one of the west’s major mountain chains, protecting an array of wildlife and their habitats from low to high elevations.29 Habitats in the Qilian Shan are predominately grasslands at lower elevations and alpine rock and fell-field at higher elevations (the range has extensive glaciers), but the Qilian Shan also contains pockets of naturally occurring spruce forest that survived deforestation campaigns during the Great Leap Forward and play an important role in regulating water discharge into the heavily agricultural Hexi Corridor to the north. In the field, however, the Qilian Shan Reserve is recognized as existing only within these small and isolated forest tracts, where tree cutting is prohibited. The reserve functions as a no-logging zone, but otherwise has no visible existence. None of the staff (headquartered in the city of Zhangye) monitors or protects wildlife, which is left to cope with whatever habitat influences the region’s intensive livestock industry

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imposes. Without diminishing the tremendous importance for downstream water users of maintaining natural forest cover (the Hei River, which drains most of the Qilian, is already overused for irrigation and runs dry by the time it enters Inner Mongolia30), the Qilian Shan Reserve has provided precious little habitat protection for sensitive wildlife.31 Another early reserve in the west was the even larger Arjin Shan Reserve in Xinjiang, which at 45,000 km2 retained the honor of being China’s largest for a number of years. Among the first to host western scientists, the Arjin Shan, virtually uninhabited by people, was initially reported to contain uncountable numbers of wild yaks, Tibetan wild ass, argali, and chiru.32 Subsequent surveys suggested that the distribution of these species was uneven, and that while they might be abundant in some areas, they were completely lacking in others.33 When chiru poaching began in earnest, the small protection staff was quickly overwhelmed, and the calving areas in the Arjin became prime poaching fields. The report of biologist Bill Bleisch, who spent a number of field seasons in the Arjin, is worth quoting at length:34 Both herd size and herd number of wild yak seem to have declined during the last decade. Chiru, target of organized poaching for international markets, have been reduced to a small remnant of their former range and numbers. The migratory herd of chiru that formerly roamed the western third of the reserve appears to be functionally extinct. Argali may be rapidly approaching local extinction in the reserve. Brown bear must now be presumed extinct within the reserve until proven otherwise. During the past decade, it appears that there have been substantial decreases in the abundance of nearly all large mammals in the [Arjin Reserve], with the possible exception of kiang and wolf. The immediate causes of all of these reductions can be assumed to be human disturbance, and in most cases, uncontrolled hunting. This in turn reflects the lack of effective monitoring, educational programs, patrolling and enforcement. The root causes of these problems are lack of resources and sustainable support for protection in the reserve. The lack of sustainable support for nature reserves is a problem that is generic to the Chinese nature reserve system. According to Chinese nature reserve law, even national level nature reserves are dependent for their operating budgets on local government. However, local government generally sees no immediate benefits from the existence of a nature reserve, and often sees substantial opportunity costs in the form of precluded options for profitable land uses, for exploitation of resources, or for development of infrastructure. Nevertheless, they are required to provide funds for salary and for operational costs, even for national level nature reserves. The result is that nature reserve management authorities are powerless to address the many threats faced by the reserve’s habitat and wildlife. Even in the best cases, they manage to do little more than monitor the deteriorating situation, with no means and no support to mount effective counter-measures. Despite much lower human density than elsewhere in China, most reserves in the west generally still confront the oft-conflicting requirements of ecosystem integrity and local

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human use. The Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve was primarily intended to protect nesting and feeding habitat for migratory waterfowl, but its bird-watching tourism program has been powerless to prevent the continued shrinkage of the lake, which has resulted in Bird Island, once a sanctuary from mammalian predators, becoming a peninsula. At Gansu’s large (4,284 km2) Yanchiwan provincial-level reserve in the western Qilian Mountains, livestock grazing, mining, and hunting occurred within the boundaries just as it did outside them. When asked what protective measures the reserve had taken, Yanchiwan’s director could respond only that hunting was strictly forbidden (as it was for almost all species outside the reserve). As of 1999, the three provincial nature reserves in western Gansu’s Aksai County (two small reserves at Sugan Hu protecting lakeshore habitat for migratory birds, and the sprawling 3,960 km2 Annanba Wild Camel Reserve), all of which contained people making a living off the land as they saw fit, were each allocated yearly budgets of approximately $200 (but even that amount constituted a doubling from its level of a few years earlier). In the even larger Kalamaili Wild Ungulate Reserve in Xinjiang, an 18,000km2 region of desert scrub and low hills, Kazak pastoralists with historic winter grazing rights competed with newly reintroduced Przewalski horses as well as established wild ungulates for sparse forage.35 Even in its reduced size, the gigantic Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve in Qinghai incorporated so many pastoralists, towns, schools, and other human infrastructure that five years after its designation, staff at its headquarters in Xining were still scratching their heads, wondering just what it was they were supposed to do. In contrast to the situation at Qinghai Lake, Sugan Hu, Sanjiangyuan, and parts of Annanba, the huge reserves in the highest and coldest parts of the Tibetan Plateau, the Qiangtang and Kekexili Reserves, were established where human use was almost nonexistent. Although situated in the center of the Tibetan cultural area, very few pastoralists lived in these frigid grasslands and meadows. Here the problem was not to roll back undesired human development or disturbance but rather to maintain a reasonably pristine condition into the future. Guards and patrols were needed, even if they themselves caused some disturbance, to deter poaching and evict illegal miners. And there is little doubt that these protective efforts have enjoyed some success. However, even here, in these most remote and pristine reserves, new mining development is planned. The Qiangtang Reserve plays an important role in reducing poaching of chiru, but its northern section, unfortunately for the chiru, lies atop a large oil and gas deposit that is likely to be exploited before long (hard-rock mining activity has already increased).36 Further, the number of pastoralists and livestock in both the Qiangtang and Kekexili Nature Reserves actually increased since their formal designation. County officials in Tibet had encouraged pastoralists to move into portions of the Qiangtang (an estimated 20,000 pastoralists have recently taken up residence within the reserve), and even provided subsidies for some herders living near the Qinghai border to relocate to the Kekexili Reserve (despite acknowledging the very low pasture productivity in these areas).37 In short, nature reserves occupied a sizable portion of China’s wild west by 2005, but had yet to make much of a contribution toward conserving any of the west’s wilds. A few points are, by now, begging to be made. First, it is by no means clear that nature reserve designation caused the problems discussed above. Indeed, the status of biodi-

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versity in these areas might well have been worse had nothing at all been done. Second, some reserves, particularly in forested sections of southern and central China where key species are located, are improving their management capability greatly. Often aided by international and domestic NGOs and provided with outside funding, reserves in Sichuan, Shaanxi, Yunnan, and Hainan are beginning to investigate problems honestly, engage in dialogue with local people affected by land management policies, and view their mandates more holistically.38 Third, hobbled as forestry and environmental protection officials are by fundamental problems of authority and funding, designating a nature reserve gives them some standing to at least speak on behalf of biodiversity. Although they lack clout to affect land management, absent nature reserve designation such officials are not empowered even to enter the policy arena. Fourth, Chinese academics and agency personnel are becoming increasingly aware of and outspoken about the problems besieging China’s nature reserves. There are currently efforts under way to develop a more firm legal footing for nature reserves (although the process of drafting laws in China remains lengthy and mysterious). Finally, “paper” reserves are hardly a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. They can be found in almost all developing countries, and reflect both genuine sincerity about protecting biodiversity (at a time when countries have neither institutions nor trained personnel that can do so), and unresolved conflicts between such noble intentions and the ever-present imperative to support short-term development. The world’s first national park—and perhaps even today its most famous, Yellowstone—was a paper park for roughly its first twenty years of existence. Yet Yellowstone was ultimately provided not only with effective protection, but also with an enormous buffer area (in the form of the first of many U.S. national forests) in which natural resources were to be used in a managed and sustainable way.39 Clearly, from the perspective of conserving native flora and fauna, nature reserves on balance represent steps in a positive direction. My analysis and critique should not be interpreted as suggesting that China’s nature reserves should be abolished, or that the concept of retaining areas essentially free from human disturbance is anything but noble. Rather, my argument is twofold. First, by oversimplifying the problem, the Chinese policy of equating nature reserve designation with conservation has shown itself to be ineffective. In decreeing that huge swaths of the landscape should henceforth become entirely free from natural resource use (lacking either legal authority to implement such a change or feasible alternatives for people thereby deprived of their livelihoods), the policy set itself up for failure. Second, by virtue of the confusing and wooly terminology and direction provided by high-level leaders, in which protection from human use and furthering local economic development were melded into an incomprehensible mash, nature reserve staff have been encouraged to promote money-making schemes that, comforting words notwithstanding, inevitably compromised the reserves’ conservation function. Promises of one-off funding from higher levels have encouraged planners to propose nature reserves not in order to limit economic development, but to encourage it. As I have emphasized throughout, China’s west differs so markedly from its more populated regions that the one-size-fits-all approach toward nature conservation embodied in the current Chinese nature reserve system is particularly ill-suited here. The huge areas

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involved in the west make enforcement of unpopular restrictions virtually impossible. But pastoralism, by far the predominant land use, can generally be pursued without great loss of biodiversity, at least if monitored and done with consideration for particularly sensitive wild species. For coexistence to work, however, wildlife, grazing, and forestry officials must have an understanding of, and some leverage over, livestock–wildlife interactions over the entire landscape, not merely within designated nature reserves. Finally, the notion that remote (and often high-elevation) nature reserves can support themselves financially through ecotourism (let alone substitute entirely for land uses forgone on neighboring lands) is completely unrealistic. The current paradigm says, “within nature reserves, biodiversity rules supreme and production for human needs does not take place; outside of nature reserves, neither biodiversity nor long-term biotic sustainability are legitimate concerns.” In eastern China, where land use is so intensive that biodiversity is perforce severely compromised, this model makes sense. In western China, a more appropriate paradigm is one in which, in addition to (somewhat smaller) nature reserves, biodiversity is a concern everywhere, and incentives to maintain it are supported by monitored and regulated use.

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SPECIES STORIES

In this chapter we finally get our boots muddy by digging into the conservation status of particular species in China’s west. There isn’t room to focus on all the species that might be investigated, nor is my intent to be exhaustive. Rather, I have selected eight species (or species groups) exemplifying themes in wildlife conservation that cut across taxonomic boundaries and recur frequently. I have minimized biological details about each animal, because those are available in the technical literature and have already been summarized admirably by George Schaller.1 Rather, I focus on the conservation issue for which each species, unique as it is, provides an emblem. Each species should be seen as a proxy for larger issues rather than as an isolated case. Musk deer are affected by that most particularly Chinese of conservation issues, the demand for body parts used in traditional Chinese medicine. Przewalski’s gazelles have been relegated to a small fraction of their original geographic range because “eastern” China has progressively moved westward, replacing native habitats with human-dominated ones. Argali are little used in traditional medicine but are valued highly for their beautiful horns. That value has not, as of yet, been mobilized to protect critical habitats, and this species is one that appears all but intolerant of much human presence. The chiru turns the conventional wisdom regarding supply and demand of wild products on its head. Whereas tigers, bears, and many other species that live outside China are subject to killing to satisfy the material demands of Chinese, the chiru is a Chinese endemic that is threatened by foreign demand. Pikas and zokors are small mammals whose status, depending on one’s viewpoint, is either that of a pest, damaging to the economic livelihoods of local people, or a sentinel, warning us of ecological damage inflicted in the rush toward economic development. In either case, the two are positioned squarely within the area of contest between conservation and development. Western China is home to two endangered large wild ungulates that are ancestors to fabulously successful domestic species: the wild yak and the wild camel. Whether these wide-ranging herbivores can persist or will ultimately be completely replaced by their domestic descendents remains an open question. Large carnivores are difficult for people to live with in any circumstance, and it might be surprising to learn that China still has so many potentially dangerous species with big teeth and sharp claws: wolves, dholes, and brown bears. Finally, there are also species in China’s west that appear to be thriving, probably because they are not in high demand for 121

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consumptive use, or they conflict only minimally or locally with other economic uses of the land. Tibetan gazelles, Tibetan wild ass, and blue sheep are of interest more because of what we can learn from success (as well as because they sometimes are viewed as a nuisance and their populations may need to be reduced) than because they are at any risk of imminent extinction. USED AND ABUSED: MUSK DEER My years of work in China owe a large debt of gratitude to the humble musk deer.2 This is the first species I became interested in, and the development of my project studying this little proto-deer provides, in many ways, a microcosm of wildlife conservation issues in China in general. Although the species is not well known in the West (all musk deer species are restricted to Asia), the animal is the source of the well-known musk, both the word and the stuff, a secretion from a unique gland that has been used in traditional medicine (and, until recently, as a base for fragrances) for thousands of years.3 Musk is mentioned in the Bible. There are other wild mammals that exude a musky odor, such as muskrat and musk ox, but only the musk deer produces true musk. Only relatively recently have synthetic chemicals replaced its use in the perfume industry (and such replacement is not complete), and raw musk is still highly sought after for its purported medicinal properties. To date, there are no acceptable substitutes for those who value its medicinal use. But because only adult males produce musk, and even they produce only a small quantity, the inexorable logic of supply and demand causes musk to be, on the basis of weight, among the most expensive substances on earth.4 It often sells, by weight, for prices several times higher than gold. The musk deer conservation issue encapsulates crucial themes that reappear consistently throughout Chinese wildlife conservation: traditional consumptive use; initial lack of any social and/or governmental institutions to regulate harvest of a public resource; governmental overreaction in the form of a draconian prohibition on any killing (lacking, needless to add, any realistic measures for its enforcement) that neither credited traditional customs, nor allowed local people realistic alternatives to consumptive use, nor provided incentives for them to defend their local resource from outsiders; and finally, official (if tacit) abandoning the value that wild musk deer habitat might have by promoting policies that focus on meeting the unabated public demand for musk solely through using animals raised in captivity. In musk deer we encounter a species for which consumptive use had a long, distinguished, and culturally embedded history, but for which social institutions to regulate that use never evolved. Lacking any such regulation, human off-take rates were probably historically limited—and musk deer populations thus avoided extirpation—primarily via the interaction of low human population density and difficulties of accessing musk deer habitats. As human populations and ease of access increased in the twentieth century, musk deer populations became increasingly vulnerable, and as soon as organized efforts to consider their status in China began, it was clear that they were in severe decline.5 (China had begun experiments with captive breeding of musk deer in the 1950s6). But China took no action to

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stem the population’s decline until the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law, at which time musk deer were listed as a Category II species, which effectively ended any legal harvest of wild animals. As I argued earlier, the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law is aspirational, providing no enforcement system or funding to back up its lofty goals. There is no reason to believe that killing musk deer (which officially became “poaching” with the Law’s effective date in 1989) declined in response to the prohibition; it simply went from being an unrecognized economic activity to an illegal one. By the 1980s, with increasing access to vehicles and official approval for doing business in a free-market setting, musk deer hunting had become primarily a specialty operation, conducted less by locals living in musk deer habitat than by distant farmers, truck drivers, or merchants with time on their hands and profit on their minds. And with the exception of a few nature reserves (and often, not even within them until the late 1990s), no protection whatsoever was provided for the thickly vegetated and usually (although not necessarily) forested habitats that musk deer require. Musk deer all belong to the genus Moschus within the family Moschidae, and are thus not really true deer at all, being only slightly more closely related to Cervidae, the main family of deer, than to antelopes, sheep, or giraffes.7 Their most obvious non-deer-like trait is that adult males lack antlers, but instead sport long, saber-like tusks (elongated upper canines) that protrude below the upper lips and are thus visible indications of maturity.8 Musk deer are smaller than most true deer, only about a half-meter high at the shoulder, and even a large male weighs in at a modest 17 kilograms (two musk deer that I captured in Qinghai in 1990 both weighed about 10 kilograms). In common with most other ruminants of this size, they are generally solitary and territorial rather than herd-forming. Associations among individual musk deer, other than mother–fawn relationships and during mating, are rare. They are selective feeders, choosing from the most nutritious part of whatever plant species exists in any given area.9 Although generally associated with forest cover, musk deer do not appear to require trees; rather, they seek shelter, particularly when not foraging, and this can be provided by a thick shrub canopy as well as by true forests.10 They are lithe, agile, and sure-footed on almost any terrain, and often use steep cliffs (as long as vegetation cover exists) on which to rest and avoid predators. They also use their acute sense of smell and hearing to evade danger, and if approached, demonstrate their fever-pitch temperament by furiously bounding away. These characteristics, together with their crepuscular (i.e., early morning and late evening) feeding schedule give musk deer a well-deserved reputation for being very difficult to observe in the wild.11 Unfortunately for them, however, they also tend to be creatures of habit, using well-worn trail systems and defecating at fixed latrine sites, thus making it easy to determine where they live (even if they can’t be seen) and where to set snares for their capture. (These snares, even if they don’t kill the animal immediately, always result in the animal’s death.) It is this last characteristic that has made them so vulnerable to excessive mortality. It doesn’t take a great deal of field experience to learn where on any given mountainside musk deer have recently been active, and thus even a person new to an area can quickly optimize his chances for capturing and killing one. The relative ease of determining locations for snares is magnified in the relatively open habitats used by musk deer on the Tibetan Plateau (in comparison with those in Sichuan, Yunnan, or even in forested

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sections of Mongolia or Siberia). There are many places within the Qilian and Kunlun Shan where one can stand on a high lookout point, view the surrounding scene, and point, with reasonable confidence, to where the musk deer are. Or, rather, where the musk deer were. Reliable numbers are lacking, but all indications are that musk deer numbers have continued to plummet.12 A declining musk deer population is hardly news, but what appeared to be a continuing decline throughout the 1990s suggested, for the first time, the possibility that musk deer will face complete extirpation from large areas of their original range.13 In earlier years, pastoralists had a long tradition of hunting musk deer and either using musk in traditional medicine, or trading it to Chinese, Arabs, Persians, or directly to Europeans.14 It is likely that such historic use reduced musk deer population densities generally, but also likely that harvest intensity would have stopped short of that needed to extirpate populations when the costs of harvest increased beyond the expected payoff. This economic calculus seemed to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when musk deer snaring became common among Hui and Salar agriculturalists from Xunhua and Hualong counties in eastern Qinghai and Linxia County in Gansu. By all accounts, small groups of these itinerant poachers would typically saturate an area with wire snares and, given the relative ease with which musk deer travel routes could be identified, kill most of the animals within reach in a short time.15 A number of socioeconomic factors also conspired to make musk deer poaching a rational decision for many agriculturalists during slack seasons, even those living as far away as eastern Qinghai and adjacent Gansu. The market for domestically manufactured products containing musk was no doubt large enough to create demand capable of soaking up any available supply.16 As of the early 1990s, musk deer pods could be sold for ¥800–1,000,17 a windfall that may have surpassed the annual income of many agriculturalists at the time. The expenses involved in mounting a poaching expedition were relatively low: if a vehicle could be commandeered (quite possibly an inexpensive and fuel-efficient tractor), the main expenses were food and gasoline, both of which have always been inexpensive in China (petroleum products in China have always been partly subsidized and among the world’s cheapest). Wire or even rope snares would have cost little, and itinerant agriculturists could pitch a humble camp and live very simply. Considering that any given expedition was likely to yield a number of mature, male musk deer, it is likely that income from such poaching far exceeded the costs involved. Because the only economically valuable part of the animal was the musk pod itself (measuring only 4 to 5 centimeters in diameter), smuggling the product out of the mountains back to towns and cities for sale would have been easy; any guard stations along the way, even if operational, were designed solely to check for illegal timber felling, not for wildlife poaching. The risk of being apprehended by law enforcement personnel in transit was thus negligible, and no doubt even lower once having returned to commercial centers.18 Because these poachers were mobile and nonresident, they had no incentive to promote sustainability of the musk deer population in any given locality: if musk deer were reduced to levels low enough to make continued snaring efforts unprofitable, poachers could simply move to another area. When musk deer in all areas known to any given group were extirpated, these agriculturalists could easily move on to different items of trade, or simply return home. And,

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perhaps most critically, because local residents had no legal right to any economic benefits from musk deer inhabiting the mountains in which they grazed their livestock, they had no economic incentive to intercede in the illicit killing or smuggling. In fact, given historical enmities among the different ethnic groups and the reputation these itinerant Hui and Salar agriculturalists had for being armed and dangerous, locals would have had ample reason to give them a wide berth. Thus, the system in place all but guaranteed that musk deer populations would be reduced to very low levels, perhaps even to extirpation. In the dramatic decline of musk deer, at least in primarily pastoral areas, we have a failure that is almost entirely one of policy: the biological and technical facets of the problem provide no reason to expect such a tragic outcome. Why should the demise of musk deer in western China have been avoidable? First, musk deer pose no direct conflict for pastoralists. As small-bodied, selective feeders, musk deer can potentially inhabit brushy and forested hills alongside domestic livestock with minimal forage competition. Pastoralists are more than willing to complain about anything that makes their earning a living off livestock yet more difficult, but the presence of musk deer is unlikely to have been one. True, extensive reduction of understory plants caused by excessive livestock grazing would come at the expense of musk deer, so that a trade-off between high livestock populations and healthy musk deer populations would have existed. But—had there been institutions to allow its realization—the economics of growing musk deer would likely have made it beneficial for pastoralists to reduce pressure on their habitat from their domestic herds in exchange for benefiting from the presence of musk deer. Second, it is possible to extract musk from adult males without killing the animal. This is accomplished routinely in captive situations, and at least experimentally in a wild setting.19 It might therefore be possible to develop systems in which male musk deer were captured, milked for their musk, and then released back into the wild, possibly to live (and produce musk again) another year. The long-term biological effects of such a management option would have to be considered. (Because it has never been tried on a large-scale basis, no research has been initiated on the topic.) Perhaps more problematic than the possible adverse biological effects of yearly capture and musk extraction would be the logistical difficulties of capturing the animals without injury. A research study at Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal showed that live capture is feasible, but whether it could be routinely undertaken by local villagers without extensive training is less certain.20 Although it is not difficult to determine where the animals are likely to be, safely herding them into a situation in which they can be handled gently is another matter entirely. However, musk deer appear capable of achieving reasonably high densities, and doubtless have the reproductive capacity to respond quickly to moderate levels of human-added mortality. If a harvest could be restricted to adult males only, musk deer populations could sustain even higher off-take rates. If achievable on the ground, the demographic effect of killing, for example, 40 percent of all adult males over 1 year old in any given year would have been biologically inconsequential. Thus, even had there been no way to avoid killing, and even had some killing involved females, a considerable harvest would have been biologically sustainable. Finally, although the territorial nature of musk deer breeding systems no doubt func-

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tions in part to limit the ultimate population density they might reach, such territoriality provides a potentially critical advantage to any scheme in which local communities would limit their own harvest rates and to protect their musk deer from outsiders who might free-ride on the system. With the price of each male musk deer so high, it would be difficult to manage a sustainable harvest if individual pastoralists were allowed to compete against each other, or to procure for themselves the entire benefit of killing one. However, if entire communities took on the burden of caring for musk deer habitat and protecting local musk deer from poaching, and if financial benefits were distributed in some fair way among community members, a community-based harvest system might well be economically attractive.21 But the sustainability of even a community-based system could be tenuous if there were a mismatch of spatial scales between the typical size of a male musk deer’s territory and the typical size of an area that could be defended from human incursions. In the case of musk deer, the spatial scale would seem to be just right, offering the potential for naturally bounded human communities to identify forest patches that logically “belonged” to them, and therefore to identify, protect, and potentially harvest “their” musk deer. Clearly, the devil of such community-based harvest schemes would still reside in the details. How much (if any) reduction in grazing pressure from domestic livestock (or protection from excessive timber harvest) would be necessary to maintain a sufficiently dense musk deer population? Could such forgone financial benefits be compensated by the sale of musk? How would financial benefits from musk deer living in a communitymanaged area be allocated among community members? How would purchasing agents distinguish between presumably legal community-generated musk and presumably illegal poached musk? Would it be necessary to initiate active patrols to guard against poaching (both from within the community and from outsiders), or would the presence of herders’ eyes, already routinely in the field, be sufficient to deter poaching? There is little doubt that a high degree of social cohesion and coordination would underlie any such system, at least on the village level. As well, government oversight, in the form of a more highly developed wildlife management bureau, would probably become necessary. Alas, the current direction of Chinese policy suggests that we will never get a chance to find out just how difficult these questions are to resolve. Despite the continued interest in musk as a traditional Chinese medicine, there appears to be little support for the concept of proceeding along the lines suggested above (and indeed, in many areas, it is probably already too late, the musk deer populations having declined to densities that require restoration before any harvest could be considered). To the degree that attempts are being made to cope with the current demand for musk, Chinese policy appears to have given up on the potential for wild habitats in the forested or shrubby regions of the west to satisfy it. FROM THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE: PRZEWALSKI’S GAZELLE Where a once more widespread species has become quite rare, either through human habitat alteration or overexploitation, a logical assumption would be that the relict popu-

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lation would be situated roughly in the center of its previous geographic range. Animals living in the center would benefit from having potential conspecifics immigrants in all directions, and—a reasonable guess might continue—if the appropriateness of habitat conditions varies along some sort of gradient, the conditions in the center might be the very best, tailing off in quality as one traveled toward the historic periphery. Such an assumption, logical as it is, would be wrong.22 With the Przewalski’s gazelle, we encounter an example of the counterintuitive phenomenon in which remnant populations of once more abundant species are, as often as not, found at the edge, rather than the center, of the species’s geographic home. Nowadays, this gazelle is found only in Qinghai, and within this province, only on the northern shores of Qinghai Lake as well as in two or possibly three small, isolated locations relatively close by. This extremely restricted distribution has led most who have any familiarity with the species at all—it hardly qualifies as famous outside of China—to associate it closely with the famous lake (known to most geographers prior to 1949 by its Mongol name, Koko Nor, which, like the Chinese version, means “blue-green lake”). In recent years, the Przewalski’s gazelle has even become a flagship species for conservation of the environment surrounding Qinghai Lake in general, and both its endangered species status and the efforts to recover it have become a point of pride for Qinghai-based government officials. Just as Sichuan has its pandas, Shaanxi its crested ibis, Hainan its Eld’s deer, and Yunnan its elephants, Qinghai has its Przewalski’s gazelle.23 With the increased national attention recently paid to perilously endangered species, one almost gets the impression that even if it were not truly endangered, Qinghai officials would claim that it was. More to the point, the very limited habitat within which it still survives, as well as pressure within those habitat patches, has allowed for only a relatively few individuals from this formerly much more abundant species to persist. Today, notwithstanding its relatively low profile on the international endangered species scene, the Przewalski’s gazelle has the honor of being not merely the most highly endangered gazelle in China, but, in fact, of being the rarest species of antelope in the world. And while attention is appropriately focused on how to prevent this graceful gazelle from joining the pantheon of Chinese species that have become extinct within historic times—thus concentrating work on its remaining habitats around Qinghai Lake—it would be mistaken to lay the causes for its predicament at Qinghai’s feet, and thus to ignore the larger lesson of how this state of affairs came to be. For all the available evidence suggests that the Przewalski’s gazelle is a species adapted to the semi-arid conditions typified by the plains and valleys of the Ordos and Alashan plateaus of Inner Mongolia, the steppes surrounding Ningxia’s Helan Mountains, and Gansu’s Hexi Corridor.24 Its historic distribution no doubt included 3,000-meter-high Qinghai Lake where we find it today, but there is little indication that it was ever a resident of the higher, colder reaches of the Tibetan Plateau south and west of the lake. Rather than typify the habitats for which the species has evolved, Qinghai Lake appears to represent a refuge of sorts, the last redoubt of a species that has been in a state of continuing contraction from formerly suitable areas.25 Because it was not until attention was paid to its plight in the late 1980s that any scientific information was collected at all, virtually everything we know about

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the Przewalski’s gazelle comes from the Qinghai Lake populations. But the historic perspective is critical, because scientists are necessarily hobbled in making management recommendations by the fact that we know how the gazelle interacts with other flora and fauna only in an extreme corner of its natural habitat. We must guard against the tendency to conclude that it prefers, or is well adapted to, certain habitats or to cope with particular predators or competitors associated with the lake, when a cursory view of its historic distribution tells us that most of the Przewalski’s gazelles that have ever lived never encountered such conditions.26 Despite the past dozen years of intensified research by scientists, the Przewalski’s gazelle today remains arguably the least understood member of the subfamily Antilopinae. First encountered by a westerner (the Polish-Russian explorer N. Przewalski) only in 1875, and described scientifically only in 1892, the species remained a backwater of scientific interest until recently. Making sense of what was known prior to the 1980s was made more difficult by the confusion about just what this animal was. Originally considered a new species of the closely related genus Gazella, it was later misnamed as belonging to the genus Antilope, and when finally put in the correct genus Procapra, initially believed to be only a subspecies of the Tibetan gazelle, P. picticaudata. Until genetic methods allowed for somewhat more objective classification, such confusion was understandable: superficially, the animal closely resembles not only its congenerics, the Tibetan and Mongolian gazelles, but also the slightly more distantly related goitered gazelle. Historic accounts are thus filled either with misidentifications, or simply nonidentifications, with many early explorers simply referring to “gazelles” (or worse yet, “antelopes”). Local hunters or pastoralists likewise would have had little reason to distinguish the local type of gazelle from any other: why would they even have known that there existed more than one kind?27 And given the Przewalski’s gazelle’s small size and generally wary nature, even contemporary observers can easily mistake it for any of the other three or vice versa.28 Basic as it sounds, without both detailed knowledge and really good observation conditions, figuring out which species one is looking at under typical sighting conditions is far from straightforward. We currently understand that the diminutive29 and graceful Przewalski’s gazelle has occupied an ecological (and geographic) niche somewhere amid the other three Asian gazelle species. It is well adapted to xeric conditions, but probably is not a desert specialist like the goitered gazelle. It seems to be capable of normal reproduction and survival rates in relatively cold and unproductive plateau environments up to 3,500 meters, but is clearly not a high-plateau specialist like the Tibetan gazelle. (Where their distributions abut, north and west of Qinghai Lake, observations suggest that the Przewalski’s gazelle remains on the lower-elevation flatter terrain, whereas the Tibetan gazelle will also use higher elevations and steeper terrain.30) Its historic range extends eastward almost to Shanxi Province, but Przewalski’s gazelle appears to have never been present on the vast Mongolian steppe, which was inhabited instead by the Mongolian gazelle (see Figure 7.1). And here, before knowing anything more, one gets a hint at the genesis of the problem: the Przewalski’s gazelle has always wanted to be in places increasingly occupied by people. Not quite at home on the sparsely inhabited Tibetan Plateau, nor quite at home

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Figure 7.1

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Historical and present distribution of Przewalski’s gazelle.

on the vast steppe (where people and their livestock were widely separated from each other), nor on the uninhabitable deserts, the Przewalski’s gazelle appears always to have occupied the hidden corners, the cracks and crevices separating habitats either too severe or too densely peopled. And as those places became increasingly populated, the corners too small and the cracks and crevices filled in, the gazelle was left with only the environs of Qinghai Lake for a final refuge, just far enough away from the intensive grazing and agriculture of lower-down lands to give it some space, not quite so far away as to require it to become the plains, desert, or alpine specialist of its taxonomic cousins (all of which have fared considerably better).31 The Hexi Corridor of Gansu has long been converted largely to agriculture, and compact Ningxia, with an area of only about 66,000 km2, now has an estimated population of almost 6 million. Recent population increases in Inner Mongolia have been even more dramatic, with a huge upsurge of immigration evidently beginning in the 1930s and continuing until recently (see Figure 7.2). Because we cannot specify exactly the historic range of the gazelle, we cannot quantify the anthropogenic changes in its habitat, but it is clear that humans are now up to an order of magnitude more numerous than they were only 150 years ago. It is unlikely that the Przewalski’s gazelle found itself without adequate food in its former range. There is, of course, overlap in diet between this small gazelle and the domestic sheep and goats that now live where it used to, but it is also likely that this mixed feeder could usually find sufficient quantities of dicotyledons and shrubs of lesser interest to sheep and goats.32 Rather, the species appears to be intolerant of people and their live-

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Figure 7.2

Estimated human population of Inner Mongolia, from ancient times to present. Historical data from Wen (1995); 2000 data from UNESCAP (2004).

25

2000 20

Population Size (Million)

1982 15

10

5 1949 1937

0 1267 BCE

265 BCE

742 AD

1575

1912

stock, unwilling—if physically quite able—to graze among or within domestic animals, and no doubt was displaced by dogs and other domestic animals that usually came with people. Of course, Przewalski’s gazelle were hunted locally for meat, particularly during the Great Leap Forward, but there is nothing in what we know of their population dynamics which suggests that they should be any less able to sustain hunting pressure than the other gazelle species. Rather, if subsistence hunting was disproportionately focused on the Przewalski’s gazelle, it was probably because they were closer by. It appears that hunting and direct forage competition played subsidiary roles to appropriation of land by humans with their agriculture and livestock in the demise of Przewalski’s gazelle from its former low-elevation habitats. In the case of the closely related and declining (but still very much more abundant) Mongolian gazelle, we know that wild populations have done well where people have remained sparse, but declined where human population density has increased.33 Until roughly the mid-1950s, the area around Qinghai Lake probably provided quite a suitable place for the species to make a stand. Situated west of Sun-Moon (riyue) Pass, which has traditionally been seen as a cultural border between China and Tibet, it was populated primarily by Tibetan and Mongol pastoralists living a subsistence lifestyle. The Xining Valley had been occupied by Han Chinese in good numbers since at least the Han Dynasty, and we know that deforestation of the Huang He Valley leading up toward Qinghai Lake had become severe by the early Qing Dynasty.34 Tibetologist Graham Clarke

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has written that, during Qing times, “There was no settlement of Han peoples on the Tibet Plateau itself, where pastoralism remained the dominant economic form” and that even “under Nationalist China there was little further administrative control” of areas west of Sun-Moon Pass. The automobile road to Qinghai Lake remained in poor condition until the mid-1950s, and the railway to Golmud was not constructed until the late 1950s (reaching Golmud in 1961).35 Thus, although Qinghai Lake itself was a well-known gathering place for both Tibetan and Mongol pastoralists, it seems unlikely that, as of 1949, human influence on native fauna there had changed greatly from historic times. This all shifted dramatically in the 1950s, as People’s Liberation Army (PLA)-operated agricultural projects put thousands of hectares of grazing land around the lake into production of wheat and rapeseed, economic refugees from Shaanxi, Shandong, and Henan provinces tried their hand at agriculture around the lake, and there began a general increase in human activity associated with the various reform-through-labor camps, mostly located west of Qinghai Lake on the periphery of the Qaidam Basin (populated largely by victims of the Anti-Rightist purges of the late 1950s).36 During 1949–87, the area around Qinghai Lake was subject to a human population increase from roughly 22,000 to over 90,000, a doubling of livestock number to almost 2.5 million, and a twentyfold increase in grasslands converted to agricultural use.37 Qinghai Lake’s water level had begun lowering at a rate of 10 to 11 centimeters yearly, retreating from its estimated 1956 size of 4,566 km2 to an estimated 4,256 km2 in 2000.38 Although the lowered lake level probably did not affect Przewalski’s gazelles directly, newly exposed lands were sandy and unvegetated, and increased sandstorms no doubt exacerbated desertification trends that may have already been put into motion by excessive livestock densities. Expansion of cultivated areas around the lake continued into the 1990s, with an additional 53 km2 put under the plow during 1994–99 (satellite imagery from 1985 had suggested that cultivated land already constituted the single most common land classification along Qinghai Lake’s north shore at that time). Statistics are not available with which to evaluate grazing trends, but as Tibetan pastoralists became increasingly involved with the market economy, it is likely that their density also increased near the lake, where easy access to markets probably gave them a competitive advantage over more remote pastoralists. An increased number of livestock competing for an ever declining acreage of grasslands evidently resulted in substantial range degradation. Because no quantitative monitoring has occurred, we can only guess at the rate of change, but as of 2004, cursory examination of grazing areas around the lake suggested that most xeric and/or saline areas had become dominated by the unpalatable grass Achnatherum splendens, and more moist areas contained no litter left over from previous grazing seasons. Government sources reported that fresh grass production in Gangcha County north of the lake had declined from a mean of 2,057 kilograms per hectare in 1959 to 1,271 in 1987. All statistics are unreliable, but the general situation as of the late 1990s seemed indisputable: the natural vegetation surrounding Qinghai Lake was in serious disrepair, and the relative solitude typical of most Tibetan Plateau grasslands had become a thing of the past. Such was the fire that Przewalski’s gazelle found itself in, having been forced out of the frying pan of its former, lower-elevation habitats during the preceding 100–150 years.

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Its only refuge itself seemed to be succumbing to a similar pattern of increased human encroachment and use, leaving less and less room for the gazelle.39 Estimates of the number of surviving gazelles in the early 1990s were as low as 200. Further, there remained concern (amid considerable uncertainty) that these gazelles were fragmented into three or more subpopulations with no opportunity for demographic or genetic interchange. If isolation was complete, the situation was indeed dire. It now appears that either these earlier estimates were too low, that genetic interchange may be occurring, or that there may have been some recovery since that time. Increased survey efforts have suggested that, as of 2004, the total worldwide population of Przewalski’s gazelle was at least 300, and may have been as high as 500. However, even if it was this high, the species was in considerable danger of complete extinction: there were none in zoos or other captive breeding facilities. The confiscation of pastoralists’ guns in the late 1990s may have had some beneficial effect, as it became almost impossible to kill gazelles directly without firearms. But in the mid-1990s, government-sponsored initiatives intent on reversing pasture degradation began providing financial incentives for herders to fence individual pastures, and with the high density of pastoralists around the lake, fences soon sprang up everywhere the eye could see. Wire fences to control movements of domestic sheep might seem to be but a minor inconvenience to wild species, but some wild ungulates are known to be unable—or simply unwilling—to jump over or crawl under fences. A well-known case is that of the American pronghorn antelope, which suffered dramatic declines in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada during the nineteenth century, but has come back, partly because of improvements in livestock fence design that allow occasional passage.40 Such also seems to be the case with the Przewalski’s gazelle, which may have the strength to leap over fences, but is burdened by an evolutionary history ignorant of such requirements. In recent years, researchers have noted a number of gazelle mortalities adjacent to fences, where the animals seemed unable to cross to alternative pasture or in order to avoid danger. By the year 2001, the plight of the gazelle had finally caught the attention of officials at the highest planning levels within the State Forestry Administration bureaucracy, and when the new list of fifteen focal species was announced (sifted from among the existing species under special State protection), the Przewalski’s gazelle was among them. Modest expansions of the area under whatever protection Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve could afford were funded. Further good news for the gazelle came from the implementation of the “retire cropland, restore grasslands” (tuigeng huancao) program (see Chapter 2) to address the fact that so much grassland had been unwisely converted to cropland. But the larger issues of livestock density and fencing remained unaddressed. Even if they were, it seemed that the best conceivable future for Przewalski’s gazelles had them occupying but a tiny fraction of their original habitat. VALUABLE, VALUED, BUT SENSITIVE: ARGALI If there is a single species that wildlife advocates in western China care to highlight, it would doubtless be the giant Asian wild sheep, the argali. The majestic sweep of the

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males’ horns—which begin in a massive base above the forehead, curve gracefully back over the head, flaring outward above the ears and then curving back forward again toward the animal’s mouth and nose—gives this beautiful animal an appealing image. But it is the animal’s economic allure, its potential to bring in hard cash from Westerners—unique among Asian fauna—that actually lies behind the prominent position given to this species at provincial- and county-level forestry offices throughout western China. Mention argali and the topic immediately turns to trophy hunting and the potential it has to allow argali to pay for at least some of their own conservation. This, in turn, leads to the tempests inevitably spawned whenever the controversial subject arises of killing animals for their heads. There are not many other species for which otherwise sane people will part with twenty, thirty, or even forty thousand dollars.41 Before discussing hunting, economics, and incentives, however, a brief understanding of the animal is helpful. Given the prominent position accorded it by provincial officials, it is a bit ironic that the argali is not uniquely Chinese. In addition to China, argali inhabit most of Mongolia and Tajikistan and most mountainous areas of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, as well as isolated portions of Uzbekistan, Russia, and the northernmost regions of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Still, they are broadly distributed throughout western China, and if nowhere common, can be found in Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet, and possibly in small numbers in Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. But even though argali are closely related to the bighorn sheep familiar to North Americans, and look very much like bighorns on steroids, they are ecologically quite different. Whereas bighorn sheep find comfort and security on or near steep cliffs and rarely move far from favored areas, argali are denizens of gentler hills and readily move large distances (sometimes even crossing wide deserts and plains between distinct mountain ranges) in search of forage and security. Whereas stocky bighorns prefer to bound upward into crags and ridges when sensing danger, long-legged argali will run across sloping hillsides to put distance between themselves and a threat. Thus, bighorns are relatively easy to observe and study whereas argali are among the wariest, most sensitive, and most elusive species on the planet. It is, after all, not merely the huge horns of adult males that trophy hunters prize so highly, but also the great difficulty of approaching the animal closely, making a successful hunt that much more of a perceived honor. Rather than thinking of them as simply an Asian bighorn, think of them as a curious hybrid between a bighorn and a barren-ground caribou and you’ve got the picture. In a broad sense, argali live everywhere in western China that has enough graminoids to provide forage and sufficiently hilly terrain (although not so steep or rugged that it cannot be negotiated). In a narrower sense, however, argali seem to thrive only when a number of factors come together to minimize what would otherwise be an extremely inhospitable environment. Put another way, argali have a very wide geographic distribution, but a surprisingly narrow ecological niche. They are tolerant of arid environments but are not a true desert-adapted species. To support such a large body, they appear to require more high-quality grass than deserts can usually provide, and thus depend on the orographic precipitation of their preferred mountain habitats to provide sufficient quantities of grass. However, argali are rare among the mountain ranges in the very high-elevation

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vastness of the Kekexili (southwestern Qinghai) or Qiangtang (northern Tibet).42 My own observations suggest an explanation for this: argali cannot tolerate deep snow in winter; thus they must either live year-round where snow depths are moderate, or have access to winter ranges where snow depths are usually low. For example, during November–December 1998, and then again in April 1999, I worked with staff at the Kharteng International Hunting Area (KIHA) in Aksai County, western Gansu, to identify areas of argali concentration. Despite days of searching from vehicles and climbing ridges where we knew argali were often seen during summer, we found argali routinely only within the relatively low-lying hills (at elevations generally below 4,000 meters) on either side of the Kharteng River. Unconvinced that either of these surveys had uncovered the full extent of argali winter range in this area, I returned in early February 2002 to map their full extent of winter occupancy, extending our survey beyond the geographic bounds that KIHA staff believed argali to use. The results of this winter survey confirmed that KIHA staff’s anecdotal knowledge had probably been correct all along: argali were indeed restricted in winter to the low hills KIHA staff had previously directed me to. Every argali group we saw was located in regions that were either completely snow-free or had only patchy snow cover. Our observations of tracks (or the lack of them) suggested that argali avoided areas with more than approximately 0.2 meters of snow.43 Argali are clearly a mountain ungulate; one need not bother looking for them if no mountains are in sight. That said, they are uninterested in (or perhaps incapable of) using steep terrain as a refuge from predators. On the Tibetan Plateau, they largely cede the steepest slopes and most broken terrain to blue sheep; in the Tian Shan of Xinjiang, these cliffs are left to the ibex. In fact, argali use slopes and ridges not so much to benefit from any topographic refuge they provide as to facilitate visually scanning for potential predators, a higher platform allowing a more encompassing view than a lower one. Their favorite haunts appear to be on ridges where they can see in multiple directions simultaneously. Upon sensing potential danger, argali may continue to move upward along a ridge, but if danger is perceived to be imminent, they are as likely to run down as up (i.e., away from the most forbidding topography), seemingly trusting in their speed rather than their maneuverability in difficult terrain. Excepting the period immediately preceding the breeding season (and, of course, the breeding season itself, when they are focused on conspecifics of the opposite sex), argali seem to be interested in only two things: finding abundant forage and looking out for wolves. Their primary defense against wolves is space; an argali’s location at any given time is a continual compromise between proximity to good forage and distance from wolves. Thus, topography that is too broken, jagged, or cliffy may actually be avoided by argali, as it could act to limit their ability to see the full landscape surrounding them and thus limit their perceived measure of adequate distance from any threat.44 In sum, argali are hemmed in. Although they will cross surprisingly wide valleys, even moving between discontinuous mountain ranges, they cannot be considered a plains animal in the same way that gazelles or wild ass can; they need topography. But simply mapping steep topography fails to capture the nuance of argali habitat

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needs, because they do not tolerate slopes that are too rough or steep. Although they are basically denizens of arid climates, they appear to require both quantity and quality of graminoids (in summer) and shrubs (in winter) more similar to the needs of the even-larger-bodied wild yak than the desert-adapted goitered gazelle. Yet mapping precipitation as a surrogate for forage similarly fails to capture argali habitat needs, because too much moisture means too much snow, and they require winter ranges that are either blown free of snow or simply don’t accumulate much. And because argali use solitude as a defense against predation, they further limit themselves to undisturbed habitats—which, I will argue below, constitutes their greatest conservation challenge. Thus, argali must find an elusive compromise, negotiating a host of adverse factors in order to successfully maintain their populations. George Schaller considered that the primary threats to argali populations were poaching, the isolation and fragmentation of herds, and possibly disease.45 Although I agree that the status of argali—at least in many regions within its range—is precarious and its future at risk, my take on the relative importance of various limiting factors is somewhat different. Until the mid-1990s, poaching was certainly rampant in western China, and even today it no doubt occurs occasionally. But recent Chinese efforts to crack down on organized poaching are beginning to reap dividends, and subsistence poaching by local pastoralists has now become all but impossible with the governmental confiscation of all guns. Argali herds are geographically disparate, but this probably reflects their restricted habitat needs, not necessarily anthropogenic fragmentation. Further, my observations suggest that Schaller’s characterization of argali as “sedentary” and slow to resettle areas once removed is misleading.46 I have observed large argali groups that have recolonized mountains believed to have been previously poached out.47 On numerous occasions (most importantly, just prior to the breeding season), I have seen argali traverse minor hillocks and frozen rivers between distant mountain ranges, features that the superficial view of topographic maps would suggest might act as barriers to movement. I have also observed argali within a few hundred meters of highways, suggesting (albeit not proving) that they can cross at least some man-made structures. While genetic concerns stemming from small population size should never be dismissed, argali appear to be capable of substantial gene flow among seemingly distant groups, relegating these concerns to a secondary status. We know little of disease in argali; local reports suggest that they are susceptible to eye diseases (instances of blindness have been reported), and the scientifically welldocumented history of disease transfer when bighorn sheep encounter domestic sheep serves as an appropriate caution. However, I am not familiar with any reports of dramatic die-offs among argali of the kind we typically observe among North American bighorns when diseases are transmitted to them by domestic sheep. And unlike in North America, where old-world domestic sheep (and their pathogens) are relative newcomers, argali have lived in the same mountains with domestic sheep for millennia and thus may have had time to develop resistance to their pathogens. Instead, my concerns for the future of argali center on their seeming need for isolation from human activity in view of the steadily increasing magnitude of human presence in just those areas where argali can meet their biological needs. Livestock grazing exists at

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relatively heavy densities throughout argali distribution, both within and outside of designated nature reserves, and both within and outside of designated international hunting areas. Of course, pastoralists have lived in the same mountains as argali for centuries, and, as noted in Chapter 2, the recent Chinese publicity about grassland degradation or destruction is often simplistic and exaggerated. However, the recent trend toward sedentarization of pastoralists, combined with continued market pressures toward short-term profits associated with large herd sizes, portends trouble for argali. Chinese officials continue to focus on mortality management while imminent threats to the argali’s already restricted habitat are ignored. In Yanchiwan Township, in Gansu’s Subei County, where argali hunting began and where the Chinese consider one of the healthiest argali populations to be, an American hunter recently phoned me to express horror at the habitat conditions caused by the large number of livestock. In adjacent Jianshe Township in Aksai County, our work concluded that domestic sheep densities and pastoral practices were unsustainable and no doubt limited argali to a fraction of the number that might otherwise be supported.48 Although we do not know the population trend of argali there, removal of all guns and the absence of any known poaching during 2000–2003 failed to produce any obvious increase in argali numbers, suggesting that habitats or competition, rather than hunting, were limiting. (We documented fewer argali in 2003 than 2000, but survey limitations precluded us from concluding a true decline had occurred.) In part, domestic sheep compete with argali for forage resources. But perhaps even more importantly, domestic sheep (with their attendant herders, horses, and sometimes dogs) appear to displace argali from otherwise preferred foraging areas, relegating the wild sheep to dry, cold ridges that pastoralists don’t bother herding their domestic sheep to. In Jianshe, my colleagues and I documented pastoralists continually displacing argali as they moved their herds seasonally to different grazing areas (see Figure 7.3).49 Although we phrased it somewhat less succinctly, a Kazak friend of mine put it best when he snapped his fingers, telling me, “When the pastoralists move in, the argali move out.” Similarly, near Arjin Mountain, where Gansu abuts Qinghai and Xinjiang, KIHA staff and I were pleasantly surprised to observe 116 argali during an excruciatingly bumpy and slow jeep drive through only about 50 kilometers in August 1997. Habitats there were extremely arid and stony, almost entirely devoid of grasses and sedges, and we found ourselves puzzled by why argali density appeared so high. Toward the end of the second day, when we began descending the western slopes, grasses suddenly appeared in lush abundance, but we ceased finding argali. The seeming anomaly could best be explained by the complete lack of domestic livestock in the arid areas, and the high density of livestock where moisture allowed for lush pastures. In Yeniugou, Qinghai, our surveys suggested that argali had declined from the early 1990s to 2002, again despite any evidence of poaching or disease. Here, livestock numbers remained approximately constant and grassland conditions declined only gradually (see Chapter 2), but in contrast to the situation in the early 1990s, pastoral camps had by 2002 become increasingly fixed in the very areas favored by argali (in both summer and winter), and argali had evidently forsaken these productive areas for

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Figure 7.3 Approximate geographic distribution of argali and livestock in Jianshe Township, Aksai County, Gansu, during 1997–2003. During spring, livestock were concentrated in the northwestern portion, and all argali (open circles) were found south of the Kharteng River, which formed the southern boundary of spring pastures for livestock. In summer, livestock moved to mountains south of the river, and argali (solid diamonds) were widely distributed, but often found in the northern (Danghe Nanshan) mountains, which had been vacated by livestock. In autumn, livestock were moved westward, but we never found argali (solid x’s) this far west. In winter, livestock were moved back to the easternmost portion of the study area, but argali (open triangles) used areas north of this, where livestock were concentrated during spring.

arid grasslands that offered more security (see Figure 7.4).50 In Gouli Township of the Dulan International Hunting Area in Qinghai, where blue sheep are extraordinarily abundant (and well protected), argali remain rare. Our argali observations in Gouli have been in those areas furthest from domestic sheep herds, where grasslands begin to be replaced by cushion-plant communities or alpine fell-fields. Only when domestic herds are in distant summer pastures (or safely ensconced within herders’ corrals) do argali use their preferred Stipa grasslands. Considering these experiences, I am tempted at times—despite the evidence that argali require considerable growth of grasses—to search for them specifically where grassland conditions are poor. Perversely, poor grassland conditions, arising from either natural conditions or heavy livestock grazing, have become a promising omen for finding argali. Despite the abundance of guesses, we know neither the current population of argali nor their recent rate of decline. It seems almost certain that many fewer argali existed when the Chinese Wildlife Protection Law was enacted in 1988 than historically, and given my own surveys of two key areas, I fear continued declines since then.51 There do seem to be some redoubts where argali remain relatively numerous, chiefly within sections of the huge ranges arcing east to west across western China—the Qilian, Kunlun, and Tian Shan cordilleras.52 However, my interpretation of the rather narrow ecological niche

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Figure 7.4 Approximate locations of argali observed (with numbers observed) during September 2002 in Yeniugou, Qinghai (larger, dark markers), along with locations argali had been observed during similar time of year in 1991, 1992, and 1997 (smaller, light markers). Light shaded areas bounded by dashed lines represent the approximate extent of regions affected by pastoral activity during September 2002. Dark shaded areas bounded by solid lines represent approximate extent of regions affected by winter domestic livestock grazing, as indicated by location of encampments and evidence of past grazing.

occupied by plateau argali suggests that they have never been abundant. If their recent rate of decline has thus been gradual rather than dramatic, it does not make the situation any less critical; it simply means that their present conservation difficulties should be understood as adding to existing challenges for the species. Chinese have approached conservation of argali from two angles: nature reserves and international (trophy) hunting areas. The amount of area currently under formal nature reserve protection that—at least on paper—contains argali is a jaw-dropping 676,300 km2, almost twice the area of Finland. This impressive acreage must be viewed, however, with three important caveats in mind. First, some large reserves that claim argali as resident barely touch on appropriate habitat (e.g., the 17,000 km2 Kalamaili Shan Nature Reserve in Xinjiang, which is primarily arid scrub unsuitable for argali, and the 3,960 km2 Annanba Wild Camel Nature Reserve in Gansu, which is almost entirely desert, just abutting the Arjin Shan), or no longer contain substantial argali populations (e.g., the 4,790 km2 Qilian Shan Reserve, which primarily consists of isolated forested fragments in any case). Second, the largest and most undisturbed nature reserves, such as the 247,120 km2 Qiangtang Reserve in Tibet and the 83,000 km2 Kekexili Reserve in Qinghai, are predominately made up of habitats that seem to lack winter range for argali. Despite their size and relatively undisturbed nature, they appear to contain low densities of argali. Third, as detailed in Chapter 6, most Chinese nature reserves in the west are not managed appreciably differently from nonprotected lands. Funding and staffing levels

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are low, and few resources are spent on patrol or law enforcement. More critically, nature reserve staff lack authority to prioritize nature conservation when competing economic land uses are favored by county governments. Anti-poaching patrols might further reduce illegal hunting within reserves, but mineral development and livestock grazing are not effectively prohibited or even limited. But large as nature reserves are, it is trophy hunting that commands the attention of provincial wildlife officials, and it is the controversy over foreigners hunting Chinese argali that has really put the animal on the international conservation map. Combine a charismatic species, lots of money, and the suggestion of political intrigue in high places and you’ve got a story that the popular media can really dig their teeth into. Such was the case in March 1988 when four American hunters paid $25,000 each to kill argali sheep in Subei County, Gansu, which had just opened its Hashiha’er International Hunting Area. Chinese officials had authorized the hunt, unaware that taxonomic disputes, and indeed differences over whether trophy hunting should even be supported by foreigners, would soon create an international controversy that lasted many years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of time from attorneys and government officials. The hunters involved were pioneers in the newly established Chinese argali-hunting program. (Prior to this, only a single foreigner, Robert M. Lee, had obtained Chinese permission to hunt argali since 1949, but his trophies were taken far from Gansu, in southwestern Xinjiang in 1980, and, for whatever reason, his hunt did not raise any legal issues.53) The hunting group included oil executive Clayton Williams, who later ran as the Republican candidate for governor of Texas and who counted among his friends many influential U.S. politicians, as well as Dr. Richard Mitchell, who at the time held an unusual joint appointment between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS, which was charged with regulating American hunting of possibly threatened foreign species) and the Smithsonian Institution (which was often called upon to adjudicate scientific disputes regarding taxonomy).54 When USFWS enforcement agents apprehended the hunters’ American-based agent carrying the trophies upon arriving at the San Francisco airport on April 16, 1988, and confiscated the trophies, a legal storm ensured, the consequences of which echo even today in Washington, D.C., Beijing, and the provincial capitals and county seats of western China where argali live.55 At the time, U.S. law was silent on whether such importations were legal. But the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which both the United States and China were signatories, allowed imports of species (and, importantly, subspecies) listed under its Appendix I only after having first received an import permit, which the hunters did not have. In contrast, CITES allowed for import of subspecies listed under Appendix II with only an export permit, which the Chinese had provided for the hunters. Thus, the initial legal case centered on the taxonomic status of the four trophies and their attendant legality under CITES.56 Unfortunately, the taxonomic status of argali was a hornet’s nest of conflicting opinion, most of the existing literature being based on antiquated methods, small samples, and reports published in the nineteenth century.57 Thus, questions about which few had reason to care—such as whether argali in a particular location within Gansu Province were different from those elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau—became central to larger ques-

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tions of governmental authority and the role of consumptive use in conserving wildlife. Over the next eighteen months, scientists were interviewed, senators and congressmen sent angry letters to agency officials, lawyers went to work dismantling their opponents’ legal points, embarrassed public relations officers provided tepid explanations and bland assurances, and accusations of bad faith were volleyed between and among players in the case. In the end, the USFWS settled the case without trial, returned the trophies to the hunters, and decided to revisit its approach to permitting imports of argali under its own law, the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), rather than relying on the subspecific distinction contained in CITES. This resulted in new regulations on the entire species, published on June 23, 1992, which classified argali as endangered under the ESA except in the countries of Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where it was classified as threatened.58 By policy (although not by law), the USFWS only considered application for permits to import threatened species, not endangered species. Thus, by classifying all Chinese argali as endangered, this new policy effectively prohibited Americans from importing argali trophies from China, and thus dealt a substantial blow to the expansion potential of the newly established international hunting areas. The elimination of Americans from legal participation in trophy hunting for argali angered Chinese officials, who saw it as unjustified interference in their domestic management of wildlife. Most Chinese officials had little idea of the complexity and minutiae of U.S. regulatory law that surrounded the policy change, some seeing the return of the contested Gansu trophies to the hunters as simple vindication of the original Chinese taxonomic position. In contrast, some American groups opposed to trophy hunting generally, found the new regulations insufficiently strict and American monitoring of argali hunting in the three countries where permitting continued insufficiently detailed. Thus did Chinese argali hunting begin amid a whirlwind of controversy, and develop largely (albeit not entirely) without funds from American hunters. But develop it did, and by the late 1990s hunting areas featuring argali (as well as the more abundant and less controversial blue sheep, Tibetan gazelle, and Asiatic ibex) commandeered a disproportionate amount of attention from provincial leaders in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai. As discussed further in Chapter 8, these hunting areas have generally succeeded in recruiting and retaining energetic and dedicated staff, and raising awareness of wildlife conservation in their communities, but have not yet begun truly managing and conserving argali. Argali on the Tibetan Plateau have persisted despite the presence of mankind and his livestock for centuries, so it seems simplistic to conclude that coexistence is impossible. Because we cannot recreate the past, we have no way to detail the ways in which argali earlier met their needs and maintained their population levels in the face of traditional pastoralism and subsistence hunting. More research is obviously needed, particularly on their habitat use and movements and their response to human disturbance, but plateau argali are fiendishly difficult to study (in part because of that very mobility). As well, patterns of pastoralism and development are in a state of rapid change on the Tibetan Plateau; human influences on argali may be very different in ten years from what we see today. That said, it appears that increasingly intensive livestock grazing—typically in areas

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valued by argali—threatens to exacerbate the species’ refugee-like status. Argali appear to tolerate close proximity only of domestic camels; all other human disturbance elicits a similar response—finding elsewhere to graze, rest, and avoid predators. As highways, mines, and tourist facilities increase on the plateau, these argali will find that fewer and fewer of these “elsewheres” provide for their life-history needs. GLOBALIZATION STRIKES BACK: CHIRU Scanning through the popular media, it is not difficult to find reports of how demand for wildlife products in China (or among overseas Chinese communities) is threatening species living elsewhere. Most noteworthy of course, is the tiger, whose future as a wild species is now threatened largely by the demand for its bones in traditional Chinese medicine (notwithstanding recent Chinese laws banning the use of tiger parts or even claims of tiger ingredients in any domestic product).59 Elsewhere, rhinos in Africa, saiga in Kazakhstan, and even American black bears in the United States and Canada are reported—sometimes accurately, sometimes with exaggeration—to be suffering from the insatiable Chinese appetite for animal parts. But with the chiru (or Tibetan antelope),60 we have the situation in reverse. Western China still maintains abundant habitat for the species, and hunting for local subsistence use has never seriously threatened it. Instead, it is the increasing ease with which products can be moved across borders, and the increasing mobility of nonlocal Chinese poachers (generally made possible by wealth produced in the global marketplace), that has turned population stability into population collapse, and in the space of about a decade, transformed one of the most abundant large mammals in Asia into a bone fide endangered species. The chiru’s conservation problem is closely related to its biology. Because it is supremely adapted to living in one of the world’s coldest climates, it is endowed with a down-like undercoat to keep it warm: to provide this high-density blanket, its hair diameter is a minuscule 10 to 12 microns, even finer than that of the Andean vicuña (discussed in note 21 in the earlier section on musk deer), and considerably finer than cashmere or pashmina from the highest quality domestic goats.61 From this softest of all wools, artisans in Kashmir have for centuries woven a product called shahtoosh, generally used for shawls that have considerable cultural significance among wealthy Punjabi families. Although these shawls have been in international trade since at least the eighteenth century, interest among the fashion elite of Europe, Japan, and North America in shahtoosh remained muted until about the mid-1980s. But at about that time, with increasing disposable income, luxury interest in trendy products from places such as India, and trucks, gasoline, and free time now available to would-be poachers within China, the stage was set for a dramatic upsurge in sales of shahtoosh, which in turn fueled smuggling of chiru wool, which in turn fueled poaching of chiru. As of 1996, raw shahtoosh sold to shawl weavers in Kashmir went for $970 to $1,725/kg, and shawls in London commandeered from $1,280 to a whopping $17,600 (for an extra-long version). (Adult male chiru also sport beautiful, lyre-shaped horns between 55 and 65 centimeters long, which are a lustrous black with a dozen or two knurled ridges; these horns are prized by many Tibetans and

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Chinese as decorative items, and also have a traditional use as a “bipod” for unsteady Tibetan rifles. However, unlike shahtoosh, horns can be scavenged from dead animals, and even if individuals are killed to procure them, only adult males are vulnerable.) The chiru is virtually synonymous with the vast and bleak Tibetan Plateau. This goat-that-acts-like-an-antelope roams in search of its preferred forbs and sedges in large herds numbering from as few as a dozen to as many as thousands. To support such large numbers on such unproductive habitat, chiru are migratory: most herds travel hundreds of kilometers between winter and calving areas, although a few in mountainous areas migrate on a much smaller spatial scale. Thus chiru marching across the Tibetan Plateau are ecological analogues of barren-ground caribou marching across the North American tundra: impervious to extreme cold, physiologically better adapted to moving widely in search of high-quality forage than to staying put and dealing with low-quality vegetation. Like caribou, the chiru’s main predator is the wolf. Also like caribou, the chiru is susceptible to parasitism from insects (in this case, the larval stage of a warble fly), which no doubt weakens individuals, making them easier prey for wolves. Unlike caribou, however, chiru are almost always segregated sexually: except during the mating season in December, males and females travel separately, in some cases hundreds of kilometers apart. Single young are born in late June or early July, with females staying with the maternal herds and male calves separating from their mothers to join the all-male groups the following spring. Although historical records sometimes note chiru in steppe grasslands below 4,000 meters, they seem truly at home only in the alpine deserts above this elevation, where only summertime pastoralism and, more recently, mineral development can disturb their solitude.62 Many figures have been published about the number of chiru that existed historically and how many there may be now; the most commonly cited state that there may have at one time been up to 1 million animals but that that had declined to about 75,000 by the late 1990s. No large-scale estimate has been conducted using rigorous sampling or appropriate modeling, so the proliferation of numbers should be viewed skeptically: we simply do not know how many chiru there are (and we even more certainly don’t know how many may have existed in the past).63 This is hardly an indictment of either Chinese or Western scientists. We would be similarly ignorant about the numbers in the various arctic caribou herds of Alaska and Canada were it not for the technology available to biologists in the form of aircraft, large-format cameras, and satellite radio-collars. On the high Tibetan Plateau, such large-scale aerial census efforts would be made infeasible by the thin air were they not already made impractical by the expense. We can count chiru at congregations during rut and calving, and we can estimate densities within relatively local areas using accepted distance sampling methods,64 but obtaining a total population estimate for all chiru is currently unrealistic. That said, there is no doubt that the population has crashed, disappearing entirely in some areas, severely reduced in others.65 During most of the 1990s, poaching chiru on the Tibetan Plateau functioned economically and socially much as did cultivating opium poppies in Afghanistan or growing coca in Colombia. Of course it was illegal, and efforts to stamp out the trade, interdict the smugglers, and arrest the perpetrators were

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made by government agents in all the relevant countries. But with continuing demand for an extremely high-priced product that could be easily hidden due to its small size and light weight, the rewards to be gotten from the shahtoosh trade trumped the risk of apprehension and punishment. With the principal occupation of most poachers being small-scale agriculture (as with musk deer poachers, mostly in Gansu and eastern Qinghai, particularly Hualong and Xunhua counties), and of those assisting (or ignoring) them being pastoralism in an extremely harsh environment (in or near chiru habitat), incentives to poach were continually strong. At prices of ¥200 to ¥500 per pelt to the poacher, a poacher could expect to net ¥7,500 on a typical ten-day expedition—almost 100 U.S. dollars per day at prevailing exchange rates—much higher than the daily wage for any conceivable alternative use of that time. Poachers would typically pose as gold miners (which was legal until the late 1990s, and which most already had experience with) and employ scouts to determine the routes of government poaching patrols in advance so as to more easily evade them.66 Most apprehended poachers expressed ignorance that the chiru was rare or protected. This naïveté might be difficult to believe given the ubiquity of Chinese propaganda against poaching until one considers both the education level of most poachers as well as the fact that even as they were becoming rare, a chiru herd, once encountered, would typically number in the thousands, providing an impression of abundance. Given the vastness of the chiru range, anti-smuggling efforts, valiant as they were, could not possibly expect to cover the entire area. As the chiru population declined, the product price no doubt increased accordingly. Thus, even as stepped-up enforcement efforts elevated the risk of apprehension, the prospect of yet higher profits no doubt acted to make the risk worth taking. (If it seems difficult to imagine how a species once so abundant could be reduced so rapidly, one need only recall the archetypical example of a recent historical extinction: the North American passenger pigeon, which was once among the most abundant birds in existence, and was hunted to complete extinction by market hunters prior to 1900; North American bison were also reduced to under a thousand in a period of less than twenty years.67) By the late 1990s, the chiru’s plight had gotten the attention of both the international wildlife community and Chinese authorities. An influential exposé of the shahtoosh trade was published in 1997, and Chinese CITES authorities convened a high-profile workshop on conserving the species in Xining in October of 1999.68 Increased funds were channeled into anti-poaching patrols, and staffing was upgraded at the huge nature reserves that formed the backbone of chiru habitat (Qiangtang in Tibet, Kekexili in Qinghai, and Arjin in Xinjiang). Coordination among reserves and provinces—a sore point in China generally—was increased through meetings and purchasing better communication equipment.69 Surveys in Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang were organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, provincial wildlife offices, provincial environmental protection offices, and funded by foreign-based wildlife conservation groups. (Needless to add, captive breeding of chiru was also begun, the objective of which remained unclear.) The worldwide wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC began studying the illegal trade, and large multinational NGOs such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and the International Fund for Animal Welfare helped popularize the chiru’s plight internationally, while indig-

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enous NGOs such as the Wild Yak Brigade, the Green River Society, the Upper Yangtze Conservation and Development Organization, and the Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association began setting up externally funded patrols and stations.70 A proposal was submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that, in addition to its existing status as an Appendix I species under CITES, the chiru be listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.71 Books and newspaper articles began appearing in China, popularizing the species both in myth and reality.72 In spring 2005, the chiru was even nominated as one of only six candidates to be the official mascot of the 2008 Olympic games to be held in Beijing—a distinction that may appear unimportant from abroad, but from all appearances, was taken very seriously within China.73 A scientific survey of chiru calving grounds in summer 2005 was accompanied by no less than four TV film crews, all intent on cashing in on the new publicity allotted to the species.74 In sum, although it took some time in coming, the chiru went from relative obscurity to celebrity status in the span of about a decade. By the early 2000s, there were signs that poaching was beginning to abate, and the chiru population was responding. Although reports of increased arrests could always be read with contradictory interpretations, the increased enforcement efforts were no doubt real. In at least one area, the Qiangtang reserve, the chiru population was documented to have increased; additional surveys in western Qinghai documented large herds, suggesting that at least the nucleus for a population recovery still existed.75 Three notable characteristics in the chiru story are worth emphasizing. First, unlike most other wildlife conservation issues in western China, the task of saving chiru is relatively simple. That is not to say that it is easy. Indeed, given the economic incentives involved, reducing poaching to a level that can be sustained by the wild chiru population will require a great deal of effort. But here, for once, the Chinese inclination to focus on protecting animals from bullets (and doing little else) is basically sound. There are exceptions, of course. The probable isolation of chiru herds that historically migrated east of the Golmud-Lhasa highway (and now railway) from west of it, with the danger that poses both for normal foraging and for long-term genetic health, stands out as notable. But neither habitat quantity nor quality is a major issue for chiru.76 Reduce poaching to a low enough level and chiru will respond. Second, ironic as it is in light of the tremendous publicity given the species within China, the decline of the chiru is really not China’s fault. One can hardly think of anything positive the Chinese did for chiru prior to the 1990s, but there was also little need. Subsistence hunting by Tibetans had existed for centuries without seriously threatening the population. Shahtoosh shawls as fashion accessories had never become popular in China. Rather, the impetus for the dramatic surge in poaching came from abroad. Just as it will be difficult to eradicate drug production and smuggling in poor countries as long as drug addicts in rich ones demand the product, chiru poaching will be difficult to control as long as wealthy foreigners are willing to pay for shahtoosh. Would-be Western doctors wishing to fix China’s wildlife conservation system must, in this instance, first heal themselves. Finally, unlike the case of some other species with consumptive, material value, chiru

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are a species for which sustainable use will be difficult in a future conservation system. Although George Schaller has correctly pointed out that their reproductive capacity and potential abundance make a sustainable harvest biologically quite feasible,77 I would argue that chiru hunting is unlikely to be workable in any conceivable future system. Unlike musk deer, chiru migrate over huge distances, making the issue of control, accountability, and capture of benefits among local people extremely problematic. Who, exactly, is in charge of the habitat that must be adequately protected in order to produce a sustainable harvest of chiru pelts? And how would any pelts that resulted from an organized, controlled, and biologically sustainable hunt be distinguished from those resulting from poaching? The economic problem of the free rider in a wild chiru pelt scheme would seem to be essentially unsolvable, given the imbalance between the vast terrain involved and the manpower potentially available to manage it. As well, shahtoosh, unlike musk, has traditionally been used by only a small number of people. Absolutely eliminating a wild product from commerce always entails a cost to society, but fashion mavens negatively affected by a future without shahtoosh shawls are few in number and can hardly be counted as among the world’s more disadvantaged. CAUSE OR EFFECT? PIKAS AND ZOKORS Two very small animals, the plateau (or black-lipped) pika (Ochotona curzoniae) and the plateau zokor (Myospalax fontanierii),78 have sequestered a disproportionately large amount of research interest within China and have exerted a very large influence on their habitats, government policies, and even on government funds. Pikas, despite their mouselike appearance, are not rodents, but rather are classified within the order Lagomorpha, that is, they are relatives of rabbits.79 As of 2005, experts had recognized a total of thirty Ochotona species, of which all but six could be found, at least as part of their total geographic range, within China.80 Indeed, western China, in particular the high-elevation grasslands in and around the Tibetan Plateau, can be viewed as a kind of pika central headquarters, with about fourteen species present, depending on the geographic area envisaged. Two pika species inhabit North America, of which one, O. princeps, is familiar to hikers who have climbed to high elevations in the Sierra Nevada, Cascade, or Rocky Mountain ranges of the United States and Canada. Unlike this pika species, however, pikas in China’s west are not restricted to rocky outcrops, but often live in large colonies on flat or rolling grasslands, creating burrow systems for shelter, much as prairie dogs or ground squirrels do in North America. And although other pika species are of interest (and some are rare and perhaps even merit being considered endangered81), it is one of these grassland-dwelling pikas, the plateau pika, that I focus on here.82 In contrast, zokors (also called mole-rats) are true rodents (in the family Muridae, consisting of such better-known cousins as the house mouse and the common domesticated hamster). However, if the best North American ecological analogue of the plateau pika is the prairie dog, the zokor acts most like a pocket gopher or mole, living almost entirely below ground, eating primarily roots and tubers, and making its presence known above ground by extruding mounds of earth as it tunnels its way along.

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There has never been any question that, at least under certain conditions, both species can achieve very high densities (pikas more so than zokors), and have locally dramatic impacts on vegetation. More critically, there has also never been any question that both species are associated with grasslands characterized by sparse ground cover and lowgrowing plants (see Figures 7.5 and 7.6). In short, both species appear most common in areas commonly (if uncritically) referred to as “degraded.” But mere association begs the question: do pikas and zokors cause these grassland conditions, or is the presence of pikas and zokors (at least in high densities) the result of such grassland conditions? From simple observations, either situation could be the case, but the implications for wildlife management—the all-important balancing between human needs and biodiversity protection—could hardly be more disparate. If these species cause grassland degradation, their presence constitutes a genuine conflict with economic use of grasslands by pastoralists, and their reduction, or even elimination where livestock production is a high priority, is a rational response. Conversely, it could be that these species—for whatever reason—do better (i.e., have higher survival and fecundity) in habitats that already—for whatever reason—have these “degraded” characteristics. If so, we should view their presence as a useful warning that something else is awry, and rather than strive for their elimination or reduction, address the underlying problem. As might be expected, lacking resolution to this conundrum, early government policy following 1949 landed squarely on the first possibility, asserting that these two species Figure 7.5

Pika burrow density as a function of vegetation cover.

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Pika burrow density as a function of vegetation height.

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were, like so many other rodents in agricultural China, simply “harmful.” Thus, beginning in 1958—the very year in which the Maoist onslaught upon nature was building to a crescendo—governments began supporting “rodent control” on the grasslands. Over such large areas, poisoning was the only method seriously considered for pikas. In the early years, zinc phosphide was the preferred rodenticide, but later fluouroacetate (also known as Compound 1080), anti-coagulants such as diphacinone, and even bacteria-produced toxins such as botulinin C were used, as they were found to be superior in either killing efficiency or in minimizing secondary toxic effects.83 By 1990, a cumulative total of some 208,000 km2 had been subject to such poisoning, usually carried out by county-level agricultural, grazing, or forestry bureaus. Although both species were successfully reduced locally by such poisoning, these energetic efforts succeeded neither in eliminating either species entirely, nor—if government statistics are to be believed—in improving grassland conditions on a large scale.84 This should not have come as a big surprise: both species, in common with most small mammals, have prodigious capacity to recover quickly from declines, and thus continuous, long-term application of rodenticides would have been necessary to prevent population recoveries.85 As well, poisoning, particularly during early years when unselective agents were used, most likely also killed large numbers of animals that naturally preyed on pikas or rodents, thus weakening natural control.86 Further, it emerged that, at least in some places, pikas and zokors competed with each other for resources: kill enough pikas (usually the initial target, and by far the easier of the two to reduce because of

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Figure 7.7 Zokor density (as indexed by dirt mounds they produce) as a function of domestic sheep density. 2000

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the zokor’s fossorial nature) and one often ended up with an increased zokor population (see Figure 7.7).87 Finally, if in fact the underlying premise regarding cause and effect was reversed, it can easily be seen that temporary reduction would have had little effect. If instead of causing grassland degradation, high densities of these species were primarily a response to existing habitat conditions, then failing to address those conditions simply left the surviving animals in a veritable paradise: the same, ideal habitat but with that many fewer conspecific competitors.88 As research on these species progressed (driven, it can safely be assumed, primarily by the incentive to kill them more efficiently) and Chinese scientists became increasingly knowledgeable about ecology and correspondingly less influenced by Maoist ideology, understanding of the biology deepened. It began to emerge that both species had important roles as ecological engineers within the plateau ecosystem, and that a host of plant and animal species were closely associated, and perhaps even wholly dependent, on the activities of pikas and zokors.89 By the late 1990s, it had become widely acknowledged that pikas in particular (and zokors to a lesser extent) are the architects of unique microecosystems, and that their loss in any given area would therefore be manifested in a cascade of other ecological changes. In particular, a number of bird species find shelter or nesting spots only in the burrows of plateau pikas. One species in particular, the Hume’s ground jay, appears to find acceptable habitat only within pika colonies; an obligate commensal, it is essentially absent lacking pikas.90 In addition, pikas form the primary food resources

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of a number of mammalian predators, including small Mustelids such as Altai weasels, steppe polecats, and Eurasian badgers, medium-sized carnivores such as mountain cats, and even western China’s largest-bodied carnivore, the brown bear. One endemic canid, the Tibetan fox, appears to merit status as a pika specialist, being found only in or near pika colonies. Similarly, a number of raptors either specialize in capturing pikas or are at least most common when they are available, including saker falcons, upland buzzards, and eagle owls.91 By the early 1990s, evidence had accumulated not only that pikas and zokors had ecological significance well beyond their own existence, but also that the initial paradigm had largely gotten it reversed. Experiments in grazing pressure, removal experiments, and the weight of observational studies (augmented by suggestions from foreign scientists) strongly supported the concept that pikas and zokors were found in “degraded” areas not so much because they had unilaterally created such habitats, but rather because they found ecological advantage there.92 Grassland conditions conducive to buildups in pika (and, to a lesser extent, zokor) populations could come about in a number of ways, but by far, the most likely, logical, and empirically supported agent was excessive livestock grazing. Thus, rather than pikas and zokors harming grasslands (and, by extension, the pastoral economy), the consensus was that excessive grazing benefited pikas and zokors, thus explaining most of the observed association between degraded grasslands and high “rodent” densities. Once pikas were favored by grassland conditions, they could, of course, multiply rapidly, remaining at high densities until occasional severe winters set the population back to a lower density, from which it would recover again within a few years. But in the absence of overgrazing, this newer paradigm suggested, pikas were unlikely to compete with livestock or degrade pastures.93 Unsurprisingly, ecosystems are rarely simple, and the above paradigm, even if more accurate than that which it replaced, also missed the mark to some degree. To be sure, pikas and zokors can also be found, at times at very high densities, in areas with little or no grazing pressure from domestic livestock.94 More importantly, once established, pikas in particular act to perpetuate the twin conditions of sparse and short vegetation, if not by direct consumption, then by clipping of overly dense or tall vegetation to allow detection of predators.95 It is not necessarily a function of cultural or political bias to conclude that, given a toehold, pikas may act to exacerbate grassland conditions that make for poor livestock grazing. Attempts to change these habitat conditions while high pika densities remain may simply be met with frustration. The issue of pikas and grasslands in western China is strikingly similar to that of prairie dogs and rangelands in the western United States. Pikas, like prairie dogs, have been considered “keystone species,” which exert a disproportionate effect on the presence and abundance of other species. In the “keystone” analogy, these species, although only one among many, are positioned in such a way that without them many other species would find their own ecological niche compromised or eliminated altogether, much as many stones in a classic arch would come tumbling down if suddenly bereft of the keystone at the apex. Whether or not they truly deserve such categorization, there is no doubt that both species play pivotal roles in their respective ecosystems, facilitating the

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existence of many other species. Similarly, both pikas and prairie dogs have been targets of eradication and control by governments responding to livestock interests, largely under the assumptions that the small, wild species competed with the large domestic ones, and that their mere presence foretold doom to grassland health. A more nuanced view has recently become accepted among scientists, recognizing that high densities of pikas (in western China) or prairie dogs (in western North America) are more likely a response to range degradation than its cause; although once established, the animals and the range condition act symbiotically to reinforce each other, and competition among the wild and domestic species is a legitimate management issue.96 Chinese scientists have altered their thinking from earlier days and have recently begun emphasizing integrated control for pikas and zokors, admitting that while lethal control may be necessary to begin with, pika management ultimately requires that the source of grassland change (usually excessive livestock grazing) be addressed. Tracking this evolution of consciousness among Chinese scientists makes for fascinating reading, and not only among documents written in English for an international audience. For example, writing in the mid-1980s in Economic Animals of Qinghai, Li Dehao and colleagues characterized pikas as “among the most harmful mammals in Qinghai. . . . They are very destructive of grassland vegetation and compete with livestock for forage. They lead to grassland degradation and increase the grassland’s sandy nature. We recommend energetic and scientific prevention and elimination.”97 Contrast this with the following, published in 2002 by a team from the State Ministry of Agriculture (which one might expect to be less sympathetic to arguments favoring biodiversity as a value in its own right and instead to maintain an instrumentalist attitude): “Natural grassland ecosystems are basically in a type of dynamic balance. Rodents are an indispensable part of this system. Their position within grassland ecosystems comes about through their position in trophic food webs, as well as their burrowing and feeding activity,”98 and later in the same book, this conclusion to the “cause or effect” debate, taking a view of nature’s balance that Through a long history of biological evolution, rodents have formed a very harmonious relationship with their surrounding environment as well as with other animal species. Each species, including those currently so-called “most harmful rodent pests,” even as they attempt to increase their numbers, are ultimately controlled by multiple factors such as predators, disease and nutritional resources. As a result, they generally cannot become large-scale or serious grassland pests. Even the most numerous grassland rodent pests, while one cannot say they lack the intrinsic potential to become harmful, are ultimately controlled by such natural biological factors as predators and abiotic factors such as weather, as well as pressures from their own population abundance. Regardless of whether or not people are aware of it, natural regulation is always the main path toward preventing rodents from becoming pests. Regrettably, in irresponsibly increasing our living standards, we humans have often been greedy in using natural resources (for example, continuously exceeding grazing capacity). The basic conclusion of Chinese research on rodent pests makes

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clear that pest activity basically occurs on degraded grasslands. Because degraded grasslands provide appropriate habitats for a number of rodent species, their numbers can increase; it is this increase that then exacerbates grassland degradation.99 But if contemporary Chinese biologists appear to have produced objective, comprehensive, and relatively rigorous work laying out the possible compromises between the high biological value of pikas and zokors and the economic and management implications of their present abundance, Chinese government policy appears to be stuck some decades behind them.100 While some documents have begun to mention the merits of “biological control” or “integrated management,” decision makers still seem mainly interested in poisoning pikas and trapping zokors.101 and local officials routinely refer to pikas and zokors as “destroying” (pohuai) rangelands.102 If arguments that zokors may ultimately enhance soil productivity, or that pikas act as keystone species, fail to persuade where livestock is clearly the priority, it remains surprising that even in nature reserves, dedicated as they nominally are to maintenance of biodiversity, “rodents” are considered vermin and large-scale plans exist to severely reduce their numbers.103 It is this discrepancy between the viewpoints of Chinese scientists and policymakers that will be worth watching for signs of change in the next few decades. WILD PROGENITORS, DOMESTIC REPLACEMENTS In his classic 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond invoked what he called the “Anna Karenina principle” in explaining why, throughout mankind’s long history and out of all the possible wild animals in the world, only fourteen species of large mammal had been successfully domesticated. Borrowing from Tolstoy’s observation that any number of factors might lead to the unhappiness of families but that only when all things aligned might a family be truly happy, Diamond observed that, likewise, in attempting to domesticate wildlife there exist myriad reasons for failure, whereas success requires the convergence of a number of different happy coincidences. For many of the earliest domesticated species (largely originating in the Fertile Crescent, today’s Iraq and Iran), the identity of wild forebears remains unclear; for others, it is clear that their wild progenitors are extinct. Thus it is noteworthy, particularly given China’s otherwise poor history of maintaining large mammals in the wild, that of Diamond’s fourteen species of domesticated large mammals, wild ancestors to two of them still exist in western China. These are the wild yak and the wild camel, both of which are still found in the wild.104 Of course in both cases, the domestic descendents vastly outnumber the wild ancestors. But the wild species are hanging on, if only by a fragile and tenuous thread. Wild Yaks: Ferocious Cowards Most of us can remember, as children, having large, colorful books introducing the English alphabet displaying an animal for each letter. And because there are so few animals whose names begin with “Y,” nearly everybody knows what a yak is. But surprisingly few

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realize that the well-known domestic yak is simply a highly modified (and considerably smaller) wild yak,105 that wild yaks still roam certain portions of the Tibetan Plateau, but their populations are small, somewhat isolated, and their future far from secure. Their domestic cousins have made yaks famous, but wild yaks remain essentially unstudied, noteworthy more as symbols of the remaining wildness on the plateau than for their identity as a valid wild species. Yaks have presented something of an enigma for taxonomists and paleontologists. Even restricting oneself to the recent literature, one readily comes across three different Latin names referring to the same beast—Bos grunniens, Bos mutus, and Poephagus grunniens—and some earlier taxonomists considered it congeneric with Bison.106 Although clearly a member of the subfamily Bovinae (cows and their relatives), it remains unclear how close, and through what pathways, its familial relationship is to other large cows. And a large cow it is, weighing generally more than any wild bovid, heavier even than American bison or African buffalo. At a reputed weight of up to a ton in adult males107 the wild yak is larger than all other animals in Eurasia except for Asian elephants and Indian rhinoceroses. But wild yaks are not simply hairy cows. They are high-elevation specialists, thriving in oxygen concentrations that domestic cattle cannot tolerate, frequenting steep hillsides, marching over talus slope and navigating glaciers like overgrown goats. Particularly in summer, they prefer mesic sedge meadows tucked under snowfields or glaciers, normally at the upper limit of vegetation, close to 5,000 meters high. Here, mixed-sex herds of up to several hundred animals will graze together, young calves always located toward the center for protection from predators, otherwise invulnerable adult animals forming a loosely knit protective shield around them. In autumn, when these sedge meadows become dry and nutritive quality drops, yaks descend to slightly lower-elevation grasslands, where cured grasses still provide sufficient calories for them to survive the long, frigid winters. Unlike many other bovids, numerous adult males generally accompany these maternal groups. There also exist separate, bachelor groups of males, moving independently and often quite distantly from the maternal groups, yet these males are not, as one might assume, youngsters awaiting sexual maturity, but rather elderly bulls, seemingly unable to successfully contest for breeding.108 Because wild yaks have become relatively rare, researchers do not have much experience with them. But Yeniugou, which I have already discussed in relation to grassland conditions and nature reserves, is probably the single most important area for wild yak conservation in the world. Nowhere else can wild yaks be seen in such numbers and with such regularity.109 Exploring the reasons why will be helpful in understanding why they are rare elsewhere. First, Yeniugou is positioned squarely under some of the most frequent storm tracks on the Tibetan Plateau; although situated in the relatively arid Kunlun Shan, small glaciers and permanent snowfields are particularly concentrated on the north-facing slopes of all the major peaks in this area. This moisture, together with conducive soils, produces large bands of mesic sedge meadows (primarily consisting of species of the sedge Kobresia) that produce abundant summer forage. These sedge meadows appear tolerant to heavy graz-

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ing, and no doubt provide just the kind of nutrition needed by lactating females: maternal groups (i.e., those including calves and yearlings) spend almost the entire growing season perched in these hanging valleys, close to the talus slopes of the peaks, feeding on these meltwater-fed meadows. When these sedges cure in autumn, wild yaks have abundant grasslands (dominated by nutritious species in the genus Stipa) just below, which maintain forage quality far longer each season. Finally, in the harsher winters, these yaks can move only a few more kilometers north to much more arid grasslands, where although forage quality is no doubt lower, snow depths are also more moderate. However, these ideal habitat conditions can also be found elsewhere—particularly further east within the Kunlun Shan, and further yet southeast in Qinghai and east-central Tibet, where moisture and lush grasslands become increasingly abundant—but wild yaks here are scarce if present at all. There must be another reason why wild yaks have done so much better in Yeniugou than elsewhere, and I think it is this: although Yeniguou’s wild yaks have always had to deal with pastoralists and livestock, they have never had to deal with high densities of either. And from approximately the 1950s, they have not had to compete with their domestic descendents much at all. In Jianshe Township in Aksai County, Gansu, a small population of wild yaks has held on. Located in the much drier western Qilian Shan (where mesic sedge meadows are rare), intrinsic habitat conditions are not nearly as conducive to a large wild yak population as in Yeniugou. But it is noteworthy that, as in Yeniugou, domestic yaks are absent. In contrast, the relatively lush pastures in the upper elevations of Gouli Township, about 410 kilometers eastward along the Kunlun Shan from Yeniugou, still appear capable of sustaining a healthy wild yak population. And indeed, wild yaks were present in Gouli as recently as about fifty years ago. But now, when I look at the mountains of Gouli with my Yeniugou-trained eyes and search for places where wild yaks would be at home, I find that these sites are inevitably occupied by domestic yaks. Domestic yaks, unlike sheep and goats, are tended loosely, and sometimes hardly at all. Of course, milking yaks are kept close to dwellings for their daily production of milk. But most domestic yaks are left to graze freely, often unattended for days or even weeks at a time. As such, they are free to follow their genetic instructions, moving according to the underlying patterns of forage availability and quality. Groups of domestic yaks place themselves on the landscape very much as their wild ancestors would have done. From a distance, such groups of domestic yaks appear just as do wild yaks, the primary distinction being that, unlike their wild ancestors, domestic yaks generally come home when requested. Domestic yaks are raised in northern India, northern Pakistan, in parts of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and in Mongolia; they are the mainstay of most pastoralists in Nepal and Bhutan. But over 90 percent of the world’s estimated population of some 14 million domestic yaks inhabits western China,110 making the Tibetan pastoral lifestyle possible (and the future of wild yaks uncertain). The history of yak domestication is shrouded in mystery: we know that Tibetans domesticated them long ago—indeed, Tibetan culture scarcely seems possible in the absence of the domestic yak—but ancient Tibetans wrote few history books, archeological research on the Tibetan Plateau has been limited, and distinguishing between wild and domestic

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yaks from fossils has been difficult.111 An issue more relevant to conservation of wild yaks than when they were domesticated is how. One of Diamond’s principles for successful domestication of large mammals is temperament: species that are too ferocious (even including social herbivores that otherwise would seem good candidates, such as African buffalo or zebras) have never been domesticated, their temperament evidently resisting, at least to some degree, our most concerted effort to breed docility into them. Yet wild yaks are consistently reputed to be aggressive and belligerent. There are rumors—none confirmed to my knowledge—that they have been known to gore horses and kill people. (A Kazak friend who grew up around them once advised me how to behave if charged by a wild yak in the open grasslands where neither hiding nor escape was possible. He told me not to run, which was sensible as it was clear I could never out-distance one. His solution, however—standing still until the attacker was quite close, then deftly moving aside like a Spanish bullfighter before the yak could make the needed adjustment to gore me—seemed oddly incomplete. Surely the yak might hurtle by me once, but if its intention was clear, why would it then not simply turn around and come at me again from the opposite direction? How long I was supposed to keep up this matador-like behavior to save myself was never made clear.) Regardless, there is clear documentation that wild yaks have, at times, attacked and damaged vehicles and injured people, and there is little question that within their native habitat, they can outrun people, horses, or jeeps for that matter, if they desire. If so, they would seem to challenge part of Diamond’s theory regarding domestication. Although young calves could no doubt have been captured occasionally by early Tibetans, to transform them into fully domesticated animals—and domestic yaks are no more dangerous than common barnyard cows—would-be yak breeders would eventually have to confront this problem of the wild yak’s nasty disposition. But having frequently trekked among wild yaks (at times within a few meters’ distance), I suspect the conventional wisdom regarding their bellicose nature has been exaggerated. Certainly, they look fearsome, particularly solitary bulls when facing a perceived threat, horns menacingly curved forward, nostrils puffing in the thin air. But in my experience, their ultimate response, whether a group of 200 with young calves or a single bull, has always been the same: approach too close and they flee, usually until visual contact is no longer possible, often over mountain passes or onto distant snowfields. When I have remained at a sufficient distance and behaved in ways not perceived as threatening, wild yaks have simply continued their previous behavior, wary of my presence but showing no inclination to chase me away. (Once, having eaten my lunch during a rest stop on a long-day solo survey hike, I noted upon rising that a huge solitary bull had been sitting, ruminating, and no doubt fully aware of my presence the entire time, about forty meters away but just out of my field of view.) Surely, if cornered or chased by vehicles, it would be adaptive for yaks to eventually turn on their pursuers. In questioning their aggressive reputation, I do not mean to suggest that they aren’t capable of defending themselves, and in so doing, causing considerable damage. After all, almost any wild animal (and most large domestic ones, for that matter) is fully capable of killing people under the right circumstances. But given all the available evidence, I am unconvinced that yaks constitute a counter-example to Diamond’s

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theory. As large, strong, and hearty as they are, wild yaks—when it comes to confronting humans—are basically wimps.112 And that, it turns out, is part of their problem. Their fear and intolerance of people generally constitutes the third leg of an unfortunate tripod of threats, each of which, on its own, might be insufficient to explain the tremendous reduction in wild yak numbers from prehistoric times to today.113 The first leg, of course, is hunting for meat. Any beast that provides a successful hunter with such a large and tasty reward of meat is inevitably a prime target. Hunting wild yaks has a long history among the Tibetan pastoralists who have shared their habitat, and although hunting has never been as common or valued among Tibetans as other pastoralists, there clearly has been some hunting pressure from them on wild yaks from time immemorial.114 We also know that wild yaks were particularly targeted for their meat during the nationwide famines associated with the Great Leap Forward of 1959–61.115 During the worst of the famine, recently completed railroads to Golmud and Liuyuan acted as moving meat lockers, transporting the flesh of wild yaks eastward toward millions of starving Chinese. Commercial poaching of wild yaks continued long after the Great Leap, however, and no doubt contributed to population declines and range reduction. Along with this, of course, low-level subsistence hunting by pastoralists no doubt occurred, although most likely at intensities too low to explain large-scale population reductions. Yaks reproduce slowly by the standards of wild ungulates, so can sustain only low mortality rates before declining.116 The tripod’s second leg is hybridization with their domestic cousins. Genetic differences between the two are insufficient to prevent fertile mating, but introduction into wild yak populations of the anthropogenic architecture of the domestic yak genome would doom them just as surely, if more gradually and insidiously, as would direct killing. The four or so thousand years of selective breeding by pastoralists have produced a smaller and more docile animal. But this very sidestepping of natural selection has produced an animal incapable of coping with the natural environment on its own: domestic yaks need people just as surely as the reverse. Additionally, domestic yaks are frequently hybridized with domestic cattle, a husbandry practice designed for specific human benefits but having the effect of moving the animal yet further from its wild roots. Domestic bulls are likely incapable of moving freely into wild herds, but wild bulls are known, on occasion, to consort and breed with domestic females. If bred females and the offspring resulting from such mating remain with the domestic herd, the consequences befall the pastoralist and do not affect the wild population. However, if domestic females are drawn away, kidnapped as it were into a wild herd, both the pastoralist and the wild population are the losers.117 Ultimately, however, wild yaks simply seem to vanish, searching for more remote places, when human disturbance rises to some as yet undetermined threshold. This would seem strange if one’s view of the animal were that of strength, fearlessness, and aggressiveness. But here I return to the concepts that Jared Diamond elucidated in explaining why some large mammals were successfully domesticated and others not. For if wild yaks are not indeed as fearless and bellicose as sometimes believed, it is easier to imagine them retreating in the face of humans. The future of wild yaks is unclear. Certainly their low numbers and disjunct distribu-

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tion are cause for great worry: due to human intervention, they are no match for their meek domestic cousins. On a brighter note, their capacity for making long-distance movements suggests they are capable of recolonizing areas from which they have been lost. As well, recent efforts to remove pastoralists from extreme environments, if they are sustainable, may provide benefits for wild yaks. If pastoralism contracts geographically toward more centralized, developed areas, the loss of Tibetan culture may be the wild yak’s gain. Wild Camels: In Retreat For his exhaustive environmental history, author Mark Elvin needed a title that would symbolize the long and unidirectional history of human advance and forest reduction in China. His choice was The Retreat of the Elephants. Based largely on historic texts as well as archeological evidence analyzed by the Chinese geographer Wen Huanran (1919–1986), Elvin encapsulated roughly 7,000 years of forest retreat in a single map, in which he displayed the approximate geographic distribution of Asian elephants from prehistoric to modern times. Although wild elephants in China are currently restricted to a few small forest fragments in southern Yunnan, their historic range included almost all of southern China, and once extended northeast almost all the way to Beijing.118 If the retreat of the Asian wild elephant serves as a symbol for human expansion in “China proper,” perhaps the retreat of the Bactrian wild camel can act in a similar capacity for the arid, northwestern portions of the country. The map in Figure 7.8, roughly drawn from Wen’s work and supplemented by more recent information, suggests that, like wild elephants, the distribution of wild camels once extended northeast almost to Beijing.119 But unlike elephants, camels evolved in North America and are relative newcomers to Asia, having crossed over the Bering land bridge during the Pleistocene. The lands now occupied by Beijing, Taiyuan, and Xian happen to be on the way if one is crossing from Siberia’s Far East to Xinjiang. Exactly where and how camels made their way further west is unclear, but evidence unearthed by Wen suggests that only relatively recently have wild camels been relegated to the uninhabited and desolate habitats where they remain at present. It is clear that wild camels once enjoyed a far larger geographic range within China than is true today, extending to eastern regions where human populations are now quite dense. Early documents show not only that wild camels existed throughout what is now Inner Mongolia during the Han Dynasty (221 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), but that people at that time knew the difference between wild and domestic camels. During the eleventh century, wild camels were documented as living as far east as present-day Shenmu in Shaanxi Province (approximately 110° 30’ E), just west of where the Yellow River forms the boundary with Shanxi Province. Their distribution at this time encompassed all of present-day Ningxia, most of Inner Mongolia, and the entire Gansu Corridor from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. Even as late as 1160 C.E., wild camels were recorded from near the Shandian River, directly north of Beijing. However, it seems that the Yuan Dynasty was the beginning of the end for wild camels that far east. From this time, they evidently began a gradual contraction

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Figure 7.8 The retreat of the camels showing the area within which fossil records have documented distribution during historical times, and present (~ 2005) distribution.

Source: Adapted from Wen 1975.

westward, disapppearing from areas east of Lanzhou by the 1800s. By the mid-twentieth century, wild camels were restricted to the desert areas of western Gansu, Xinjiang, and southwestern Mongolia. A single individual was reportedly captured in the 1950s in western Inner Mongolia (at about 101° E, 42° N), but the species is now considered extinct in Inner Mongolia,120 and its range has continued to contract elsewhere. As of 2006, wild camels in China were believed to survive within only four isolated regions of Xinjiang and Gansu: a portion of the Taklamakan Desert south of Luntai, the Lop Nor area, the adjacent Annanba area of extreme western Gansu, and the Mazong Shan area where Gansu abuts Mongolia, which protects a population of wild camels in the Great Gobi National Park. Population estimates are unreliable, but it seems likely that the entire species (including those in Mongolia) does not exceed 1,000 individuals.121 The domestic Bactrian camel, meanwhile, is common throughout northern China as a beast of burden and a source of wool, milk, and meat.122 The same three factors implicated in the reduction of the formerly widespread wild yak on the Tibetan Plateau have been at work in decimating wild camel populations north of it. Hunting has certainly taken its toll, as camel meat has been considered a delicacy for centuries, and, like yaks, camels represent a large payoff in meat for the expenditure of effort. Hybridization with domestic camels is another threat. Although genetically differentiated, wild and domestic camels can interbreed (and domestic camels are even more loosely tended by pastoralists than are domestic yaks, with small groups often wandering many kilometers from their owners). In fact, any single hybridization event would have an even larger impact on any local adaptation and capacity for evolutionary response among wild

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camels than it would among the more numerous wild yaks, the per capita contribution of any given introduction of domestic genes being that much greater. And perhaps even more so than wild yaks, wild camels are shy and reclusive, using their keen eyesight and the immense open spaces they occupy to put distance between themselves and any threats.123 Living in smaller groups and being less physically imposing than wild yaks, wild camels have difficulty defending newborns from predation, and thus have adopted the life-history strategy of the refugee, constantly moving so that their location at any given time is unpredictable.124 This strategy, successful perhaps in coping with wolves, has failed them in the face of the ever-expanding human footprint in arid northern China. Human development in almost any form seems to preclude an area from constituting wild camel habitat. Two additional factors make the persistence of wild camels even more tenuous than that of wild yaks. First, although it appears to be the case that wild yaks can tolerate only limited incursions of pastoralism, livestock grazing—particularly that of their domestic cousins—does not fundamentally degrade wild yak habitat. Vegetation composition and cover may be altered if domestic yak grazing is excessive, but the high-elevation grasslands used by pastoralists remain high-elevation grasslands. Wild yak habitat is not irreversibly transformed by pastoralism. In contrast, most of the former distribution of wild camels in China is now under permanent occupation by people. Irrigation, agriculture, fencing, industry, and urbanization have combined to leave few places in China quiet and secure enough to act as habitat for the shy and retiring wild camel. The human population increase of Shaanxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Gansu (see Figure 7.2) is unlike anything that wild yaks have had to endure. Second, although wild camels are a quintessentially desert-adapted species, even they need access to water occasionally. Surface water in the form of lakes, rivers, or creeks is rare and seasonal at best in the parched deserts of Xinjiang and Gansu where these remnant populations persist. Wild camels therefore are tightly associated with the presence of a few springs, fed underground by meltwater from snows in the adjacent mountains. Because they can drink, store and conserve prodigious quantities of water, and because they are in constant motion, wild camels visit these springs sporadically, rarely staying for long. But these isolated springs, mere specks of real estate within the huge ranges of individual camels, appear to be critical to their survival. Destruction, pollution, or disturbance at a small spring can dramatically reduce the habitat’s ability to maintain wild camels for a radius of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of square kilometers (at least during snow-free seasons). And these same springs form logical points of attraction for any human economic activity in these deserts. In recent years, miners—both legal and illegal—have evidently begun using and polluting these springs, killing wild camels either directly (by poaching or poisoning) or indirectly (by denying them their only water source).125 Thus, perhaps wild camels constitute a counter-argument to my central thesis, that is, that western China can and should develop wildlife management systems that zone human use, limit human activity, and mitigate for human disturbance but generally allow for coexistence, rather than relegating all wildlife to nature reserves. If we wish to save wild camels, perhaps there is little choice but to declare certain areas totally off limits to humans and dedicated entirely to wildlife.

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But if so, the prognosis for success remains uncertain. Two large nature reserves have, nominally at least, served this purpose for over twenty years. The Annanba Wild Camel Nature Reserve in Gansu, just short of 4,000 km2, was established in 1982, and the Arjin Wild Camel Nature Reserve in Xinjiang, at over 15,000 km2, was established in 1986. For roughly the first fifteen years since their establishment, these reserves existed comfortably on paper only, unstaffed and unmonitored, as wild camels evidently continued to decline.126 In the late 1990s this situation seemed about to change, when high-level meetings were held; the Arjin reserve was officially expanded to 65,000 km2 and its name changed to Lop Nor Nature Reserve (the designation reflecting the by-now dying lake that lies to its north),127 both reserves were abruptly upgraded from provincial to national level, and substantial funding for building guard stations and hiring staff was promised. By mid-2005, the newly upgraded Lop Nor National Level Nature Reserve had established a guard station at Milan in the reserve’s southwest portion, hired a staff of twelve, and built a new headquarters in Urumqi, over 800 kilometers distant by road. Whether it had succeeded in securing the area for camels was unclear, although the reserve had received $2 million in compensation for allowing the west-east gas pipeline (which supplies gas to Shanghai from Korla) to traverse its northern portion.128 In Gansu’s Annanba, a large interpretative sign had been erected along the rutted gravel road penetrating it from the county seat of Aksai, and small boundary markers had been placed along its eastern portions. However, by mid-2005, no staff had yet been hired, nor guard stations developed. But even if promises regarding these nature reserves begin to be fulfilled, it is not clear that mining and degradation of springs will be effectively halted. These are not areas where people are likely to settle permanently in any case: the main threats come from extractive activities, either of the biological or mineral variety. Guard stations and more staffing may help, but my review of the management history of Chinese nature reserves, together with the fits and starts accompanying the development of these two, suggests that keeping all springs clean and secure for wild camels will be a continuing challenge. INTO THE TEETH OF THE CONFLICT: LARGE CARNIVORES Keeping large carnivores around has been a major challenge to those interested in their conservation ever since humans developed sufficient technology to kill them easily. The conservation of animals capable of killing us—or more to the point, killing our livestock—has not been easy for any society since the industrial revolution. There is nothing particularly unique in the conservation difficulties faced by Chinese.129 Unsurprisingly, at least one species—the tiger—has already been lost in western China entirely,130 and at least one more, the dhole, is in dire straights. Perhaps more surprising is that so many potentially dangerous animals still have a chance for a bright future in western China. Wolves: Surprisingly Common When I was young, no animal in the United States was so clearly associated with the words “endangered species” as the wolf. Of course even then, wolves were not endan-

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gered in Canada or Alaska, and since that time, wolves have increased their numbers in the Great Lake states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, made a strong comeback in the Rocky Mountain states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and also increased their range and numbers in Europe. Still, the words “wolf” and “endangered” remain linked in popular culture, so it may be difficult to accept that, in western China, wolves rate as rather ordinary animals. As the Tibetan pilgrims in Chapter 3 suggested, wolves are hardly loved in western China; the phenomenon of honoring, to say nothing of adoring, wolves as representatives of wilderness or of natural processes is distinctly Western. And although attacks on humans are extremely rare, in China, unlike in North America, there is documentation of wolves killing people within living memory. (It is not difficult to imagine periods in China’s recent past when human carcasses would have been available to scavenging wolves, a few of which might then have learned to attack children.) More pertinent is the risk to livestock from wolves: by all accounts, wolf predation on livestock constitutes only a modest irritant to pastoralists, most of whom view wolves as an inescapable, if unpleasant, fact of life (though prior to their confiscation, the primary use of the small-caliber rifles owned by most pastoralists was to shoot at, and occasionally kill, wolves). But because any loss of livestock to wolves is a direct financial hit to the pastoralist, what is surprising is not that attitudes toward wolves are negative but that they are not more so. As a top predator that can only survive in densities orders of magnitude lower than their prey, wolves are, of course, not abundant in an absolute sense (needless to add, reliable statistics on their numbers are nonexistent). But judged according to the land’s inherent ability to sustain them, wolves in western China are reasonably common. The question is why? In the livestock-growing regions of the western United States, wolves had been essentially eliminated by about 1930 when human and livestock densities were but a fraction of what they currently are in western China.131 It might seem logical to expect wolves to have met a similar fate in western China, yet they did not. Why not? Once again, admitting that data are lacking with which we might address the question rigorously, I offer a hypothesis for the difference that includes a minor reason and a major one. The minor reason is that although most populations of wolves’ wild ungulate prey in western China are much smaller than in the past (some of the exceptions having been noted above), they never experienced the catastrophic decline that befell bison, elk, deer, and mountain sheep in the western United States during the nineteenth century. The current, relatively happy state of affairs for most wild ungulates in the western states should not blind us to the memory of the situation that existed near the turn of the twentieth century, when these species had been reduced to remnants. Wolves in today’s American west are the beneficiaries of policies adopted a century ago to benefit people (by prioritizing big game habitat and controlling hunting), but wolves in 1900 would have had little but livestock to eat. The major reason is poison: early in the twentieth century it was used routinely in the United States, but its use for large predators remains rare in China. Notwithstanding their size and strength, wolves are largely creatures of habit, resistant to change, and from the perspective of somebody interested in killing them, relatively predictable. This, together

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with their pack structure—meaning that all generally share the same meal—has made them particularly susceptible to poisoning. The widespread application of poison decimated wolves in North America; bullets had relatively little to do with it. And although poisons have been used in China, they were never so widespread, or applied in such a coordinated effort. When native prey is available, the low-powered guns of subsistence pastoralists were never enough to more than dent the western Chinese wolf population. Ironically, now that those guns have been confiscated, the wolf in western China might be in more danger. With more livestock than ever roaming the land and yet less ability among pastoralists to discourage wolves from seeing them as prey, frustrated pastoralists might find that acquiring and using poison to reduce wolves could be an easier route to riches than tolerating occasional livestock losses. Dholes: In Trouble One of the joys of visiting wild places, and occasionally observing rare wildlife, is coming back to the civilized world to tell stories about what one has seen. Thus I was particularly frustrated after returning from China in September 2003, where I had had the luck to spend an entire day witnessing attempted predation on blue sheep by a pack of dholes.132 Upon recounting my adventure, the response I always got, even from friends who were wildlife biologists or otherwise heavily involved and knowledgeable about nature, was not one of admiration or envy, but a shrug followed by, “What the heck is a dhole?” Doubtless the least well-known large mammal species in all of China, the dhole, also sometimes called the Indian or Asiatic wild dog, is one of the world’s three species of large-sized, pack-forming canid (the other two being the African hunting dog and, of course, the wolf). By living in packs, these animals are able to subdue prey many times their own size, and thus earn the enmity of local people (because such large animals often include domestic livestock). In fact, there are few species that elicit more universal scorn and condemnation from the average Chinese who bothers to have an impression than the dhole, which although it causes very little actual damage (in part due to its rarity), is never ascribed any of the more positive qualities occasionally attributed to tigers or other dangerous predators,133 but instead generally regarded as a kind of criminal of the animal world—sneaky, untrustworthy, and unclean. The dhole, the lone living species in the genus Cuon, has a geographic distribution that, at least at one time, stretched from the island of Java in the south to Siberia in the north, from as far west as Pakistan almost to the Pacific coast of Asia at the Ussuri River, which separates Heilongjiang from the Sikhote Alin region of far eastern Russia. With such a cosmopolitan distribution, one might infer that dholes are common and have learned how to live successfully among humans, but from all accounts, this would be quite wrong. Scientific research on the species has been limited to a handful of national parks in central and southern India, where they seem reasonably common. Within China, dholes have historically been reported from every province except Hainan, but almost all reports are anecdotal, vague, and old.134 In recent years, even sightings of dholes by livestock herders (who would have reason to know about them and voice their complaints) have been

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exceedingly rare.135 Conceivably, dholes could be confused by local respondents with the far more common wolf, and if so, the presence of dholes might be underreported. But this seems unlikely: although both are pack-living canids, they are physically quite distinct and not easily confused. Dholes have deep red pelage (except for their contrasting white chest), while wolves, although physically more diverse, never have these striking characteristics. Dholes usually travel in packs, which makes them more conspicuous than solitary hunters, and they have loud and unique vocalizations (another common name for them is the whistling dog) that would allow their detection even at night or from a distance. In the one place where I know dholes existed as of 2003 (the Kharteng hunting area), local pastoralists and wildlife staff reported their presence to me and could accurately differentiate them from wolves.136 Thus it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the dearth of anecdotal reports elsewhere reflects true rarity. Dholes appear to be literally on their last legs throughout China (no less so in the remote sections of western China), their reputation as livestock killers perhaps having already spelled their doom. But if the tiger has vanished from western China in a fashion biologists have come to understand, becoming restricted to specific habitats and thus helpless when those habitats were transformed and inhabited by humans, the dhole faces almost the reverse problem. It is seemingly everywhere yet nowhere, distributed so widely that its geographic range has become only a superficial veneer, painted, as it were, onto the fabric of the landscape. Dholes are so rare that their ultimate extirpation from China—should it someday come to that—will be not because they contracted to a point of land that became infinitesimally small, but because their spatial diffusion became so shallow that they simply evaporated. Brown Bears: Holding On If wolves are disliked, bears are genuinely feared. The broad valleys and gentle slopes of most western Chinese mountain ranges provide little sense of security to a man on foot faced with a brown bear (essentially, a North American grizzly). Like wolves, bears constitute a risk to pastoralists’ income (most bears have a weakness for mutton), but they also occasionally tear up encampments and their sheer physicality is more frightening than that of wolves. Beyond livestock, life is much more difficult for a bear living in the Kunlun Shan or a typical Tibetan valley than for a wolf. Bears cannot hunt in packs to subdue large ungulates, and vegetation that would support such a large body is scarce in such alpine deserts. From observations and analyses of feces, it appears the ever-flexible and omnivorous brown bear that occupies the high ranges of western China depends largely on excavating pikas, marmots, or other small mammals for its maintenance. Vegetation is no doubt consumed, but it appears to require both the presence of small mammals and soils amenable to digging for bears to feed themselves in this difficult landscape. And that’s not to mention yet the price put on their gall bladders; bears having the additional bad luck of producing bile acids with just enough uniqueness to have found their way into the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia. Unsurprisingly, brown bears in western China would have to qualify as “rare.”

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But again, if we adopt the perspective not of the primeval wilderness that the first pastoralists might have found thousands of years ago but of the realistic challenges facing bear populations in any location occupied by people, they are not doing all that badly. Admittedly nowhere common, brown bears can still be found in almost all the major mountain ranges of western China, including the western portions of the Qilian, almost the entire Kunlun, the Tangula and associated ranges, the Arjin Shan, and the Tian Shan. Managing to have bears and people occupy the same space is not easy anywhere; that brown bears have held on in this many places is really rather impressive. And with the elimination of firearms from the general population, there are subtle (if admittedly uncertain) indications that bears may be making a modest comeback. What is needed now is not so much more protection as more intervention. Except only in areas in which humans are present only as temporary visitors (an essentially nonexistent land-use category anywhere in China), one cannot simply “protect” bears and expect things to work out smoothly. Those who study and manage bears in other countries spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy dealing with bear–human conflicts, and with good reason: bears and humans come perilously close to occupying the same niche, and neither gives way passively. At the least, humans making their living among bears need to be provided with techniques to minimize damage and educated in ways to avoid inadvertently training bears to become constant problems. In the long term, it is probably in the interest of bear conservation that individual bears that have learned to associate humans with food rewards be killed (if there is no practical way to retrain them), lest tolerance for their presence disappear altogether. An active program to minimize problems, combined with occasional removal of problem animals, is usually the price we must pay when asking for protection of bears in general. But for the last two decades, Chinese laws and policy have implicitly contained the following message for pastoralists: “Bears are precious and valuable animals that belong to the State; the problems associated with living near bears belong to you.” A future for bears in western China will require a more sophisticated approach. DOING WELL, OR DOING TOO WELL? Having by now concentrated on species that are rare, in decline, or vulnerable, I would have painted an inaccurate picture if I did not also pay some attention to western Chinese wild species that are doing quite well. One can learn as much about the problems and potential of conservation by analyzing success as failure, and it would leave a seriously erroneous impression if one only considered the species in trouble. There are species that Chinese wildlife officials can (and should) take pride in, and for which Chinese wildlife officials can (and should) develop more active systems to minimize the conflicts sometimes faced by humans due to the presence of these species when abundant. Failing to do so would risk engendering intolerance of wildlife in general, which could, in turn, easily thwart efforts those same humans need to take in order to conserve species that have not enjoyed nearly so much success. Of late, there are subtle indications that white-lipped deer, at times considered on the

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brink of extinction, have been making a modest comeback.137 So little is known of their status, however, that it is premature to consider them a success story. However, ibex in the Tianshan and associated mountain ranges of Xinjiang are, from all accounts, common and under no great threat; red deer in Xinjiang (although not necessarily elsewhere) are also reported to be locally common. Goitered gazelles inhabit deserts and semi-arid areas throughout western Gansu, northern Qinghai, and most of Xinjiang, seemingly under little pressure. Perhaps because of the weak tradition of hunting, populations of small “game” species that might be at risk, such as Tibetan wooly hares, appear to fluctuate according to natural factors rather than being entirely under mankind’s thumb. Even Himalayan marmots, which are subject to massive (if generally illegal) commercial slaughter, seem to find ways to come back (although admittedly, nobody has monitored their trend). Among large-bodied “game” birds for which one might reasonably have concern, both Tibetan and Himalayan snow cocks seem relatively secure in their alpine haunts, and both species of sand grouse are commonly encountered. Indeed, it is the fact that western China still possesses so many wild species with a potentially bright future (seen as well in the previous section on carnivores) that distinguishes it from eastern China and, in part, underlies my argument for a change in management approach from the current one. Here are three western Chinese species with which I am familiar that appear to be doing well. Tibetan Gazelle: Finding a Small Niche Although closely related to the Przewalski’s gazelle that is in such trouble, the Tibetan gazelle is adapted to the colder climes of the true plateau, grazing on alpine steppe grasslands and alpine sedge meadows where human occupation has always been relatively low. Perhaps equally telling, it consumes mainly dicotyledons (flowering plants, commonly referred to as forbs) that are of relatively little interest to domestic livestock, and, at least during the growing season, it avoids grasses and sedges.138 Its habitats have thus been only moderately altered by a history of domestic livestock grazing, and its presence is not seen as a threat by pastoralists. While always of some interest to subsistence hunters, its small size and dispersed nature have saved it from being the target of intensive commercial hunting or poaching (and it probably doesn’t hurt that the Tibetan gazelle has no particularly valuable or unique medicinal qualities). Tibetan gazelles are thus in no particular trouble. These diminutive gazelles have a distinctively large and furry white rump patch (a common local name for the animal, used in both Chinese and Kazak languages, is “white behind”), and their small group size, nervous temperament, and bounding gait gives them the air of being a bunny rabbit among ungulates, hardly a threatening image. Male Tibetan gazelles stake out breeding territories, often on bare ridges with poor forage, which they signal with small latrines. Thus during fall, males distribute themselves spatially in order to distinguish their territories from those of their competitors (and during summer, subadult males often seem interested in “defending” these sites as well, strutting around making themselves seem masculine and sexy, evidently unaware that females are usually far away, feeding in wet meadows at higher elevations, and, in any case, uninterested). Females and

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young forage in larger groups, but even so, groups of more than twenty Tibetan gazelles are rare; most often, group sizes range from three to a dozen or so.139 Whereas species such as argali and wild yak appear to be highly sensitive to disturbance from humans, abandoning entire drainages when they become inhabited by people, Tibetan gazelles are characterized by only small-scale (geographic) and short-term (temporal) displacement. True enough, one does not see Tibetan gazelles grazing contentedly among domestic livestock or moseying across highways; they are highly vigilant and routinely flee from men on horseback, roving herds of domestic sheep, or jeeps bumping along primitive roads. But such displacement appears to create only a minor inconvenience for them: when the horses, livestock, or vehicles have safely passed, gazelles seem willing to return to their favored foraging spots.140 Thus, only the very small areas subject to permanent disturbance (e.g., herder homes, fenced areas) become areas truly denied to Tibetan gazelles; they seem able to find hiding places in habitats where everything would appear to be perfectly transparent, able to discern small cul-de-sacs and blind corners within what appears, to the human eye, to be a continuous and smooth habitat surface. Tibetan Wild Ass: Too Bold to Submit Wildlife biologists, along with all natural scientists, are trained (and correctly so) to view animals through the prism of evolution and natural selection, and to avoid anthropomorphizing our subjects. That said, if there is one species in western China to which it is difficult to avoid attributing human-like intentions, it is the Tibetan wild ass (also called kiang). These are animals that really seem to have a personality. At times clown-like, they seem to take on the role of official jester of the steppe. At others, they appear to deliberately taunt the humans with whom they share the grasslands, willing to cede their space but not before offering a kind of asinine insult, saluting with the equine version of a shaking fist, giving human interlopers, as it were, the hoof. Here, we are talking about an ass with an attitude. I know better of course, and realize that these impressions are likely due in part to the animals’ appearance (comically oversized head, stiff mane, erect ears, harlequin-like coloration), and in part to elements from their own intraspecific behavioral repertoires that are called upon in their interactions with humans. But try as I might, I still find it difficult to rid myself of the impression that these animals look upon humans with a mixture of derision and contempt, laughing at us even as they run from us. Two behavioral traits in particular come to mind. Social groupings are usually dominated by a territorial male who makes it his business to investigate the source of disturbance prior to sounding the general alarm that it’s time to leave.141 This often results in individual stallions approaching humans, seemingly out of curiosity, at least until it is clear that getting any closer is risky. Even more striking is the tendency of groups of Tibetan wild ass to race across their flat grasslands in response to a moving vehicle, not—as would seem adaptive—in a direction that would provide them the most security in the least time, but rather toward the vehicle, insisting on crossing in front of it. Only once across the vehicle’s

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path, securely on the other side of the valley from their original location, do the animals settle for putting distance between the vehicle and themselves. I have heard similar tales of this behavior as often as I have seen it myself. When in a vehicle observing them, it is entirely predictable that any group of Tibetan wild ass within a few hundred meters will seemingly go well out of its way to spray a moving vehicle with the dust from their galloping hooves. It is easy to imagine how forming a large band and galloping away for all they’re worth would be an adaptive response to their primary predator, the wolf. But I have yet to hear an explanation that satisfactorily relates this particular reaction to natural (or even artificial) selection in an evolutionary context. Although it cannot possibly be correct, it certainly looks as though these wild ass simply want to show that, no matter that you are motorized and they are not, at least on these high-elevation steppes they are not to be outrun. Either that or they are showing that, regardless of which side of the valley your vehicle is traveling down, it is, according to the considered opinion of the equine world, the wrong side. The Tibetan wild ass is now generally recognized as a unique species, closely related to, but separate from, the Asiatic wild ass, E. hemionus, and the Indian wild ass, E. khur.142 Its present abundance is unknown, and with good reason: it occupies an enormous range of over 2 million km2, frequently moves long distances, and joins and leaves other ass groups with ease, so extensive aerial surveys would be required to produce a valid estimate of its numbers. Chinese scientists guessed there were 200,000 in the late 1980s; George Schaller estimated there were about 60–70,000 in the mid-1990s; yet both Chinese scientists and Schaller agree that its numbers increased during that time period.143 Clearly, this species remains numerous but poorly quantified. We are fairly certain that Tibetan wild ass declined in number during most of the twentieth century: we know that hundreds were slaughtered in Gansu and Qinghai during the military-organized meat hunts that attempted to mitigate the great famines of 1959–61.144 Since that time, however, there are plenty of indications that Tibetan wild ass have increased. We lack rigorous population estimates, so have little choice but to infer these trends from a skeptical eye trained on anecdotal data. Data consumer beware: these trends could be wrong. That said, the fact that—informal and unquantified as they are—reports from so many local pastoralists, staff at nature reserves, and staff at international hunting areas point to a recent increase in Tibetan wild ass is highly suggestive.145 The range of the species, formerly restricted to China and Ladakh, has recently expanded to include northern Nepal. Add to this the fact that Tibetan wild ass have a broad taste in acceptable habitats, from quasi-desert shrubland to alpine steppe. As long as there is sufficient grass and sufficient open space to run from danger, wild ass can subsist. Since the late 1990s, with the confiscation of firearms, poaching has become more difficult. But even prior to that time, poaching of Tibetan wild ass (again, with the notable exception of the slaughter associated with the Great Leap Forward) was never common. Tibetan hunters have generally preferred other species to wild ass,146 and Mongols, despite their rich hunting culture, have similarly prioritized eating other species.147 Kazaks, never numerous within the range of Tibetan wild ass (living primarily in the range of the Asiatic wild ass) have traditionally killed asses for meat, but never in large numbers.

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Complaints from pastoralists that they are being overrun with wild ass are best regarded with a doubting but sympathetic eye. From the skeptical side, it is to be expected that pastoralists, whose lives are never easy under the best of circumstances, will exaggerate the number of wild ass they see and the damage caused to pastures needed by their domestic livestock. A herd of one or two hundred wild ass rumbling through a valued livestock pasture makes a strong impression, and these may be recalled with greater clarity than the more frequent times in which no ass are seen for days on end.148 Stories of range damage from a single herder may be picked up by others, becoming folk legend long before anybody has a chance to investigate how often it occurred. On the other hand, there is little doubt that Tibetan wild ass eat almost exclusively the high-quality Stipa grasses that are also coveted by pastoralists. As relatively inefficient hind-gut fermenters, wild ass (in common with all Equids) must eat a great deal to fuel their large bodies, and their large, hard hooves can also be rough on fragile alpine soils. Their dietary overlap with domestic livestock, their large appetites, and their large herd sizes can combine to form a terrifying picture from the perspective of a pastoralist attempting to husband grasslands for his own use. Missing, alas, are reliable data that could help us understand how serious a problem wild ass can be, and how frequent (or rare) truly damaging events are. Because of their capacity for moving over large areas, wild ass may impact a single pastoralist greatly but his neighbors not at all. The true extent of the problem has never been adequately researched, but it is clear that many pastoralists believe there is one.149 In recent years, wildlife officials in Tibet and elsewhere have begun speaking openly about the concerns of these pastoralists, and are considering reducing the number of wild ass in response.150 Although any official sanction of killing animals generally seen to be “rare” will no doubt raise hackles (primarily among those outside China), some reduction of Tibetan wild ass is most likely good policy. When a population of large, wild herbivores increases to the point where people who live on the land are imposed upon greatly, some accommodation is needed. A mature wildlife conservation system in any country would, at this point, look for ways to allow for peaceful coexistence, and this no doubt would include some killing of wild animals. The rub is that not only are Tibetan wild ass still classified in China as a first-class protected species (thus requiring permits from national, not merely provincial, authorities for any legal killing), but neither Tibet nor any province with increasing wild ass–pastoralist conflict possesses even the beginnings of a wildlife management infrastructure that could investigate the nature of the problem, administer a rational system of herd limitation, or monitor the results of such an experiment. Perhaps even more critically, because the underlying ideology is that common people must be kept at a distance from wildlife, and that wildlife management is strictly a technical problem that must be left to government technocrats, any reduction of Tibetan wild ass as currently conceivable would fail in its greatest mission—that of reconnecting people in a visceral and tangible way to wildlife. Rather than allow regulated hunting by the very pastoralists affected, or even allowing the material benefits of any reduction (e.g., meat, hides) to flow to them via some objectively managed allocation system, such a reduction is more likely to take the form of government

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“culling,” whose primary message would be the reconfirmation of the government (or Communist Party) in its paternalistic role of protector. Were such culling to occur in this manner, it is highly likely that neither its effect on the wild population nor its efficacy in reducing losses to pastoralists would be known. Government policy would, indeed, have made a rapid turnabout—from protecting wildlife from local people to protecting local people from wildlife—but the essential separation that is ultimately so damaging to the potential for future coexistence would have been maintained just as surely as before. Blue Sheep: Above the Tumult Ever since the 1978 publication of Peter Matthiessen’s classic, The Snow Leopard, brought blue sheep (also called bharal) into the consciousness of Westerners, they have most often been imagined as rare animals that live only in the most remote regions of the Nepalese Himalaya. In fact, blue sheep, which are neither quite blue nor quite sheep, are the common goats of cliff habitat throughout the Tibetan Plateau. Nepal forms the southernmost extension of their geographic range, which otherwise is centered in Qinghai, with large populations throughout Tibet and also in eastern Xinjiang, throughout the Qilian Shan in Gansu (even including some small hills in the otherwise low-lying Gansu Corridor, called Dongda Shan), east into the Helan Shan where Ningxia borders Inner Mongolia, and southeast into western Sichuan and northwestern Yunnan. Smaller (but still evidently thriving) blue sheep populations also exist in Ladakh and the Indian Himalaya.151 If argali are difficult to find but easy to see once found, blue sheep are the reverse—easy to find but difficult to see. Their slate-gray to brownish pelage, augmented by the disruptive coloration of black striping on their legs, allows them to blend in to their preferred rocky resting sites at any time of year. They seem, chameleon-like, to always be exactly the color needed to disappear visually among the rocks and cliffs, becoming obvious only when they venture onto alpine meadows to feed. When in their rocky resting habitat, counting blue sheep is very much like solving a children’s puzzle in which well-known objects are deliberately hidden within a complex drawing and one first detects only one or two of the target items, gradually increasing the number, until at last one is incredulous that so many could exist where at first there appeared so few. In short, blue sheep are almost certainly the single most numerous species of large mammal in western China, although—once again—attempts to enumerate them rangewide are little more than guesses. In addition to the difficulty of counting them, getting to blue sheep necessitates traveling in steep and cliffy country. More than any other western Chinese mammal, these goats are denizens of mountains, requiring terrain that only they can negotiate to provide them with security from predators. But in marked contrast to most other species in western China, blue sheep really are present in as many places as conventional Chinese wisdom suggests they are. Serious field investigations of subjective and anecdotal reports have invariably confirmed their presence and general abundance. Wherever I have traveled in Qinghai, Gansu, and Tibet, and been told by local people or government officials that blue sheep were present and have had opportunity to get into the field to check, I’ve confirm their presence. Although extrapolating on the basis of ad

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hoc sampling is always poor science, blue sheep, unlike argali or wild yak, appear to be thriving in the numerous mountains where they earlier might only have been assumed or reported to exist. Officially, China considers that it harbors almost half a million blue sheep, which is almost certainly a wild overestimate.152 But even if the true population is only one-third or one-quarter of this number, the species remains numerous and in no danger. It was not always this way. In the early 1960s, extrapolations from shaky surveys suggested that Qinghai alone might have had well over a million blue sheep.153 Such breathless (and poorly documented) reports no doubt combined with the prevailing Maoist imperative to exploit nature for mankind’s use to prompt a government-run commercial harvest, which provided meat both domestically and internationally (mostly to Germany). From the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, blue sheep (as well as Tibetan and goitered gazelles) were subject to commercial hunting in Qinghai, in which production was measured in tons rather than number of animals; almost 3,600 tons of meat were sold during the 1965–79 period, and an additional 1,100 during the 1980–86 period, most of which consisted of blue sheep. Near as can be determined, no surveys or studies were conducted to judge the sustainability of such a hunt, and bags were limited only by the ability of hunters to kill the animals. By the mid-1980s, it had become clear that even the seemingly limitless blue sheep population was suffering under the assault, and the commercial harvest was ended (and, as had been planned, replaced by the considerably more conservative trophy hunt). In retrospect, it seems odd that, even in the closed-off People’s Republic of those decades, an uncontrolled commercial slaughter of wildlife could have been condoned, but it becomes easier to understand when remembering that it was really believed there were over a million animals within just a few mountain ranges. Once the massive killing stopped, however, blue sheep were able to respond. Without doubt, small-scale subsistence hunting continued until the confiscation of guns in the late 1990s. But given the poor weaponry, blue sheep subsistence harvests were almost certainly modest. Although most all pastoralists enjoy their meat, blue sheep, at a total weight of about 35 kilograms for females and 50 kilograms for males, represent a small reward for the effort of trekking into their vertical world. Equally important in their recovery, however, is the fact that surprisingly large populations of these small-bodied goats can be supported entirely within high-elevation, steep, or excessively rough/rocky terrain that is used sparingly if at all by domestic livestock. Both domestic sheep/goat herds and yak herds are often herded to within proximity of blue sheep, and in specific situations there may be conflicts. In general, however, it appears that even relatively intensive livestock grazing does not preclude having healthy populations of blue sheep. Safely above the tumult, blue sheep look down upon ever-expanding, ever-developing China, careless of whether or not they live within a nature reserve, a designated hunting area, or simply a livestock production zone. They provide an opportunity for a wide array of possible management approaches in the future.

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8

TROPHY HUNTING Opportunities Squandered

Hunting is an exceptional form of sustainable use that has been proven to create conservation stakeholders, to stimulate conservation incentives and generate operating revenue for conservation budgets; hence, it is one of the foremost forces for conservation. —Conservation Force Web site SCI [Safari Club International] members don’t hunt or fish to conserve animals. They hunt to hunt. —John Jackson, former SCI president, founder and president of Conservation Force

In my conversations with county-level employees at trophy hunting areas in western China, an awkward question frequently arises. These staff, generally ethnic Mongols, Tibetans, or Kazaks, are not fazed by dealing with a Westerner; they live in the field among Europeans and North Americans for a few weeks each year, and have long since lost any sense of naiveté or wonder they may once have had. But I arrive carrying binoculars and a computer, not a gun. Almost all other westerners they have met are, in their view, “hunters.” Am I, they often wonder, also a “hunter”? Answering this question requires stretching both my vocabulary and their concepts of hunting. To respond, I must explain that hunting for me, as for the overwhelming majority of North Americans who carry a gun to forest or field each autumn, is a fundamentally different activity than what the “hunters” they interact with are doing. In fact, labeling anyone who engages in hunting as simply a “hunter” risks overlooking the rich variety of human motivations, biological consequences, and social institutions associated with killing and consuming wild animals. Trophy hunting is generally taken as the killing of animals specifically for their trophy value (usually horns or antlers of adult males, occasionally skins or full mounts) rather than for food. Although hunting is an almost ubiquitous human activity, trophy hunting, defined in this way, constitutes only a miniscule part of it. Trophy hunters go to Alaska and western Canada to hunt brown bears, and to southern Africa to hunt elephants, lions, and an array of hoofed animals. In lesser numbers, trophy hunters travel to Mongolia, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and other Asian countries to hunt various mountain sheep and goats. Sometimes their incentive is to see a new country or experience a new culture, sometimes 170

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it is little more than competing to bag the biggest or most complete set of animals. China does not rank high on most trophy hunters’ priority list. The total number of trophy hunts and hunting areas in China is small, and, as I will show below, the killing of trophy animals in China has, at least thus far, had an insignificant effect on their populations. Why, then, devote an entire chapter to such a seemingly minor topic? Not, as one might guess, because the topic is controversial. Until quite recently, it was rather uncontroversial within China.1 Rather, it is because trophy hunting commandeers a very large share of the available manpower, energy, and interest among those tasked with conserving wildlife in China’s west. Particularly in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai, trophy hunting programs, despite hosting only a handful of foreigners yearly, are largely what provincial wildlife offices do. Lest one immediately jump to the conclusion that provincial officials deem killing animals more important than conserving them, let me offer them a pithy defense: they are hardly unique among bureaucrats in prioritizing the interests of their funding sources. Revenues from trophy hunting have become an increasingly important source of sustenance for underfunded provincial wildlife offices. In western China, the species attracting the largest number of hunters is the blue sheep, which otherwise can be hunted only in Nepal. Smaller numbers of Tibetan gazelles, goitered gazelles, white-lipped deer, and ibex are also shot by trophy hunters. But despite there being less than about a dozen taken each year nationwide, it is the argali that attract the most interest among hunters, among Chinese wildlife officials, and among critics of the Chinese hunting program.2 (They will thus be kept in the forefront here.) For many nonhunters, killing animals simply for sport must seem a most unusual way to conserve them. Even among people who hunt for recreation, spiritual satisfaction, or to put wild meat on their family’s table, hunting in which the sole material objective is a set of horns for display or a skin for a rug is generally viewed with skepticism at best.3 Chinese generally do not share this attitude of disapproval toward such killing. And although Chinese governments were later than other Asian countries in developing trophy hunting, they have supported the practice with few reservations, and would like, if possible, to expand it in the future.4 Thus, before examining the Chinese trophy hunting program in detail, we should look at the general concept and explore why it might be seen as a valid conservation approach. HOW KILLING ANIMALS MIGHT SAVE THEM Web sites, brochures, and books written by and for the trophy-hunting community are rife with explanations and defenses of trophy hunting as a conservation tool. Most can be encapsulated by the oft-heard “trophy hunting shows local people the value of these animals,” an explanation that manages to be simultaneously arrogant (in implying that locals don’t already place value on local wildlife) and incomplete (in assuming that hunting automatically leads to valuing, and thus by extension, to conservation). I will not credit these simplistic arguments by reiterating them here, but prefer instead to present the more objective and credible arguments put forward by natural resource economists and biologists. Among the most persuasive and justified writing in support of high-priced

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hunts as a conservation strategy are those of the British economists Timothy Swanson and Edward Barbier, and it is worth quoting them. According to Swanson, “the problem of biodiversity conservation is to determine policies that will effectively transfer value that exists in the developed world (i.e., funds) to those developing countries that harbour substantial quantities of diversity, and to do so in such a manner as will create incentives to maintain these reserves into the foreseeable future.”5 Swanson argued for what he termed a “dynamic incentive structure” that would function to reward actions that tend to conserve, and punish actions that tend to waste, wildlife resources. Under conditions in which poaching or unrestricted exploitation of natural habitats are ineffectively controlled by government authorities despite clear policies and legal authority to do so, a possible solution, according to Swanson, lies in “wildlife management areas . . . managed by the local communities exclusively for the wildlife products that they generate” that would require both “demand side” and “supply side” management, as well as external controls on “free riders” (opportunists whose presence would tend to undermine the system because they obtain benefits without paying any of the costs). Demand-side management would be needed to “maximize rents potentially appropriable by the managers of the resource.” 6 The higher the income available from the use of wildlife, the better the dynamic incentive structure would function. In short, the concept of sustainable use as a means to conserve vulnerable wildlife resources is that “use” creates incentives toward “sustainability.” Conservation is thus ensured despite the deliberate loss of individual members of the wildlife population, because the population and its required habitat must be protected adequately to allow indefinite persistence of both. Hunting focal species of high value is one possible avenue such sustainable use can take. This is not to imply that only harvestable species are of interest. In fact, the maximization of the revenues from the consumptive use of wildlife resources is important precisely because so much of the value of wildlife is nonconsumptive in nature. . . . When these products come jointly [species valued in both consumptive and nonconsumptive ways], but it is only possible to price one of the two goods, . . . it can be the optimal “second best” policy to provide price supports to the tangible good in order to foster the incentives to invest sufficiently in the habitat which supplies both.7 However, Swanson also points out that creation of revenues, while a necessary condition to the creation of a dynamic incentive structure, would not by itself conserve wildlife. There must, in addition, be a return to the manager that is linked to the provision of the resource, that is, supply-side management. Supply-side management, in turn, would require two elements: the “vesting of rents . . . with the local communities who are most able to constructively use and manage the resource,” and the creation of “a scheme for the protection of any rents that [consumers] intend to create from being appropriated by opportunists who do not share the ability or incentive to protect the resource.”

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The importance of local participation in any such scheme—and indeed the dangers of relying on traditional, nonconsumptive protection approaches—was emphasized by Barbier: The ultimate aim of community based wildlife utilization is to improve the cooperation of local communities to participate in the conservation of wildlife resources. The rationale is simple: local people are the most familiar with the area and the wildlife within it; the failure to ensure their cooperation will make them indifferent and perhaps hostile to conservation efforts, which they see as being “imposed from outside.” . . . The suppression of a community’s rights to some exploitation of the local wildlife, or a share in any of the proceeds resulting from wildlife utilization, may actually encourage local people to hunt illegally or to support outsiders engaged in these activities. . . . The alienation of communities from their local wildlife may lead to direct conflicts.8 Beyond the merely economic, the argument has been made that direct involvement with wildlife via hunting can generate a sense of kinship that itself leads to conservation. Biologist Curt Freese has argued that “the harvest of wild species and use of their products can serve to maintain an awareness of the link between human welfare and natural ecological systems, and more generally, it may simply elevate human awareness of and appreciation for wild species and nature.” Even if paying a high fee, the object of interest is “more than just the organism itself or a product from the organism. Value is also determined by the environment in which hunting and fishing take place. The average hunter would not pay to shoot an animal locked up in a pen or to walk with gun in hand through a natural landscape where there is no game.”9 It is not the killing per se that is of conservation value, but the need to conserve the wildness desired by the hunter.10 BIOLOGY Even if the theory operates as promised, one might legitimately question whether trophy hunting might be deleterious biologically. Thus, prior to investigating the success of the incentive system actually in place in western China, it is worth taking a small detour into the world of population biology to examine the issues surrounding this kind of hunting. To one lacking considerable understanding of how wildlife populations operate, it would appear that the fundamental biological risk involved in trophy hunting is that killing animals would reduce the population, and—by extension—continued and/or excessive trophy hunting could ultimately cause extinction. In fact, this concern, which I term the demographic issue, is the least of the worries of population biologists. First, most vertebrates for which research has allowed a convincing and powerful test, display density dependence. That is, the growth rate of such a population is dependent on its density: at a relatively high density (relative to its long-term equilibrium given environmental constraints), the growth rate is zero and the population neither increases nor decreases. But with density lowered—say, by hunting—to something lower than its long-term equilibrium, resources per capita are freed up and individuals either breed more prolifically or survive better

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(usually as juveniles) than before the reduction. Such compensation is rarely complete, so that the equilibrium in the presence of a constant offtake of animals will be somewhat lower than the equilibrium in the absence of any hunting. But as long as offtake does not exceed the population’s ability to compensate in some way, an equilibrium will be reached, and continued hunting will not result in a chronic decline.11 Further, in the case of trophy hunting, managers quickly discover that sustainable offtake rates are conservative ones. Unlike in models underlying the classic theory of sustainable yield, the objective in trophy hunting is to produce large males, not merely a specific yield of animal bodies. To become large, one must become at least somewhat old, and to be able to grow old, mortality rates among young males must be tempered lest all die before they attain trophy size. In any case, females are generally protected in a population managed for trophy hunting, and it is the female side of things that actually controls population growth. Thus, researchers have rarely been terribly concerned about the demographic issue in trophy hunting. A second concern is that a population subjected to hunting only of mature males could decline if there remain too few to inseminate females. If so, some females that would otherwise produce young in the spring following the hunting season might fail to do so, thus reducing the reproductive (and growth) rate of the population. Again keeping in mind the lack of detailed studies for any of the Chinese species involved, there is little reason for concern that this would occur in a population managed for trophy hunts. Studies of ecologically similar species in North America and Europe, even in cases where almost all of the oldest age-classes of males are removed, have generally shown that younger males are more than willing to step up and breed in their stead.12 It may not be the same males who are doing the breeding as in an unhunted population, but the imperative to produce the next generation is strong; it takes an unusually heavy removal of males to reduce the normal proportion of adult females impregnated.13 A third concern—one that might be applicable particularly to argali—is that removing the oldest, most dominant males exacts a cost in survival for the remaining, younger males. This effect has been suggested as potentially present in species that feature hierarchical mating systems in which males physically contest with each other for dominance, and the dominant males then obtain the majority of copulations.14 That is, the very contesting of dominance exacts a price: considerable energy is expended in constantly defending one’s high place in the hierarchy, and animals that focus their energy on such competition also reduce their food intake. Younger males, which have little chance of becoming dominant in any case, will usually expend relatively little energy even trying. Easily dissuaded from their ambition, they will generally resort to alternative tactics to attempt copulations, waiting until they grow large enough to seriously contest for dominance.15 Thus, we generally find that the survival rate among young males in such hierarchically structured species is higher than among the dominant males. The risk in trophy hunting is that by removing most or all of the older, dominant males (which suffer a higher mortality rate in any case), the energetically costly competition for dominance then devolves to younger males who otherwise would be spared it. This line of reasoning acknowledges that females will be bred in any case, whether by older males or younger ones, but the

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worry is that by burdening younger males with the now inevitable task of contesting a dominance they would otherwise have no chance to achieve, they also get the higher mortality that comes along with it. There is, indeed, considerable evidence among North American bighorn sheep that survival of subadult males (who either do not breed, or adopt breeding strategies that do not require contesting with older males) is high, whereas once males reach a lifespan of a decade or perhaps a dozen years, they tend to die out quickly. We do not find a gradual diminution of older males, but rather an abrupt edge of lifespan, as though, having fought their way to the top and succeeded for some years as a prime breeder, their available resources are quickly depleted (and their teeth usually ground to uselessness). It turns out, though, that the evidence that killing older males some years before their natural death thereby hastens the death of younger males as well is quite weak.16 If entire cohorts of older males are removed by trophy hunting, the potential for this positive feedback phenomenon, leading to yet higher mortality among males, seems real. But a trophy hunt managed in this way would quickly destroy its very object, the old males that hunters deem so valuable. Thus conservative offtake rates again appear to mollify this concern. A fourth risk—and the one that population biologists are seriously concerned about— deals with the evolutionary consequences of selectively removing the largest males (and thus, in the language of geneticists, “selecting” for males that never achieve large size, or do so relatively slowly). In theory, this risk is easily the most damning and most easily comprehended of the four, in part because if artificial selection can occur for horns, it likely can also occur for other, less obvious traits. If hunters, however unwittingly, produce strong artificial selection for certain kinds of animals, then natural selection—the very essence of the wildness that hunters and wildlife managers both desire—is perforce compromised.17 To anyone familiar with evolutionary theory, it should be clear that by elevating the mortality rate of individuals with a certain trait (large horns, in this case), and thereby increasing the breeding opportunities for those with alternative traits (smaller, or at least slower-growing, horns), the proportion of those with the alternative trait in the population will gradually increase.18 Indeed, this is the kernel of Darwinian evolution: survival of the fittest, increasing representation in the population of those equipped with the genetic basis for that fitness. Only in this case—at least according to the argument—trophy hunting has skewed the existing definition of fitness from that which would be selected naturally. By artificially increasing the mortality rate of those with traits that naturally lead to reproductive success (big horns), it now becomes “fitter” to have smaller (or more slowly-growing) horns because to have them increases one’s chance of avoiding the trophy hunter’s bullet and thus living to reproduce another day. That such artificial selection can alter the physical traits present in a population has been repeatedly shown in species as disparate as fish19 and elephants.20 Fortunately for species of interest to trophy hunters, the situation is a bit more complex than portrayed above. First, in order for artificial selection to play out in this way, the phenotypic trait visible to hunters (horns, in this case) must be a heritable one. For some time, it remained unclear whether, or to what degree, the size and conformation of

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horns was heritable from father to son. But research on North American bighorn sheep has recently confirmed that horn size is indeed heritable, although only partly so.21 We now know that there is a strong (albeit imperfect) statistical correlation between the type of horns borne by fathers and their male offspring. But horn growth is also known to be substantially influenced by nutrition, particularly when animals are young.22 Large horns may be an important (if indirect) avenue to later reproductive success, but they won’t help a youngster if he doesn’t live long enough to use them. Growing large horns comes at a cost, and thus is an evolutionary luxury compared with the imperative of growing a healthy body and acute sensory organs that will be necessary to keep the young animal alive during its vulnerable early years. Resources are allocated to horn growth only when they are relatively abundant: an animal faced with poor forage will sacrifice on horn growth in order to prioritize staying alive. Even faced with identical vegetation, animals in a dense population must compete with each other for it, whereas those in a sparse population can more easily select and appropriate the most nutritious patches. Thus, the animal’s environment, including the density of conspecifics, acts to modify the characteristics of horns ultimately grown by the young male from those genetically inherited from his ancestors. A second factor acting to disrupt the correlation between horn characteristics of fathers and their male offspring should be obvious: mothers. Females of most of these species also grow horns (albeit much smaller ones), but these animals are not subject to the same selective hunts as are males.23 Further, horns are most likely controlled by a large number of genes (it being unlikely there is a single “large horn gene”), and females contribute an equal share of these to male offspring. So any selectivity imposed on the identity of fathers is tempered by the lack of a similar selectivity on mothers. Third, horns grow with age, becoming continuously larger each year. So if hunters shoot males with larger horns, they may not necessarily be selecting those with genes for larger horns but rather those that are simply older. If all males shot were at identical ages, then clearly the largest ones would be those with some built-in advantage, and artificial selection against them would be strong. But a large-horned animal may simply be one that is older than the others, even if it is not particularly well disposed toward growing large horns genetically. Fourth, although animals with the largest horns normally achieve the highest rank within the male hierarchy and obtain the most matings, it does not follow that younger, smaller animals make no reproductive contribution at all. Recent work has shown that subordinate males often find ways to obtain matings that are frequently not evident from observational studies.24 Thus, even if males with genotypes conducive to growing large horns are selectively killed and thus obtain fewer mating opportunities than in the absence of trophy hunting, they are unlikely to have been shut out of the breeding lottery entirely. These four facets of reproductive biology among animals with fancy horns act to temper the magnitude of artificial selection. And for many years, they were sufficient to convince managers that such artificial selection was impossible among species of trophy interest. However, biologists working with an intensively studied herd of bighorn sheep in Alberta,

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Canada, have now shown that, even in the face of these complexities, artificial selection for undesired traits can indeed be imposed by trophy hunters.25 By killing bighorn rams shortly after they became of legal size, Alberta hunters produced a bighorn population increasingly incapable of producing the trophies they themselves sought. In short, hunters can, if not kill the golden-egg-laying goose, at least mold a slightly less valuable goose that lays eggs with increasingly inferior gold. The diminution of horn size in the Alberta bighorn population was gradual, and did not in itself cause a crisis for the animals. The researchers did not even recommend a cessation of trophy hunting for them, but rather a more conservative management regime, in which males were allowed to achieve older age (and thus more breeding opportunities) before becoming subject to legal harvest. Equally critical, the phenomenon of artificial selection, while shown unequivocally to occur in the Alberta study population, was not necessarily shown to be general or inevitable. Artificial selection pushing the characteristics of animals in one direction was simply competing against natural selection pushing them in another. In this case, the artificial selection was strong enough to have a real effect, but it remained uncertain that this would be the case under any such hunting regime. Lowerintensity hunts, even those focused solely on males with hunter-desired traits, might well succeed in allowing natural selection to continue operating.26 Studies such as that in Alberta are highly intensive and require not only large funding bases but many years to carry out. Needless to say, such studies have not been conducted for any species in China, and it seems unlikely they will be in the foreseeable future. Thus, there is little choice but to cautiously and thoughtfully apply the lessons learned from these bighorns to trophy hunting programs in China. The primary lesson would appear to be this: If hunts are highly selective, offtake rates must be conservative. Refugia that provide habitat for animals not subjected to the selective hunt could also be instrumental in maintaining the genetic integrity of the hunted population (if they are close enough to provide migrants during the breeding season). The number of large males taken by hunters must not be so high as to substantially reduce the number remaining for normal breeding behavior. But here again, all available evidence suggests that, from a population biology perspective, Chinese trophy hunting is on safe ground: trophy offtake rates have been low.27 Although population estimates are notoriously unreliable, Chinese hunting areas have been established only in those areas where focal species are relatively abundant. The sheer cost and logistics of mounting such an international hunt, together with the attractiveness of alternative species in other countries, has meant that few hunters have participated, and thus that trophy offtake has been modest. For example, in the Aksai hunting area in Gansu, which has produced the best available documentation of both population size and trophy offtake of argali, the number of rams taken from 1990 through 2004 has amounted to a mean of roughly 1.2 percent of the total population number. Although not a definitive indicator, the fact that the mean age of argali killed during 1990–2003 was a relatively 8.2 years old, and that neither age nor size of trophies had declined with time, both suggested that offtake rates had been conservative.28 Of course, concern about artificial selection remains, and should trophy hunts increase

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to anywhere near the level dreamed of by some unrealistic Chinese officials, they could yet become a serious problem. But thus far—and given realistic projections, into the near future—all conceivable negative biological affects on the species directly affected by Chinese trophy hunting have been inconsequential. In short, trophy hunting kills individual animals, but, at least at the intensity seen up to now, does not hurt populations or species. ON-THE-GROUND REALITIES But is simply “not hurting” good enough? Does lack of harm meet the intention of a “dynamic incentive structure” (as proposed by economist Swanson), or of sustainable use leading to conservation with equity (as suggested by biologist Freese)? Is Chinese trophy hunting creating incentives to conserve wildlife and maintain wild habitat into the foreseeable future? Or is it instead merely making use of a resource that, although perhaps globally rare, exists in sufficient local abundance to create employment? Establishment and Management of Hunting Areas Trophy hunting in China began somewhat informally during the 1980s, generally at the instigation of individual foreign hunters who inquired, were given permission by local authorities, and, before leaving, recommended that others be allowed to follow them. The first official international hunting area in China, Taoshan in Heilongjiang, opened in 1984. However, hunting areas in eastern China never succeeded in capturing the attention of many hunters, probably because the few species present in sufficient numbers to hunt were more common or more easily obtained elsewhere. Things were different in China’s west, however, where the Dulan hunting area in Qinghai opened in 1985, the Subei area in Gansu opened in 1988, and a number of hunting areas in Xinjiang were established in 1990. These quickly attracted the attention of foreigners primarily interested in taking blue sheep and argali; although none developed into large-scale operations, each became locally important. By 2004, no fewer than nine international hunting areas existed in Xinjiang, three in Gansu, and two in Qinghai (in addition to two areas in Tibet where some international hunting had occurred, although no formal establishment had yet taken place).29 The establishment of international hunting areas was given official imprimatur by the Wildlife Protection Law of 1988. Between 1985 and 2001, approximately 600 foreign hunters legally took 507 blue sheep, 238 Tibetan gazelles, 170 argali, 18 white-lipped deer, 17 goitered gazelles, and 16 ibex (as registered by the State Forestry Administration, or SFA) at western Chinese hunting areas.30 Stretched over seventeen years and a dozen or more hunting areas, these amounted to very little. But viewed as a whole, Chinese authorities considered that they had accounted for 11 million dollars of direct foreign earnings (see Table 8.1).31 Although the details differ, international hunting areas in the western provinces are all managed under a similar approach. At the local level, all are operated by staff employed

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Table 8.1

Prices Charged to Foreign Hunters for Trophy Species in Western China, as of 2005* Species

Location

Argali

Gansu, Qinghai

Blue sheep

Xinjiang, except Pamirs Xinjiang, Pamirs (“Marco Polo”) Gansu, Qinghai

Ibex White-lipped deer

Xinjiang Gansu, Qinghai

Red deer

Qinghai, Gansu

Tibetan gazelle Goitered gazelle

Gansu, Qinghai Gansu, Qinghai

Price ($US) 21,500 19,5001 26,450 29,000 7,900 6,9002 5,9003 2,5004 4,900 14,400 13,4001 4,500 3,5001 1,5004 1,5004

* These prices had remained constant since the mid-1990s. As explained in text, funds flowing to Chinese hunting areas were a small proportion of these. 1. Per hunter if > one hunt together. 2. Per hunter if two hunt together. 3. Per hunter if > two hunt together. 4. If added to another blue sheep or argali.

by the county-level forestry bureau (even counties with few if any forests have such bureaus), but are directly under the aegis of the provincial wildlife bureau. Few have staff directly on site; the nearest staff is located in county towns, which are usually more than 100 kilometers away. After having first obtained representation through a foreign-based hunting agent, hunters are directed to these localities via agents in Beijing in consultation with the provincial wildlife offices. Very little has been published about Chinese hunting areas, and most of what has been is either maddeningly vague or based on precious little on-site research.32 I have visited five hunting areas, both conducting field reconnaissance and talking with local staff, and spent considerable time in two of them (Kharteng in Gansu and Dulan in Qinghai). Although a small sample, I suspect my assessment based on personal interviews and the experience of the other three is still valuable. Thus, a quick overview of each area is useful. KIHA (Aksai, Gansu) The Kharteng International Hunting Area (KIHA), established in 1988,33 is administered by the Aksai County Wildlife Protection Station. KIHA is centered at approximately 39° N, 95° 30’ E, within Jianshe Township (approximately 13,850 km2), one of Aksai County’s four townships. Jianshe’s total human population was estimated to be 1,037 in 1990.34 Situated largely within the Danghenan Shan and associated range, KIHA is very high and

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dry, with elevations varying from 3,100 meters on the Kharteng River to 5,668 meters on the highest peak. Livestock raising (primarily sheep and goats, secondarily camels) has been the principal economic activity in and near KIHA. Aksai Kazak Autonomous County itself was created from portions of Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang provinces in 1953 to provide grazing and administrative services for Kazaks who had fled persecution from a local warlord in Xinjiang during the 1930s.35 Prior to the arrival of Kazaks, the area was very sparsely populated by semi-nomadic ethnic Mongol pastoralists. The county is one of China’s largest in area (approximately 33,500 km2, almost entirely desert and mountain grasslands), but smallest in population (according to the 1993 census, 7,229, of which roughly half were ethnic Kazaks). Most hunters come to KIHA in Aksai for argali, but many also kill blue sheep, and some also kill Tibetan or goitered gazelles. Hashiha’er (Subei, Gansu) Located just north of KIHA, in adjacent Subei County, the Hashiha’er hunting area was China’s first to focus on argali. It is similar in size and topography to KIHA, shares one mountain range (and possibly an argali herd) with it, and has a similar assemblage of wildlife. Unlike Aksai, Subei County is a predominately Mongol area, and these pastoralists maintain a somewhat more traditional lifestyle than had become true in Jianshe by the late 1990s, herding yaks in addition to domestic sheep and goats. Yanchiwan Township, which is essentially synonymous with the Hashiha’er hunting area, benefits from a broad belt of subirrigated pasture courtesy of the Dang River, and thus may provide slightly more favorable grazing for domestic livestock than Jianshe to its south. As with KIHA, argali is the prime species of interest and blue sheep an important second. Unlike in KIHA, however, white-lipped deer are present in sufficient numbers for an occasional bull to be taken. Also unlike KIHA, most of Hashiha’er is also—nominally at least—part of a nature reserve, the Yanchiwan provincial-level nature reserve. Dulan (Qinghai) Easily the largest Chinese international hunting area in terms of hunters, trophies taken, and staff employed, the Dulan area sprawls over two separate townships, Balong and Gouli, and hunters are occasionally led to other portions of the Burhan Buda Shan (itself a subrange within the Kunlun Shan) within the county. Dulan was initially conceived as providing a replacement economic activity for commercial hunting in the area, after that was discontinued (and then made illegal by the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law). Located in a relatively mesic section of the Kunlun, both Dulan areas feature much more productive vegetation than exists in either Aksai or Subei, and this, combined with favorable topography, makes it a veritable paradise for blue sheep. Tibetan gazelles are the second most sought-after trophy, and white-lipped deer are sometimes taken in Balong and red deer in Gouli. Argali are present as well, but through the year 2000 only five had been taken in Dulan. Both areas are grazed year-round, Balong by Mongol herders, Gouli by Tibetan herders.

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Bu’erjin (Xinjiang) The Kokh’shun Tau Mountains, with low hills rising to approximately 1,600 meters in elevation in a roughly 900 km2 area, constitute most of the Bu’erjin hunting area. These hills appear to have a healthy (although possibly isolated) population of argali, but no other species of conservation concern or trophy interest. (Ibex are present in nearby mountain ranges, but not within the hunting area.) Local pastoralists are Kazak, and as of 2001, five of twenty-five had been relocated from the hunting area to lower-elevation (and more fixed) grazing lands, although whether this was in deference to argali or simply part of the general sedentarization of pastoralists is unclear. The remaining twenty families used this range only for two winter months, and spent the remainder of the year in other ranges. Vegetation appeared to be abundant, and, from outward appearance, competition between argali and domestic livestock appeared to be low. Two or three ethnic-Kazak technicians lived in the range, providing horses for hunters as well as informally monitoring and passively deterring poachers by their presence. Two Kazak guides also conducted approximately monthly vehicle-based patrols around the perimeter of the mountain range, usually on Sundays (when locals would be most likely to engage in poaching).36 Gurengou (Hejing, Xinjiang) The Gurengou hunting area in Hejing County, Xinjiang, is situated south of the main crest of the Tian Shan, in rolling and occasionally cliffy mountainous terrain with abundant sedge meadows. Gurengou Village is at about 2,900 meters, and nearby mountains rise to about 4,000 meters. Unofficial reports suggested there might be as few as 4,100 domestic sheep in the area. Grassland conditions seemed very good during my short visit in 2001, with previous years’ litter generally evident, few dying plants, surprisingly high ground coverage, and generally vigorous-appearing plants. According to an official from Bayingol Prefecture (based in Korla), which is responsible for hunting in this area, Gurengou serves primarily as a winter range for argali. He told me that in the month of March it is not unusual to see 100–200 argali along the mountain slopes within walking distance of the small village. Clearly, Gurengou is another stronghold for argali.37 Funding Money still makes the world go round, so we must examine the money trail involved in Chinese trophy hunting. No comprehensive national law or regulation governs the financing of operations at hunting areas, so it is not surprising that no two are funded identically. Still, broad patterns emerge from which one can infer the funding situation in those areas never visited. Almost all trophy hunters have used foreign booking agents as intermediaries. Because most overseas booking agents retain 15 to 20 percent as commission, funds reaching China are 80 to 85 percent of published prices. Foreign-based agents have then transferred funds to Beijing-based agents, who, after taking their share, forward the remaining funds to the

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Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Bureau of SFA. Unpublished but frequently repeated policy in Qinghai and Gansu during the 1990s was to allocate 20 percent of those funds to the national management level, 30 percent to the provincial management level, 5 percent to the prefecture, and 45 percent to the county.38 Unofficially, however, 16 percent was first deducted at the national level for support of the Import/Export and CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) offices. Thus, proceeds to the county level were approximately 30 percent (i.e., 80% x 84% x 45%) to 32 percent (i.e., 85% x 84% x 45%) of the amount paid by the hunter. At the county level, two systems of further allocation were in place during 1997–2000. Prior to 1998 in Aksai County, 50 percent of county-level funds were retained for general expenditure purposes by the county treasury, and the remainder was provided directly to the hunting area. In Subei, the county received 39 percent (rather than 45 percent) of incountry revenue, of which 60 percent was retained for general purposes and 40 percent provided to the hunting area.39 Thus, about 12 to 16 percent of funds expended by hunters were available for spending by the county-level hunting area managers, from which field expenses for hunts were also paid. In both counties, salaries and overhead of the hunting areas were paid from county funds. Beginning in 1998, Aksai County altered its financial arrangement with the hunting area by allowing it to keep all funds received at the county level. However, as part of this reform, the county ceased all financial support of the hunting area and began treating it as it would a private enterprise (although it remained officially a government bureau). Salaries and overhead became the responsibility of the hunting area (i.e., they were paid for entirely by hunter fees), and taxes were also levied on its income and property. This partial privatization produced little change in total funding available (after considering salaries and overhead), but increased the area’s dependence on a steady supply of overseas hunters. Based on the costs of my own field work and information provided by staff in Aksai, I estimated field expenses (during the 1997–2003 time period) at approximately $2,400 per hunt, or roughly equal to the 12 to 16 percent of hunters’ funds reaching the hunting area. Thus, under this funding scheme, the Aksai hunting area received only enough funding to cover hunting services when argali40 were hunted (see Table 8.2). Furthermore, even this level of funding sometimes failed to materialize. For example, by August 2001, the Aksai hunting area had received only approximately half of the funds it was due from hunts occurring during 1998–2000 (i.e., approximately 8 percent of funds expended by hunters). As a result of such shortfalls, during 1999 it went into debt by approximately ¥20,000 and was forced to take out a loan from the county government to continue operations. At the Dulan hunting area in Qinghai, specifics as of 2004–06 differed slightly from the arrangement described above, but the effect was similar. The proportion of in-country funds held by the province had risen to 40 percent and that retained by the prefecture had risen to 7 percent, leaving 29 percent to be provided directly to the hunting area for expenses and other uses. (As of 2005, the provincial office was negotiating to reduce Dulan’s allocation to 23 percent, but had not yet succeeded.) Further, because the hunting area was treated as though it was a profit-making private business, these proceeds

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Table 8.2

Approximate Allocation of Foreign Hunter Fees/Argali Trophy to Each Administrative Level, Chinese Gansu Argali Hunting Program, 1997–98, According to Local Officials*

Percentage

Funds allocated

Use

Paid by foreign hunter 15% of 21,500

3,225

Foreign booking (Commission)

16% of 18,275

2,924

CITES, Export/ Import (Admin.)

20% 30% of 15,351 5%

3,070 4,605 768

National level Provincial level Prefecture level

50% of 6,908

3,454

General county funds

74% of 3,454

2,400

Aksai hunt expenses

1,054

Conservation in Aksai

}

Funds remaining for next lower level 21,500 18,275 15,351

6,908 3,454 ~1,054

*Hunters participating in groups were charged $19,500 each (rather than $21,500 illustrated here). All figures are U.S. dollars. (Adapted from Harris and Pletscher 2002.)

were subject to a 22 percent national tax. Thus, funds available to the Dulan hunting area amounted to approximately 22.6 percent (i.e., 29% x 78%) of the total reaching China. As in Gansu, all local expenses required to outfit the hunt were Dulan’s responsibility, and generally amounted to $1,500 to $2,500 per hunt. However, unlike in Gansu, very few hunters in Dulan have sought or killed high-priced argali; the main species hunted have been blue sheep, and some hunters have added smaller trophies from Tibetan gazelles. Under this funding scheme, if a foreign hunter wished to travel individually to Dulan with the intent of killing a single blue sheep, the Dulan hunting area would receive only approximately $1,518 ($7,900 x 85% x 22.6%), and would thus operate at a loss (see Table 8.3). In practice, Beijing-based agents usually combined such individual hunters into groups, and most hunters added other species, so that such losses were rarely incurred (although even for a pair of hunters, net revenue to Dulan would be only about $2,495, barely breaking even). Still, that the system—ostensibly developed to provide high value to local people in exchange for protecting a resource that they might otherwise use—even allowed for the possibility that funds transfer would run in reverse (i.e., that a rural county operation would essentially subsidize a foreign hunter rather than the other way round), suggests a problem, to say the least. (This inverted Robin Hood dynamic would, in all likelihood, not be evident to a hunter who had paid $7,900 plus airfare and other travel expenses to shoot a single animal.) Dulan also differed from the Gansu hunting areas in its scope. Because it had focused on blue sheep, because blue sheep were (and continue to be) far more numerous than argali, because they are priced much lower, and possibly because Americans had not been prohibited by U.S. law from bringing their trophies back home, the number of foreign

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Table 8.3

Approximate Allocation of Foreign Hunter Fees/Blue Sheep Trophy to Each Administrative Level, for a Single Hunter Taking a Blue Sheep in Dulan (Qinghai) 2004, According to Local Officials*

Percentage Paid by foreign hunter 15% of 7,900

}

24% 40% of 6,715 7% 22% of 1,947

Funds allocated

Use

1,185

Foreign booking (commission)

1,612 2,686 470

National level Provincial level Prefecture level

428 ~1,500–2,500 ()

Central government tax Dulan hunt expenses Conservation in Dulan

Funds remaining for next lower level 7,900 6,715

1,947 1,519 () none

*Hunters participating in pairs were charged $6,900 each, and those in larger groups charged $5,900 (rather than $7,900 illustrated here). All figures are U.S. dollars.

hunters in Dulan had been an order of magnitude higher than in either of the Gansu areas. In the year 2000, for example, ninety-seven blue sheep were hunted in China, of which the majority originated in Dulan. This larger scale necessitated a larger staff, but not quite as large as the hunting area managers at the time projected they would need. Due in part to their own overstaffing, and in part to the financing difficulties described above, the Dulan hunting area—by far China’s largest and most famous—had also gone into debt, and by 2004 was struggling to balance its books by shedding staff. Further stressing budgets at the local level was the fact that during the decade or so in which fees paid by international hunters remained unchanged, the price of vehicle fuel, one of the major components of locally borne costs, had roughly quadrupled in China. This ever-tightening margin for hunting areas had caused Dulan managers to look for increasingly creative ways to produce income, including renting out their vehicles during the nonhunting season, and obtaining hunters’ permission to retrieve otherwise unused meat, pack it up, and sell it to restaurants in distant cities. In neither the Aksai nor Dulan hunting areas did any formal provision exist for funds to be channeled to government levels below the county (e.g., township). In Aksai, monetary benefits to pastoralists living where hunts occurred were limited to horse rental. Four pastoral families with seasonal pastures nearest preferred hunting areas did all the necessary horse renting. Thus, there were no direct financial benefits to the majority of people potentially affected by the presence of wildlife. In Dulan, in addition to renting horses, the hunting area attempted to provide funds to the village leader (cunzhang) of each group of pastoral families for each animal killed in their grazing area, as well as to provide some funds to a local monastery. The usual amount was ¥300 per blue sheep (i.e., about 37 U.S. dollars at prevailing exchange rates), and ¥1,000–2,000 per argali

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(US$122–244) killed. However, these payments were not guaranteed, but rather depended on the solvency of the hunting area at the time. The village leader was, in turn, expected to use these funds for socially desirable projects.41 Other hunting areas in western China may have been faring somewhat better. For example, the director of the Bu’erjin hunting area in Xinjiang told me in 2001 that he had been receiving ¥100,000 ($12,195) for each argali trophy, or about 46 percent of the total revenue possible. If so, and if this applies to other Xinjiang hunting areas, their finances were probably in better shape than those of hunting areas in Qinghai and Gansu. However, I was unable to determine if all these funds were actually controlled by the Bu’erjin hunting area (rather than going to the county’s general fund), or whether the area paid additional taxes on this income. Thus, although the specifics remain murky and there are no doubt bright spots, it is clear that these international hunting areas receive only a small proportion of the total funds expended by hunters, and far less than would be needed to support an active program of reimbursing local people for opportunity costs borne in pursuit of wildlife conservation. To counter the argument that such a lopsided system of allocating funds is necessary or inevitable, one need look no further than one of China’s southern neighbors, Pakistan, where similar hunts for mountain ungulates, though doubtless having problems of their own, are structured to provide 75 or 80 percent of in-country revenue to the communities in which the hunts take place.42 Frequently seen claims that funds from hunters go to “local people” must be interpreted carefully: just who is considered “local” depends on the perspective of the speaker. If “local” is defined as “provincial level and below,” it is certainly true that large sums flow from foreign hunters to local people. From the perspective of most pastoralists, however, even the county level is not “local”; only benefits accruing at the township, or better yet, village (or equivalent) level would be seen by many pastoralists as being, in any functional way, theirs. Officials in provincial capitals may see themselves as local, and indeed may consider that they manage the hunting areas or their wildlife from their distant cities. But such management by remote control is little more than paper pushing. Why are so few funds flowing to the hunting areas, and even fewer directly to local people in whose hands these species’ fates actually reside? To what use are the vast majority of funds being put? Of course, transparency in accounting is almost unknown anywhere in China, so we cannot be sure. And although accusations of wholesale corruption have often been floated by critics of trophy hunting (particularly with respect to the former Soviet Central Asian republics43), I think it highly unlikely that hunter funds are going directly into officials’ pockets. No doubt some of the funds channeled toward wildlife agencies at higher governmental levels are being used, as often claimed, for educational purposes. One can hardly criticize a general consciousness-raising regarding wildlife and such activities are not free of costs. But some of the education comes in the form of what the Chinese themselves label “propaganda,” and much of this in the form of “educating local people about the value of these animals.” But because these same local people are at the short end of the funding stick (if receiving

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any tangible benefits at all), the value they are being told about must be somebody else’s. They can certainly be educated about the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law, which prohibits them from hunting these species (even as it allows foreigners to do so). But in the context of international hunting areas as currently managed, the message from foreign hunter to local pastoralist amounts to little more than “I want to show you how valuable this animal is to me. I’m willing to pay thousands of dollars for it, so you keep your hands off!” But I suspect that the most important destination for these funds at higher governmental levels is simply the bloated bureaucracies themselves. Officials are not pocketing these funds directly, but rather using them to refurbish decrepit offices and buy newer computers. It is almost always the case that provincial wildlife offices have fancier and more powerful vehicles than can be afforded by hunting area offices, even though the former are used primarily to ferry dignitaries around cities whereas the latter are needed for the rough conditions of field work. Each year, three or four provincial officials are funded to attend large hunting conventions in the United States or Europe, ostensibly to help popularize the hunting areas in their respective provinces. But these officials invariably lack both the detailed knowledge of the hunting itself and the English-language skills needed to interact productively with foreign hunters; the alternative enticements of a week in Las Vegas inevitably turn these trips into little more than junkets. Also blotting up much of the available funding at provincial levels are “hunting companies,” which supposedly function in organizing the hunt. But with capable agents in Beijing to make travel and permit arrangements, and local guides and service providers at each hunting area, there seems little need for provincial-level intermediaries. Hunters who pride themselves on their ability to climb to high elevations, negotiate harsh terrain, and outwit an exquisitely adapted mountain ungulate would hardly seem to need a babysitting service on the flight from Beijing. Yet in Gansu, for example, a dozen (or perhaps more) people are employed as part of the provincial “hunting company” in Lanzhou, yet are rarely (if ever) seen by hunters. They busy themselves with assorted office tasks, and those with English skills occasionally accompany hunters to the field (where they sit in camp). None of these employees makes a high income, but stack up enough of them and it ultimately eats into the funding that is intended as an incentive for conservation in places hundreds of kilometers away. Power and Control As troublesome as is the current system of revenue flows, correcting it would not in itself transform these hunting areas into model wildlife conservation systems. The fundamental problem is that, like nature reserves, hunting areas lack control over land use within them. The boundaries demarcating hunting areas serve to indicate regions within which foreigners can legally hunt; they do nothing to distinguish policies regarding land use or control of land management.44 Thus, if heavy livestock grazing is deleterious to wildlife (as it clearly is, at least for argali in some hunting areas), hunting area staff are powerless to do more than quietly complain.45 To the degree that any oversight of grazing occurs, that responsibility rests

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with the county grazing (or grassland) bureau. If county authorities wish to authorize a mining operation that could disturb wildlife (as they have within the Subei and Dulan hunting areas), hunting area managers can merely shrug their shoulders. When itinerant gold miners flooded into Aksai, turning riparian areas into toxic wastelands (and possibly poaching wildlife while they did so), hunting area officials not only had no authority to stop them, they were insufficiently armed and equipped to even patrol the drainages the miners occupied.46 In Qinghai, plans currently exist to upgrade the existing road that runs over the crest of the Kunlun Shan (through the Gouli section of the Dulan hunting area) from a hazardous, dry-weather-only track (best left to those on horseback) into an all-weather highway. This will shorten the route that freight-hauling trucks must currently drive between Golmud and points in southeastern Qinghai by many hundreds of kilometers. In so doing, it will also increase human disturbance in the Dulan hunting area substantially. But despite their reservations, Dulan staff know they have no say in the matter. They can only hope the highway’s impact will be minor. In Gansu, plans exist to build a dam on the Kharteng River (which flows through the middle of KIHA), inundate prime winter habitat for argali and wild yaks, and build an enormous water diversion project that would pump water into the neighboring Dang He drainage (where it would, eventually, be used for irrigation by agricultural Dunhuang). This is precisely the sort of habitat transformation that the incentive system, based on enthusiasm and funds generated by trophy hunting, is intended to preclude.47 But whether or not the Kharteng diversion project is built will depend on the availability of funding from higher levels, or perhaps other political forces. Nobody is asking for, and nobody will listen to, the concerns of the hunting area staff, who realize what its effects on both wildlife and hunting will likely be. To be sure, the presence of hunting area staff has had the positive effect of reducing poaching. At a time when poaching was such a serious threat that other threats seemed minor and remote in comparison, any reduction in poaching, even if incomplete, was a tremendous contribution. Some would-be poachers probably stopped simply because they supported the efforts of hunting area staff; others were no doubt deterred by the increased risk of discovery and punishment. Hunting area staff were authorized to apprehend and report (although not to actually arrest) poachers,48 and I have little doubt that wildlife populations responded positively to this initiative. But the species of interest to trophy hunters have all been legally protected, regardless of where they live, since at least the enactment of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law (in most cases, prior to that). Anti-poaching actions within hunting areas simply enforced a law that held equal validity wherever the species lived. As well, with increased consciousness about poaching generally, and with the confiscation of all firearms in the late 1990s specifically, poaching—at least by local pastoralists—became an increasingly minor threat to wildlife, whether inside of hunting areas or not. If the justification for trophy hunting rested on its ability to stop local poaching, that justification was now gone. If the raison d’être of trophy hunting was to pay people (directly or indirectly) to stop poaching animals in their midst (but it otherwise provided them no benefit), it could now pack up its bags and go home, because local people no longer had the means to poach.49

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CHINESE HUNTING AREAS AS CONSERVATION PROGRAMS Viewed broadly, hunting programs can be categorized in one of two ways: as essentially wildlife conservation programs, in which funds from hunters are used to either partially or entirely offset the costs of running them; or, as essentially business enterprises, where an otherwise rare species exists locally in sufficient abundance to justify a generation of employment and profits. The two are not without overlapping aspects, of course. Under the first concept, a profitable and sustainable business enterprise is a necessary condition; under the second, the business ultimately fails if the animal population is not adequately conserved. However, the two differ in fundamental conception and in the desired incentive structure. Under the first, Chinese staff are wildlife managers who also offer hunting services. Under the second, Chinese staff are travel agents and guides, who hope that as the outcome of their business activities, wildlife will automatically be well managed. Chinese international hunting areas are currently business enterprises, not wildlife conservation programs, fundamentally because allocation of power and benefits is inversely correlated to the level of responsibility. Rather than the majority of power and benefits being held at the most local level (i.e., that closest to the animals and their habitat), they are held at the national level. Those with the most ability to affect populations and habitat are provided with the fewest tools. With the administrative structure upside-down, benefits and responsibilities are inverted. As a result, the link between the business success and conservation success is seriously weakened, and conservation is not assured. Current Chinese policy looks toward market forces to assist in conservation. Hunting areas are treated and expected to operate much like a profit-making business. Under this theory, they will prosper if they succeed in their fundamental objective of providing high-quality hunts. This, in turn, necessitates conservation of wildlife populations. The longed-for incentive structure links success of the quasi-business enterprise directly to the health of the population that requires conservation action. This approach is reasonable given the existing political, economic, and historical constraints. The critical flaw is that international hunting areas are controlled and limited by higher government authorities in ways that would never apply to a business enterprise operating in a free-market economy. Because they have no authority to market or sell hunts (hunters are assigned by provincial hunting companies), they have no guarantee of seeing their conservation efforts rewarded with more business. But nor do hunting areas have authority to limit the number of hunters arriving. They are thus denied the ability to curtail harvesting in the short-term in order to assure sustainable offtake in the long-term (even if that turns out to be a prudent free-market strategy). Further, hunting areas are not in direct control of the receipts from the services they provide, thus denying them the power to budget, or to allocate resources in a way to assure their own success. Finally and most importantly, hunting areas have no control or influence on the quantity or quality of habitat that forms the basis of their wildlife populations. If the product of their “business enterprise” is high-quality hunts, they have no control over the means of production (i.e., wildlife habitat).

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LOST OPPORTUNITIES The great tragedy here is that by managing international hunting areas in this way, Chinese authorities have lost a priceless opportunity to develop them into functioning, locally operated, and largely self-funding conservation systems. The fundamental premise on which the hunting areas are based remains sound. Although better population monitoring and more thoughtful quota setting would be improvements, the hunting itself has been, as Chinese officials have claimed, biologically benign. In contrast to other forms of wildlifebased tourism, trophy hunting has not required developing permanent infrastructure on or near critical wildlife habitat. Disturbance to wildlife, habitat, and local cultures have all been quite minor. From the business perspective, the vast majority of hunters who have experienced what these areas have to offer have been satisfied with their experience. Most are happy with the quality of the trophy they bagged, and felt well treated by their Chinese hosts; there appears to be a continuing supply of international hunters. In fact, it’s even better than that. In establishing these local hunting areas, the Chinese government has unearthed a resource it may not have realized it had: local personnel (most often ethnic minorities) with enthusiasm for wildlife conservation and field savvy. They may lack university training, but many of these young staff are bright, motivated, and energetic. Given training and empowered, they could form the nucleus of a wildlife management system based on the “Devil’s bargain” that I introduced earlier: deliberately limiting human transformation of wild habitats in return for limited use of the wild products those habitats produce. As well, these hunting areas exist at an appropriate geographic and political scale, both biologically and socially. They are large enough to manage biological populations of large mammals, yet small enough that the relevant human communities involved can conceivably engage in mutual sharing of benefits and sacrifices. In time, such a system could be expanded beyond foreign hunting to include species and regions where local people could become active participants. Thus far, this opportunity has been squandered because both funding allocation and power structures treat these local staff as hired hands instead of partners in management. Foreign hunters constitute a source of funding and enthusiasm for wildness, and the germ of a method to empower such wildness in the face of competing economic interests. By linking rewards (in the form of desired wild product) to investment (maintaining an essentially wild character), trophy hunting could, by now, be operating as a model for Chinese management in places other than those where consumptive use is reserved for foreigners. If revenues exceed costs (as they surely do in the case of argali, highly priced because of their rarity and exclusivity), surplus funds could be spent establishing similarly justified management zones in areas where foreigners cannot easily travel, and for species in which foreigners have no interest. But to do this, the system needs to be reformed into one that views hunting (and attendant revenue) as the fuel for a program that looks out for the needs of featured wildlife and has power to intercede on wildlife’s behalf. The current system assumes that merely by hunting, and merely by generating funds that are distributed over a wide array of bureaus and companies (none of which manage wildlife habitat), conservation will occur automatically.

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Reform from within currently seems unlikely. The hunting areas are powerless to change the system from below, and authorities at both provincial and national levels are unconvinced that any changes are needed or even desirable. Higher-level officials are, of course, aware of complaints from the local level, but tend to see these as inevitable rumblings from those in lower positions. Leaders at these levels have neither the time nor the expertise to delve deeply into threats to wildlife that persist despite the presence of international hunting areas. It does not help that the Chinese literature on the subject is limited to uncritical rehashing of the theoretical rationale for sustainable use,50 or superficial attempts at quantitative assessment in the absence of data. As far as official Chinese documentation goes, everything is just fine; the only thing that would make the system better would be more hunters (preferably Americans).51 In any case, reforming this system would cost these officials power and control, and bureaucracies rarely devolve power willingly: they generally require some outside pressure or some external incentive before they will see it as being in their best interest. Reform is also unlikely to come at the behest of Westerners who criticize trophy hunting in general. So outraged are they at the very notion of killing rare species that many of them are unable to support any modification of a system that includes killing as a component. Their shrillness may gain them the attention of the Western press (and occasionally of politicians and judges), but it engenders in most Chinese a rigid defensiveness that freezes the discussion. Progress toward solving conservation issues is paralyzed in an atmosphere in which the Western side accuses the Chinese side of callous disregard toward the very animals they claim to be conserving, while the Chinese side sees Western critics as cultural imperialists with no understanding of Chinese history or the realities of its impoverished west. It would seem to be in the interest of trophy hunters themselves to agitate for reform. Certainly, they would seem to be most ideally situated to call for it, because, by their decisions of whether or not to purchase hunts, they ultimately control the purse strings. But the nature of the trophy hunting business itself produces stronger incentives to accept the status quo than to take a strong stand in favor of improved management. Most trophy hunters visit an area only once; after having procured the sought-after trophy, they pursue something new, somewhere else. There are few return customers. Thus, as individuals, their attention is normally drawn to the area they have not yet visited, rather than the areas they have. Hunters are almost always represented by foreign-based agents, who conceivably could pressure higher-level Chinese authorities to reform these programs. However, risking the displeasure of authorities who control their income stream (through the power to issue hunting and export permits) is not generally seen as wise business practice by agents. If a particular foreign-based agent is seen as too troublesome, officials in Beijing can easily enough make life difficult for him, safe in the knowledge that other foreign-based agents with more cooperative attitudes will be there to represent the same hunters. In such a free-market setting, it seems unlikely that individual agents will take strong stands that risk their own short-term business success. Most hunting agents, in turn, participate in groups or associations through which

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they might, theoretically, act in concert. In the United States and Canada, Safari Club International has about 40,000 members, and has become a powerful political force for the interests of trophy hunters (as well as other kinds of hunters). In Europe, the Conseil International de la Chasse performs a similar function. These organizations have made some initial moves toward prodding governments in Central Asia and elsewhere to ensure that trophy hunts contribute to conservation. Unfortunately, toward China they have thus far remained silent, and authorities in Beijing see their tacit approval as further confirmation that nothing whatsoever is wrong with the system. A valid rationale for trophy hunting rests in similar terrain as the “Devil’s bargain”: it says that taking the life of some animals is the bargain we make with nature in order to limit our own almost inevitably destructive behavior toward natural ecosystems. We must find some way to reward ourselves for paying the opportunity cost inherent in maintaining these habitats. That opportunity cost is paid primarily by people living in close contact with wildlife; those are the people who need rewards and incentives. Alas, as things stand now, neither the local people nor the wildlife whose habitat they live on are reaping much benefit. And the opportunity to build upon the Devil’s bargain of controlled use in exchange for restraining our tendency to extirpate wildness—by developing programs involving subsistence or other forms of hunting—is slowly slipping like sand through our fingertips.

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9

CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE

The key element in [the evolution of science]—and perhaps the most important single byproduct of the scientific revolution—was the institutionalization of an ethos of skepticism, born of inductive methodology, which led scientists to question, as a matter of course, the validity of any and all a priori assumptions, dogmas, and received theories. The virtual absence of such an ethos is a striking feature of Chinese culture. —Richard Baum I know that the papers I published earlier have serious flaws. Now that I’ve graduated but am still working on this species, I think I can do better. But, you know, as my professor reminded me, I had to publish to get my degree. —Young Chinese wildlife scientist

Snow leopards, emblematic of the wild mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and central Asia, are among the most charismatic species in all of western China. They are also, without doubt, among the most difficult to study or monitor. As top-level predators, they are naturally rare; because they live in precipitous and alpine terrain, spending time in their habitat is costly and difficult for humans; and because they are cryptically colored and depend on stealth for their survival, observing them in the wild is a rarity. Thus, biologists have only been able to take a peek at their lives, and conservationists have only rudimentary, indirect, and crude methods to estimate their abundance and trend; hence a mere handful of scientific studies have been accomplished. I was thus somewhat surprised, a few years back, to encounter a Ph.D. student with plans (and just a bit of funding) to “study snow leopards” in the Kunlun Mountains where I was working. Given the inevitable logistical, funding, and time constraints I knew he would face, I asked him what aspect of snow leopard ecology he planned to focus on. His response was quite general: distribution, abundance, food habits, habitat selection. When I urged him to narrow his focus, to perhaps concentrate on testing a method of detecting free-ranging snow leopards—admittedly only a piece of the puzzle, but at least a piece clearly relevant to its conservation—he agreed that doing so probably made sense, but explained that the principal funding agency in Beijing would never agree. Because such a study would, even at best, constitute only a building block for other work, the graduate student believed, it would be viewed as insufficiently consequential to merit support. 192

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Better, he thought, to comply with the agency’s assumed desire to fund research that promised to answer a large question in a single study. If, in the end, such an effort yielded data so sparse that little could be made of it, so be it. WHAT MAKES WILDLIFE SCIENCE DIFFICULT (BUT FASCINATING) The key to advancing scientific knowledge quickly is simple: controlled and replicated experimentation. There are many scientific approaches, but there is little doubt that replicated experiments with controls are the fast lane to reliable knowledge. The reductionism required in controlled experiments allows factors to be isolated, thus vastly increasing our power to determine which factors matter and how things operate. But if one wished to find a polar opposite of “controlled,” one could hardly do better than to choose the word “wild.” If what one is studying is truly wild, it is, almost by definition, impossible to conduct controlled experiments. As if to mock the very concept of reductionism, the behavior of any given animal is an impossibly complex function of a myriad of factors (condition of its food supply, condition of the viruses and bacteria making a living off it, current weather conditions, past weather conditions, weather conditions affecting its grandmother, ad infinitum). In turn, each individual interacts with conspecifics, competitors, prey, predators, and parasites, yielding even more variability and complexity in the ultimate object of study in wildlife science—a wildlife population. Like meteorologists, wildlife biologists are faced with understanding the specific manifestations of a process that is influenced by uncountable sources, some small and some large, all interacting with one another. Unlike meteorologists, however, wildlife biologists do not have large systems of monitoring stations that constantly update conditions, providing feedback to continuously improve forecasts. And as we know, even with such a monitoring network, meteorologists sometimes get the weather forecast wrong. Because the object of our study, wildlife populations, are by their nature integrations of these forces, isolating any one of them, even where possible, can give at best only partial and contingent information. If we study a population in captivity we can obtain much more detailed and precise data than if we must go searching for the animals in their natural habitat. The problem is that any information from captive studies is always contingent: it says, “assuming the lack of predators, no human hunters, no exposure to harsh climates, abundant food resources, these animals behave in the following way.” But understanding how the animals behave in the presence of these factors is the very thing we want to know. If, alternatively, we pour all our available resources into a very intensive study of a particular population during a particular (almost certainly relatively short) time-period, we might obtain detailed and precise information that pertains to these animals during this time. But what if the animals chosen for study are unlike members of the same species faced with differing habitat conditions? What if the time-period we choose for study is unusually wet or dry (or simply insufficiently variable to capture the extremes which the animals must ultimately cope with)? Again, the information we

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obtain, although perhaps accurate and detailed, will be contingent: it cannot be expected to apply generally unless we are very lucky. Lacking both the experimental chemist’s ability to isolate a causative mechanism and the meteorologist’s sophisticated monitoring system, wildlife scientists must fall back on statistics (increasingly complex and multivariate) and on synthesizing their own studies in light of others. Every study adds a small pebble to what must ultimately become a mountain-sized accumulation of information. Each study has its contribution to make, but also its limitations that prevent it from telling us everything we would like to know. We gain knowledge slowly, in fits and starts, and can only claim wisdom by reference to the sum total of research and field experience. Wildlife biologists are thus on intimate terms with uncertainty, aware that what they study is wild, and therefore to some extent, inherently unpredictable. The challenge and enjoyment of conducting wildlife science arises from the constant juggling of the information available from any given study with the complications and limitations implied by its context. It is not that we lack basic principles or safely made assumptions altogether. But we are constantly on guard against complacency that what we have observed is even remotely close to the whole story; we are engaged in a continual struggle to interpret what little we know in the context of what we do not. There is clearly no gainsaying the majestic achievements of ancient Chinese civilization, anymore than one can deny the astoundingly rapid growth and modernization of China during the last two decades: neither would have been possible in the absence of advanced knowledge and technology.1 It is similarly clear that individual Chinese scientists have always found ways to be in the forefront of their fields. Such excellence no doubt continues or has even increased in recent decades among many scientific disciplines. However, Chinese efforts to understand and monitor its wildlife have lagged well behind China’s impressive scientific achievements in other fields. The contributions of Chinese wildlife biologists toward understanding the dynamics, management, and conservation of their native fauna have been disappointing, and precious little of the technical Chinese wildlife literature can be assessed as meeting international standards. The reasons for this, I believe, stem partly from cultural characteristics,2 and partly from the lack of social institutions conducting or supporting applied wildlife conservation or management. Here, I explore both causes and provide illustrative examples. CULTURAL CHALLENGES FACING CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE Discomfort with Uncertainty In wildlife work, one is almost always faced with a very small bit of a much larger picture. It is like exploring a cavernous storage shed during a power outage equipped with only a pen light: you can illuminate a bit of what’s in front of you at any given time, hoping to avoid bumping into things or tripping over dangerous objects, but it is difficult to know

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how what you’ve discovered relates to all the other stored objects as yet unlit. Our ability to observe the wild is so limited that, even equipped with satellite radio collars and highpowered computers, we are proverbial blind men encountering elephants. We would be unwise to put too much stock in what we have observed. We must consider our inevitably small samples of data in light of the existing literature, well-established theory, and of course, the laws of probability. Alas, having gone to all the trouble of getting to a difficult field site and putting up with snow, wind, mud, insects, poor food, and any number of other unpleasant realities of field life, it is difficult to bear in mind the trivial nature of what one has actually learned. If, despite the most valiant of efforts, one has collected very little data, it is tempting to proceed with an analysis anyway and sweep under the rug violations of critical assumptions or the size of a resulting confidence interval, rather than acknowledging that one really still has no good idea of what is going on. But only the second of these options would constitute good science. And even with valiant efforts, sample sizes obtained from field work on free-ranging wildlife in western China are inevitably small. While this is unfortunate, the problem lies not in small sample sizes per se, but in the all-too-frequent failure to place into proper context the utility of inference based on them. Distance sampling is currently a favored method of estimating the abundance of wildlife in China, and for good reason. The statistical theory underlying distance sampling is well explored: some kind of sampling is obviously called for in the huge expanses of western China (where any claim to a complete count would be out of the question), and most animals are, relatively speaking, easy to see in these open, treeless habitats. Distance sampling was one of the featured methods suggested in the guidelines established by the State Forestry Administration (SFA) in its (approximately) year 2000 national wildlife “census.”3 But distance sampling is not magic, and it works well only when assumptions are not grossly violated, and only when sample sizes are adequate to support a model of detection (which accounts for animals never seen). There is no clearly demarcated threshold above which sample sizes are adequate and below which they are not, but commonly used rules of thumb suggest sixty, or better yet, eighty independent observations of animals. Most density estimates produced under the SFA’s guidelines were made based on less than a dozen observations, and quite a few were made based on a sample size of only one.4 But—at least if handled correctly—the problem of small sample size is self-correcting: one of the roles of statistics is to correct any possible misapprehension that we know more than we actually do by appending indices of certainty and reliability to our estimates. Calculated and interpreted correctly, a density estimate—associated with a standard error or confidence limits—based on very little data simply tells us that we know only that the density is somewhere between very low and very high. Far more insidious is the problem of extrapolating results from biased sampling. I first encountered the biased sampling problem in a 1988 county agricultural yearbook that had seemingly documented an astounding 80,060 white-lipped deer in Qinghai Province’s Nangqian County alone. This seemed odd given that estimates in the Chinese wildlife literature (which rarely err on the low side) had pegged the population of the

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entire species at 15,800, and other published reports had suggested that white-lipped deer were rare and declining, and that most lived in Sichuan and eastern Tibet with only a few in Qinghai. Alas, the county agricultural book did not provide enough information to clarify why their estimate was so high (stating only that “extrapolations were conducted to the entire county based on twelve sample areas”). I began to suspect something fishy in selection of the “sample areas” when, the following year, I observed a group of over 200 white-lipped deer traveling across a slope only a few kilometers from the government-run guard station. That day, on that slope, the density of white-lipped deer was quite high. But in and of itself, this did not mean that it was equally high throughout the county. I have little doubt that the authors of the county agricultural yearbook saw many white-lipped deer, but I am almost certain that they “sampled” in just those places where they knew they would likely find what they were looking for.5 Thereafter, I began to query authors of wildlife studies that claimed to have conducted “random sampling” whenever I had the chance. Twice, I had authors inform me that what was published as representative (daibiaoxing) or random sampling (caiqu suiji bushe yangdian) was, in fact, very much biased.6 The author of a study that estimated musk deer density in Sichuan (indirectly, based on fecal-pellet counts) wrote to me that he and his students were “very lucky to receive the help of local people in locating sites where musk deer were active.” A similar story was related to me by the co-author of a study estimating density of argali in Qinghai, where campsites were “recommended by local people.” It requires no additional mathematics to imagine how inaccurate an extrapolation will be when based on samples obtained only where animals are suspected to be congregated in the first place. Distance sampling to estimate the density of wild animals is a valid technique only to the extent that its underlying assumptions are not grossly violated in its field application. Exposition of its fancy-looking equations and presentation of confidence intervals in results impart a sense of scientific rigor to a paper, but only those who have done the field work can ultimately judge whether the data were gathered in a way that justifies the implied sheen of scientific precision. If the field conditions simply did not allow for collecting the type of data assumed by theory, if biologists have had no choice but to make a hash of the critical assumptions, no equation or computer-generated output can rescue the effort. Equations can be presented and calculations can be made, but too large a chasm between the field data and the elegant model dooms the resulting numbers to meaninglessness. That unfortunate fact can be pretty frustrating for someone who has spent considerable time and withstood considerable hardship to obtain the data, and it is compounded for someone who wishes to be seen as a scientist. Biometricians have been adding continued sophistication to the mathematics of distance sampling for the last quarter-century, but have made only scant progress in allowing for valid inference when fundamental assumptions cannot be met. Generally, the more sophisticated the model, the greater the need for large sample size or auxiliary data. Often, Chinese wildlife scientists appreciate the sophisticated mathematics but have no way to obtain the extensive data needed to support them. Hemmed in by authoritarianism that requires them to be experts and a belief that complexities can be simplified on the one

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hand, and uncooperative wild animals living in vast places that are expensive and difficult to move around in on the other, it is no wonder that Chinese wildlife scientists are frustrated. Provided with scant financial and logistical resources to begin with, they are expected to produce precision on a subject that defies all attempts to do so. A potentially more troubling example of unwillingness to countenance uncertainty comes from the attempt to estimate sustainable yield for a given animal population. The practice of harvesting wildlife with governmental monitoring and regulation is so common in rural and lightly populated areas of North America, Europe, and elsewhere that it may come as a surprise to the nonspecialist that scientific determinations of maximum sustainable yield for populations of animals subject to recreational hunting are almost never conducted. Although the theory of how this might be accomplished is well established, doing so in practice would require not only timely, accurate, and precise estimation of the abundance of the animals in question, but also a thorough understanding of exactly how the population will respond to the removal of a given number of animals of specified ages and sexes and under a variety of environmental conditions (including the presence of competitor and predatory species) that might also influence future population growth. Such detailed knowledge almost always requires years of intensive study, and thus has been accomplished only in limited, research settings. In a monograph providing biological background for a proposed new nature reserve in Gansu, one suggestion put forth for generating needed revenue was to initiate or expand trophy hunting of high-priced ungulates (a suggestion that, by now, should come as no surprise).7 But unlike what actually occurs in management of the existing hunting areas (Chapter 8), the monograph—being an ostensibly scientific work, and thus having to distinguish itself from the more ad hoc methods adopted by Chinese agencies actually responsible for the hunts—included an estimate not only of the population size for focal species (which were, unsurprisingly, argali, and—somewhat more oddly—goitered gazelle) but of the maximum sustainable yield (and, by extension, revenue) that could be expected. In the case of argali, the author estimated a yearly sustainable yield of 247 trophies, a figure that, I suspect, is too high by a factor of about fifty. How did they use “science” to develop such an astounding estimate? First, the authors estimated the number of argali within the area to be 3,294 (failing, notably, to accompany this estimate by confidence intervals, which were almost certainly very broad). This estimate in turn was based on observation of a grand total of six argali groups, and was almost certainly based on a highly biased sampling procedure. Second, the authors employed a well-known but biologically unrealistic model known as the logistic growth model8 to calculate the population’s maximum offtake rate from its maximum possible growth rate. Third, the logistic model requires input of a maximum possible growth rate, and despite its centrality, the value the author used was a complete guess, interpolated from other species under a wide variety of conditions.9 The model also required quantification of the argali population’s carrying capacity (i.e., the density at which losses would, over time, cancel out gains), which the author similarly had no way to determine. Instead, he assumed that the carrying capacity was identical to the guessed-at population size, thus substituting one dubiously obtained parameter for another. Finally,

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the final result, for what it was worth, yielded an estimate of the number of sustainably removed animal bodies, which is far different from the stated objective of estimating the sustainable number of males carrying trophy-quality horns. Here, in a nutshell, is the entire process:10 [0.3][3,294] 4

= 247

Were that it was so simple. Given the quality and quantity of information available (six groups of argali observed during a few-day visit to an area of few thousand km2), few Western-trained wildlife biologists would have seriously attempted a quantitative estimate of yield. Even armed with considerably better data, none would have recommended a harvest strategy based on such a crude model. Instead, wildlife managers in the West routinely set harvest regulations based on a combination of prior experience, rough indices of animal abundance, and a steady system of feedback in which errors in the regulations (e.g., too liberal resulting in excessive killing or too strict resulting in unsatisfied hunters) are periodically adjusted. These systems are far from perfect, but perfection is not required (in part, because recreational harvests are deliberately kept somewhat conservative, and there is no attempt to derive the maximum possible harvest11), nor is perfection deemed worth the cost and effort by the public that provides the funding for agency monitoring and regulation. The bargain that most governmental units with jurisdiction over hunted wildlife tacitly make with their human constituents (on the one hand) and the wild species they manage (on the other) is basically this: Complete understanding of the biological, social, and economic dynamics involved in setting precise harvest regulations (and, for that matter, enforcing them) is beyond our capability. The best we can do is to tweak regulations here and there according to the signals we receive from the animal population, and to direct the requests we receive from the public (or their representatives). We can do this level of monitoring and tweaking—rough as it assuredly is—relatively cheaply and thus maintain political support and the participation of a broad range of the public. The price for our admittedly crude understanding of the biological dynamics and our admittedly crude tools with which to manage harvests is that we will not expect to optimize any component of the system, at least not in the short term. In any given year, society may kill too many animals, and if so, we’ll have to adjust in future years. In any given year, society may kill fewer animals than could safely have been taken, and hunters accept that opportunity cost as part of keeping the system inexpensive. There is science involved in all this, yes. But note how the biologist involved with this system maintains a studied humility regarding the fundamental biological dynamics involved, despite what is likely to have been years spent obtaining an advanced degree, and many more spent observing specific wildlife–human systems. It is not that we know nothing at all about how wildlife populations operate in general, or even how particular species respond to hunting. It is, rather, that we are mindful of just how complex ecological systems truly are, and thus that even our most thoroughly studied systems can only

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yield management prescriptions that are, at best, mere hypotheses as to how things will actually turn out. That is why, although we may use computer models to help guide our management, we never let them run the show, but rather insist on at least rudimentary field monitoring and periodic surveys of the wildlife-consuming and/or -interested public. Among Chinese wildlife scientists, there seems little tolerance for the poor predictive capabilities that wildlife biologists presently have. Instead, animal populations are often viewed as having fixed and straightforward properties, such that we need only measure a few parameters, apply some simple models, and then can be confident of the system’s future behavior, much as a computer can be relied upon to perform the same task repeatedly once cleverly programmed. Among Western-trained wildlife biologists, a researcher who attempts to draw more certainty than is appropriate from available data, or who appears exceedingly uncomfortable with the vastly complex, often murky, seemingly endlessly malleable, and, frankly, inchoate world of natural ecosystems, is said to suffer from “physics envy.” Although the reference to Freud probably stems more from humor than anything substantive, the characterization nonetheless seems apt. Biologists who value irrefutable results and strong, repeatable data are naturally somewhat envious of physicists, who either live in the world of provable mathematics, or can conduct tightly controlled experiments that allow little room for uncertainty after their conclusion (or, at least, so biologists’ legend would have it). Even allowing for the fact that, at the microworld of quantum dynamics, things are not all that certain, it is fair to say that physical laws and properties really do not change. One really can write equations describing the motions of bodies, and thus predict pretty accurately just when, and at what speed, your rocket should be blasted off so that it achieves orbit or gets to the moon. If we wildlife biologists attempted something similar, armed only with our present state of ecological knowledge (and in the face of the uncertainty inherent in complex, natural systems), all of our putative rockets would long since have crashed and landing a man on the moon would be as distant a dream today as it must have been hundreds of years ago. Most wildlife biologists, if not entirely content with research results that are necessarily hedged with contingencies, are at least used to the idea. But if Western-trained wildlife scientists often suffer from physics envy, the disease is positively rampant among Chinese-trained wildlife scientists. Most young Chinese wildlife scientists have, appropriately, moved beyond the descriptive natural history that characterized what little existed of wildlife science prior to 1949. They have realized that simple description can only get you so far: ultimately, quantification and abstraction (through useful, if inexact, mathematical models) are necessary to understand the nature and dynamics of animal and plant populations. But Chinese wildlife scientists often sidestep a critical step that lies between old-fashioned natural history (which itself forms a crucial background12) and sophisticated mathematical models. This step can be summarized by the single word rigor, by which I mean carefully planned objectives, data gathered in a manner that maximizes the chance that the question asked will be answered (as well as that alternative explanations can be rejected), and careful scrutiny given to the concordance of data gathered and models used. Seemingly dazzled by the ability of their

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physicist counterparts to build nuclear weapons and put a man into space (or perhaps simply required to publish), Chinese wildlife scientists often seem to rush directly from the drawing board to the computer, stopping only briefly in the field to collect a few tidbits of data. The formidable difficulties of doing high-quality wildlife research in western China provide ample justification for obtaining small sample sizes and for gathering data capable of only limited inference. They provide no justification for ignoring fundamental tenets of logical inference or denying basic laws of mathematics. Tendency to Assign Categories and Properties Rather Than to Explore Relationships Pick up almost any technical article or book on the natural sciences in China and you first have to wade through a thicket of categorization systems. Before the research objectives are stated, before methods are laid out, before any new data at all are presented, the object of the research (e.g., plant, animal, ecosystem) must first be slotted into some preexisting category, shoe-horned into its box so that limitations are imposed from the get-go. Often, the result of the research is simply to investigate details of this categorization (and unsurprisingly, this usually results in its confirmation). Rather than begin with empirical data and later, if useful, compare what is found with abstract categorizations, such an approach limits the space of available inference by beginning with the boundaries imposed by previously developed categorization systems.13 Taxonomy is a much more popular subdiscipline of biology today in China than in the West. In part, this may reflect the natural development of biological knowledge: one can’t explore ecological relationships before one knows which plants and animals are present. But there remains a fascination with categorization that appears to transcend cataloguing China’s natural world. When so many fundamental questions bearing on conservation and management are begging for data, splitting taxonomic hairs over subspecies—still a common occupation among many Chinese zoologists—seems to reflect not so much any practical requirement as simply a desire to create more categories and boundary lines. Even when modern, molecular methods are used (as they are in China with increasing technical sophistication), they are often oriented not so much toward understanding evolutionary history (as is currently popular in Western science) as toward lending finality and certainty to an ambiguous situation (a task at which a single study, regardless of how well done, rarely succeeds). Much Chinese wildlife research is focused on finding simple differences rather than elucidating functional relationships among habitats, populations, groups, individuals, and genes. Are animals in one province larger than in another? Are the horns of a particular ungulate species living in one mountain range shaped slightly differently than those living in another? Do the plants eaten in one season differ from those eaten in another? Does group size differ by gender or perhaps by season? It is striking that, although differences are often found, they often have no ecological meaning, and even less often any consequences for conservation. Yet more fundamentally, searching for such differences seems to presuppose a baseline situation in which all individual animals are identical.

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Biologists often use statistical approaches in which a null hypothesis of “no difference” is tested (usually with the hope that it can be rejected), but that is quite different from expecting uniformity from the natural world. Should we expect individuals in one mountain range to be just like those in another? Should we expect animals to eat the same foods in summer as in winter, or to gather into similarly sized groups regardless of other factors? Of course the answers to all these questions are no; the critical questions are not whether differences exist, but why they exist and how these patterns relate to ecological, evolutionary, or management issues. The imperative to lump into discrete boxes that which is inherently continuous (or even unquantified) can be seen in an attempt—honorable in its intent if flawed in its execution—to assess the success of three international hunting areas in Gansu Province (focusing on the argali) from social and economic as well as biological contexts. The paper in question is noteworthy because it explicitly attempts to eschew subjectivity by quantifying and scoring each area—which, like in figure skating, ultimately receives a single, final score—and includes much more detailed methodology than do most Chinese technical papers.14 The exercise begins by drawing up a list of reasonable criteria for assessing each area and gathering information on each. In this case, the criteria used were the argali density, the ease of observation of argali, transportation access, the degree of threat to argali, the poaching situation, the quality of service, the “hunting situation,” “management quality,” the use of monetary income, and finally, a category simply called “overall effectiveness.” Of these, some are theoretically quantifiable directly (e.g., argali density, hunting success rate), some are quantifiable via surrogates (e.g., transportation access through distance between an airport and the hunting area, or time required to reach the latter from the former), and yet others would seem to require heroic assumptions or logical acrobatics in order to move from the qualitative to the quantitative (e.g., quality of service, management quality). In the paper, however, all are given scores (in fact, some categories are further subdivided, resulting in a total of twelve “quantified” criteria), which are then further lumped into nominal categories that themselves are rescored. These rescored criteria are given unique numeric weights (e.g., density of hunted species is accorded a weight 3 times that of convenience of access, which in turn is 20 percent less important than “quality of management”), which clearly have the potential to drive the result, but are neither justified nor examined for sensitivity. Finally, the rescored values are summed, and each hunting area gets a grade. (To lessen any suspense, the winner was Subei’s Hashiha’er hunting area with a score of 86.2, followed closely by Aksai’s Kharteng area with a score of 83.2, and trailed by Subei’s Mazongshan area with a score of 78.7. The losers need not have worried, however; the system also included an overall system of cutoffs that graded any area scoring above 75 as “fine” [liang], so even the lowest ranked area was concluded to be doing quite well enough.) An objective analysis of these hunting areas is laudable, and the desire to systematize it understandable. But the exercise of ascribing a numeric value to something as inchoate as “degree of threat to the hunting area,” replacing these pseudo-quantitative variables with nominal ones, only to then requantify these nominal variables (and finally, arbitrarily weighting and then adding up the whole ball of wax into a single metric), strikes me as

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uninformative at best and ludicrous at worst. Of the reasonably quantifiable variables, only “hunting success” rate was known with any certainty in these areas, but success rate was almost identical among the three areas. Alas, argali density, the only variable with an unambiguous and continuous value (and the parameter accorded the greatest weight in the scoring scheme), was adopted uncritically from undocumented sources, with no consideration whatsoever given to its attendant uncertainty.15 Related to premature categorization is the tendency among Chinese wildlife scientists to ascribe fixed properties to observed biological phenomena that are actually only meaningful within the context of a particular time, a particular environment, and a particular management regime. We saw this in Chapter 2 with the frequent use of the term “overgrazing” without critical examination of exactly what this meant. Implicit in this categorization was the concept that any given pasture has a set grazing capacity below which grasslands are healthy and above which they are degraded. Further, the determination of grazing capacities from one-time studies (and the subsequent failure to monitor rangeland trends) implies an unstated belief that the capacity to sustain grazing pressure is a fundamental property of any given pasture, which, once determined, need not be confirmed through continued observation. Another example is the prominence given in Chinese mammalogy to the life table. A life table is a device, borrowed from life-insurance actuaries, in which the probability of death at any given age is tabulated, allowing for computation of such statistics as expectation of further life or characterization of mortality patterns by age. Combined with estimates of fecundity, and, critically, depending on the way in which mortality rates are estimated, a life table can also be used to understand a population’s growth rate. But applied to wild populations, life tables are not representations of species’ inherent properties, but rather are tools to understand what happened to a specific wildlife population under a specific set of circumstances. The same species can experience substantially different vital rates depending on the environmental conditions to which it is exposed (including its own density, and of course, the rate of removal by humans). Indeed, understanding how the vital rates of any given population differ from that of another population of the same species is one of the fundamental objectives of wildlife biology. Yet the Chinese literature is crowded with attempts to provide “the life table” for mammalian species, as though each had a characteristic one, as fundamental to its identity as its number of chromosomes.16 Each individual study and life table—if interpreted appropriately given the genesis of its data—is a possibly useful case study, but because they are not treated as such (crucial context is rarely provided), but rather as though they are advances in fundamental mammalogy, they are generally useless. My final example is worth recounting because it exemplifies the myopia that often characterizes many Chinese wildlife scientists as they endeavor to become expert in some minute portion of the field, or to make a name for themselves by developing some new technique. During a study of a chiru calving ground in summer 1999, a team of biologists came upon the sad scene of a recently perpetrated poaching incident, but wisely decided to use the opportunity to learn what they could from the many carcasses available to them. Determining the age of animals (older than calves of the year) can be difficult, and

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assessing the degree of tooth wear is one method that can yield a useful, if approximate, guide to age at death. One of the biologists on the scene took on the grueling task of examining, in excruciating detail, the tooth wear characteristics on the jaws of 415 dead chiru. Unsurprisingly, tooth wear is a continual process; even animals of identical ages will not necessarily have identical-looking teeth, so some subjective grouping and categorization is needed to classify animals to their most likely age in years. But so focused was the biologist on the minutiae of chiru dentistry that he evidently neglected to ensure that his resultant categorization made biological sense. His final categorization included a set of tooth characteristics, seemingly intermediate between newborns and yearlings, that grouped these animals as six-month-olds, and another set, intermediate between those of yearlings and two-year-olds, which delineated eighteen-month-olds. But all these animals were poached in early summer, just as chiru—which give birth at a pronounced seasonal peak—are calving. Any animal that was six or eighteen months old at that time would have to have been born in mid-winter, an almost certainly lethal season for a newborn chiru on the Tibetan Plateau. But so focused was the biologist on the subtle differences among teeth that he never took a breath, looked up, and realized that his elegant categorization system must be incorrect (or alternatively, that he had discovered an amazing and unprecedented biological phenomenon!). Skepticism in Science If scientists are the experts, who can question them? If a famous and established author of a manuscript describing a field study claims that his or her data support a particular interpretation, how is a mere editor (to say nothing of a student) to ask probing questions of that work? In a society still steeped in Confucian values, how does one distinguish scientific skepticism on the one hand from youthful arrogance on the other? Field biology differs importantly from experimental chemistry or molecular biology: field observations are inherently nonreplicable and experiments are rarely amenable to control. As a relatively young discipline, wildlife biology, both in the field and on the computer, employs methods that are constantly in flux, and often the choice of method determines the meaning one can infer from data collected. For these reasons, clear and thorough exposition of methods is crucial in documenting wildlife science. The choice of a method for sampling and analyzing data is almost never obvious, and there are rarely situations in which the methods chosen can easily be ignored in assessing the usefulness of a study’s results and conclusions. (The casual reader, wishing only to gain a superficial sense of what was done, might skip a paper’s Methods section entirely; even a well-written one usually makes for tedious reading. But for anybody interested in placing a study’s findings into proper context, a thorough and accurate Methods section might be the most studiously examined portion of the entire paper. Ideally, the reader should be able to track each newly reported datum and every original finding back to a description of how it was produced via careful reading of the Methods.) But Methods sections in Chinese technical wildlife papers are invariably brief and

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uninformative, particularly when it comes to the crucial issue of sampling. To provide an illustrative example, what follows is my translation of the entire Methods section from a recently published technical paper reporting on a long-term study of survival and fecundity of a large mammal species in western China (I have deliberately deleted the species and location to avoid disclosing, and thus directly criticizing, the authors: they did no worse than many others, and the rest of the paper is among the best I have seen published in China): Research Methods. Field observations: [The species] in [x province] has a relatively fixed area of activity. Young less than ten days of age do not follow their mothers but rather hide in shrubs because their ability to run is rather weak and they can only travel a short distance. We followed mothers that had recently given birth, and, using a net, captured young three to ten days after they began suckling. To mark these young, we placed ear tags in the left ear of males and in the right ear of females. After marking, young were released at the capture site. We captured thirteen young [of this species] in 1987 and a total of ninety-eight young [of this species] during 1989–1991. We then followed the fate of each marked young animal, compiling all of the data at the end of the study, and using statistical analyses, built a life-table. The maximum rate of increase, rmax, is an index that integrates the ability of the population to increase under the specific biological conditions facing it. The equation for calculating it is identical to that for calculating the intrinsic rate of increase, but this parameter is obtained under these specific natural conditions. Using the accumulated data for [this species] in [this nature reserve] from February 1987 through April 2004, we calculated death rates, survival rates, age of first reproduction, and agespecific reproductive rates, allowing us to calculate the maximum rate of increase for [this species] in [this area] during the entire study period. If you are unfamiliar with the details of measuring and analyzing survival, reproduction, and growth rates of wildlife populations, and thus worried that you’ve missed something here, rest easy: you haven’t. A Methods section such as the above is completely uninformative even to a practicing population biologist. Reading such a paper, one has no idea if all animals observed were captured (or if, alternatively, the captured sample was perhaps a biased one), if capture might have affected survival, how often animals were monitored, how the problem of missing animals was treated, how the problem of ear tag loss was treated, or, indeed, how reproductive rates were estimated.17 One simply has to decide whether to take their reported results on faith, or to ignore the paper. Out of curiosity, I quantified the length of Methods sections from all the papers I had been sent during 2004–5 by the Chinese mammalogical journal Acta Theriologica Sinica (and on which I acted as a contributing editor), and compared these results to a similar exercise done on all the articles published in the 2005 issues of the international (Englishlanguage) journal I edit, Ursus.18 In Acta, eleven of twenty-one articles had Methods sections that constituted less than 10 percent of the entire paper; in Ursus, only three of twenty-three articles had such short Methods sections. In contrast, Methods sections took

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Figure 9.1 Histograms showing the proportion of the respective “Methods” sections in length of recently published technical papers in wildlife biology. White bars are from the Chinese journal Acta Theriologica Sinica during 2004–5; black bars are from Ursus during 2005. 0.40

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up more than 20 percent of the overall length in ten of the twenty-three papers in Ursus, but none of the Acta papers (see Figure 9.1). On average, Methods sections in Ursus were roughly twice as long (and presumably, twice as detailed) as those in Acta. I do not mean to make too much of this: the sample is small, and there is more to the quality of a Methods section than its length. That said, this little exercise serves to quantify, if only approximately, the much greater emphasis placed on detailing methodology among wildlife scientists publishing in a Western setting than among those publishing in China. Scientists should view disclosure of methods, including faults, limitations, and possible biases, as critical to our work being seen as science, so that the readers can judge for themselves how persuaded they are of the authors’ results and conclusions. We expect our readers to be skeptical about our work, and hope that we sufficiently anticipate their skepticism in our own treatment of it. But the brevity of Methods sections in Chinese wildlife research papers makes me wonder if taking an appropriately skeptical attitude toward new work isn’t viewed within Chinese academia as being discourteous rather than as simply being objective. The message implied by such uninformative Methods sections is, “Why need you know more about what I did? I’m the scientist; I’m the one writing about this study; I know what I’m doing. Your job is to read and learn, not to question.” What ought to make scientists authorities is their insistence on methodological rigor, their skepticism of even their own findings, and their caution in making conclusions. Within the professional

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community, a scientist is conceived of not necessarily as someone with knowledge, but rather as someone with a method to obtain knowledge. Too often, wildlife scientists in China are given credibility not by their methodological approach but by their age, position, and number of papers published. I should emphasize that skepticism should not be equated with cynicism. A reader adopting a skeptical eye looks for ways in which the author might have been misled but is happy to find none (or few), and thus concludes that the author’s interpretation is persuasive. A scientific skeptic reads original scientific literature not as a grade-school student looks at a textbook, but rather as an independent scientist who is fully capable of doing similar work him/herself but simply lacked the time, inclination, or funding to do so. Such a reader is interested in learning what the authors did, happy to learn something new, perhaps even change some long-standing assumptions about the way the world works, but also fully capable of seeing flaws in the paper, and even, in extreme cases, rejecting the paper as valueless or just plain wrong. To read in this way, however, the scientific skeptic needs to know, rather precisely, how the study was done. It does no good to evaluate new research, either as new and valuable or flawed and worthless, based simply on the reported results. That would not be a scientific reading, but merely an expression of existing prejudices. Instead, the reader must consider critically the methods used, the sample sizes available, possible undisclosed biases or confounding factors, and decide for him- or herself how much credence the reported results deserve. INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES TO CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE It is also worthwhile to consider the treatment that academic and governmental institutions accord wildlife biology as a discipline. Wildlife biology is not only relatively new (with distinct recognition in North American universities having begun only in the mid1930s), but it is also cross-disciplinary by nature. A good wildlife biologist must be able to conduct physically demanding field work but also analyze resulting data using appropriate statistics. A wildlifer must be conversant in the latest advances in evolutionary and molecular biology but also be able to fix a flat tire. Wildlife is an applied discipline, so a good biologist must also understand social and political issues and be adept at interpreting and presenting findings to foresters, miners, and farmers as well as to other academics. Having to be good at so many things usually requires that a wildlife biologist cannot be truly expert in any. This straddling of disciplinary boundaries and jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none characteristic is one of two principal reasons that wildlife biology has failed to emerge as a distinct field in China (the other, of course, is simply that it is considered a low priority). As of mid-2006, there were 106 universities in the United States that formally recognized terrestrial wildlife biology as an academic discipline (either as a named academic unit, or by offering graduate degrees in wildlife).19 In Canada, there were an additional ten. In China, there was one.20 True enough, many Chinese who work in wildlife agencies or conduct research for academies of science have obtained training elsewhere. Zoology and biology departments

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within a few of the larger universities accept some applied research as legitimate, and some courses that are clearly within the domain of wildlife biology are taught.21 A few units of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also engage in applied wildlife research.22 But as of 2005, at only a single university in the entire country could a student study wildlife per se. This not only tends to produce considerable academic “inbreeding” but also suggests that the legitimacy for which wildlife scientists have struggled in the West over the first few decades of the field’s existence as an academic discipline has yet to occur in China. Further, wildlife research, like any other scientific discipline, requires funding. In China, most funding for field studies comes from the National Natural Science Foundation,23 but it is unclear how many adjudicators of these proposals understand the particular needs and difficulties of wildlife work. Proposals for graduate-level research are more likely to be funded if they promise groundbreaking results in very little time. Overly ambitious proposals that attempt to describe the entire ecology of a species or determine its status nationwide (as in the example used to begin this chapter) tend to attract funding, when an objective appraisal would suggest that the objectives cannot possibly be met in the time frame or within the allocated budget.24 In contrast, a more modest proposal that aims to add a useful, if partial, piece of a larger puzzle, is likely to be rejected as inconsequential. Chinese academics (both graduate students and their professors) are also under unusually intense pressure to publish; failure to produce an accepted article often means failure to graduate. While the underlying rationale is laudable, the strict publishing requirement pushes students and their advising professors in the direction of trivial studies (in which some statistical difference will likely be found) at the expense of studies with true conservation value (which may, because of their difficulty, fail to yield publishable data in the limited field time students have available). Perhaps even more fundamental is the fact that wildlife science will have difficulty advancing as long as there is such a weak infrastructure for acting on wildlife knowledge. The link between research and management in the North American wildlife establishment, for example, is often frayed and not nearly as tight as we would like. But Chinese wildlife research lives almost in an academic vacuum, bereft of a node to which it might conceivably link. Much work done in universities or the Academy of Sciences serves only to fill up journals and to pad resumes. Without discounting the value of pure research, it often progresses best when responding to insufficiencies noted by applied biologists. Wildlife is, at its core, an applied science that depends upon, but is not identical to, pure zoological research. In the absence of management agencies calling upon the research community to assist them in solving problems, scientists within academia naturally tend to address questions of interest to other academics (or which easily lead to publications), rather than to focus on the everpressing demands of on-the-ground conservation. WHY DOES IT MATTER? So what? If, as I have argued, wildlife conservation is really a matter of allocating human resources, limiting human behavior, and understanding incentives for humans to take various actions, does it matter if Chinese wildlife science is a bit behind the times?

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What justifies an entire chapter on the deficiencies of Chinese science? If the issue were simply one of not necessarily being up to date in the latest thinking in some facet of evolutionary biology, or reinventing a wheel already produced elsewhere, faulty science would be unfortunate but not damaging. But when large programs are being envisaged, such as forced movements of people from their ancestral homelands or widescale poisoning that are unprecedented in scope since the ill-fated experiments of the late 1950s, and these programs are justified in part on a threat to wildlife or ecosystem stability, these threats require reliable documentation. Even if designed with the most honorable of motives (i.e., benefiting ecological integrity), there may be high prices paid, both in terms of money and, more importantly, disruption to people’s livelihoods, lifestyles, cultures, and personal happiness. When county leaders ask the administrators of international hunting areas if they can accommodate twice or even ten times the number of hunters (and thus increase their revenues), being unable to respond (or worse yet, responding in ignorance) can cause damage both to wildlife and to the economy. When provincial leaders propose reducing the abundance of Tibetan wild ass while promising not to compromise ecological integrity, how can they know how to proceed when so little is known about either? How do officials know whether to encourage or discourage farming of black bears when we know neither how well the populations are faring nor how the existence of farmed bears is affecting them? How do we know if it is advisable to accept the risks inherent in releasing captive pandas back into the wild if we don’t know how critically they are needed by that wild population? In short, how can China know how to (or even whether to) reform its conservation system if the answers to the most basic questions regarding its current successes and failures remain a mystery?

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The central problem in achieving conservation goals [is that] conservation goals refer to long-term and communal interests . . . [that] conflict with the short-term individual interests. . . . There are two main avenues towards resolution of these conflicts: one involves bringing our ideals more closely into line with physical, biological or economic realities, at the cost of compromising our conservation ideals; the other is to bring physical, biological and economic events into line with our ideals with costs, in terms of management, enforcement and public relations, corresponding to the degree of the discrepancy between ideals and events. —Richard H.V. Bell

It is time to recapitulate and move forward. Thus far, I have assessed (and often critiqued) wildlife conservation—one might even say the lack of active wildlife conservation—in China’s west. But I have not yet put forward proposals of how things might be made better, particularly given the unique and difficult situations facing those who would initiate any changes. In this chapter I will attempt to remedy that. Throughout this book, I have argued that Chinese policy is based on the fundamental premises that wildlife should be completely protected from direct human-caused mortality, that nature reserves should function as the primary lands on which wildlife habitat merits priority, and that demands for traditional Chinese consumptive use of wildlife are to be supplied by captive breeding. I have shown how current wildlife laws prohibit essentially all local hunting and act to alienate people from wildlife. I have argued that nature reserves posit an ideal of pristine nature entirely unaffected by human activity, which—unsurprisingly, given the intense history of land use most everywhere—is generally honored in the breach. Outside of nature reserves, wildlife habitat has no voice. I have argued that the emphasis on captive rearing flows from particularly Confucian notions, not only of control and mastery of nature, but also of benevolent mankind, husbanding animals in ways that are assumed to be superior to what nature itself can provide. Only the third of these fundamental premises accords with the underlying tendency of most Chinese to prioritize the utilitarian and practical values of wildlife over all others, but although captive breeding strikes a resonant chord in China, it can only produce a pale imitation of wildlife. I have argued that Chinese efforts to monitor and understand the status of its wildlife have lagged well behind China’s impressive scientific achievements 209

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in other fields, partly for historic and cultural reasons, and partly because there exist no social institutions conducting applied wildlife conservation or management. Such institutions would constitute not only the most likely source for research questions but also the agency of implementation requiring scientific answers. These policies reflect a general tendency to adopt solutions to natural resource problems that are simplistic and draconian, lack nuance and site specificity, and often cause unexpected negative consequences. Blanket prohibitions on hunting most species of subsistence or commercial interest are concordant with similar policies elsewhere in natural resources. Convinced that overcutting of forests in the upper Yangtze River Basin was a principal cause of the 1998 floods, a policy was promulgated to, virtually overnight, completely prohibit logging on state-controlled, natural forest. Concerned that biodiversity was insufficiently protected, enormous nature reserves were designated that contained thousands of residents, but on which all economic activity would henceforth be illegal. In implementing the promising tuigeng programs, compensation to farmers was set at uniform, national standards, without regard for the true local costs of conversion to forests (thus resulting in windfalls for some farmers and losses for others). In searching for ways to reduce pressure on grasslands, current programs now propose to move thousands of pastoralists off their traditional lands entirely, replacing current income with who knows what. Although there exists no single articulation of China’s west in the various writings on the Great Opening of the West, the vision clearly seems to be one of a tamed landscape, bereft of those very qualities that currently make it a source of cultural pride for those with long histories there, and of romantic dreams for many in eastern China’s urban areas. Despite wildlife protection laws and nature reserves, the general direction seems to be to remove wildness from those lands still possessing it, evidently in the belief that doing so is necessary for modernization and progress. I fear that the collision of all these forces portends ill for wildlife in China’s west. The future as so envisioned is one that I believe Chinese themselves, both in the western plains and the eastern cities, will ultimately come to regret. If the traditional Chinese interest in consuming wildlife for meat, medicine, and other products is truly to be honored, there must be some way of maintaining the very wildness that is a precondition for its existence. Changes are needed, but of course, any change is difficult. I can only propose general directions for improvement. I cannot produce a detailed plan for a new management regime, if for no other reason than that the concept is a contradiction in terms. A guiding principle of wildlife conservation is that it needs to be site specific and flexible. I have criticized Chinese government efforts for being excessively top-down in orientation, insufficiently sensitive to the requirements imposed by local conditions. That very property prohibits me from offering a detailed blueprint that should, or could, apply to the entire western region. However, I will offer general policy suggestions dealing with the two prerequisite aspects of any successful wildlife conservation system; they are: limiting direct killing to that which can be sustained indefinitely, and moderating and controlling adverse changes to natural habitats. Further, I will suggest that no wildlife conservation system

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can be considered fully mature until it finds ways to link these two aspects. Habitat and population management are biologically inseparable, but the fragmented nature of their jurisdiction in the current Chinese system makes linking them fraught with difficulty. Currently, government bureaus at all levels charged with wildlife management in China are trapped in a vicious cycle of incapacity: they are ill-funded to determine what the problems are, but have no constituency to which they might address their funding needs. They are not empowered to intercede on behalf of wildlife habitat, in part because they can offer no tangible benefits that might be traded for such power. How to get this ineffective system unstuck? TOWARD A MODEL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SYSTEM FOR WESTERN CHINA I contend that a future wildlife conservation system appropriate for western China would include a larger component of consumptive use of truly wild resources than does the current one. Further, such consumptive use need not be constrained to a single method of limiting consumption to that which is sustainable. Some parts of it might look similar to a subsistence (or “bush meat”) system. Some parts of it might borrow from Aldo Leopold’s “split-rail” mentality, the logical successor to the early hunting conservationists of North America, in which an inherent desire to emulate frontier conditions leads hunters to deliberately devise rules that make their own hunting success more difficult. Yet other parts of it might look a bit like standard market economics, with resources extracted solely for their commodity value, albeit with harvest controlled by a system of feedback loops that act to limit offtake rates. These models of consumptive use all relate to different strands of Chinese thought regarding wildlife, although they share a common bond in affirming, rather than denying, wildlife’s utilitarian value.1 More importantly, they share a deliberate intention of providing wildness with a tangible, economic value in the lives of local people, thus reinforcing its historic importance in their daily lives and giving it some measure of economic clout. In turn, both those living directly on the land and those who would exploit it from afar would be required, through socially or legally enforced mechanisms, to refrain from pursuing those developments most damaging to wildlife. LINKING PEOPLE WITH WILDLIFE THROUGH THE DEVIL’S BARGAIN International Hunting The place to start is with the existing international (i.e., trophy) hunting programs, not because they ultimately would loom large in overall importance, but because they contain the germ of the Devil’s bargain from which other programs can develop. Rather than viewing them as complete packages, ready for expansion and replication throughout western China, they should be viewed as seeds from which a more fully developed and

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multifaceted program can gradually emerge. The progressive and useful aspects of China’s current international hunting programs are four: 1. Fixed and delineated areas within which wildlife management is a stated priority. 2. Staff at the county-level whose time and energy is formally dedicated to wildlife. 3. A source of funding that—at least theoretically—can be mobilized for conservation. 4. Explicit recognition of the Devil’s bargain concept (in this variant, that a few individual animals pay with their lives the opportunity cost of maintaining wildlife habitat). This Devil’s bargain has not yet been struck in China’s international hunting areas, largely because hunting managers are provided neither authority to maintain wildlife habitat nor control of the financial benefits from their own success. Minor alterations of this system are unlikely to engage the intended incentives toward habitat conservation. Higher trophy fees charged to hunters, a revised allocation schedule of revenues, consultation with county-level managers, better communication and coordination with provincial and national authorities, increased understanding of the program’s intent among county-level leaders—all of these would constitute steps in the right direction, but none would transform Chinese trophy hunting from a commercial program into a conservation program. Rather, the fundamental disconnect in the current system needs to be remedied. If hunting area managers are expected to operate under a business model, they must be provided with control over both production and revenue. To control the production of wildlife means the ability to limit disturbance and modification of habitat—in essence, authority over land use. As long as land use is controlled by people and entities not intimately connected with wildlife, Chinese hunting areas will fail to actively conserve wildlife. As long as hunting managers lack control over their revenue streams, they cannot even begin to envision plans in which such funds might be used to further wildlife and its habitat. If these fundamental reforms were to be enacted, the rest would be details, no doubt consuming much of the local staff’s time and energy, but relatively unimportant for conservation on a larger scale. Certainly, government oversight and coordination would be needed and some standards would need to be enforced. I would prefer to see hunting areas treated as units of the government, with staff salaries provided by county governments just as those of other civil servants are (as contrasted with the quasi-privatization experiment tried in Aksai). If revenues are then sufficient, hunting areas could reimburse counties for all or part of these expenses. But regardless of their precise relationship with county governments, hunting areas need to be authorized to control land use within them, provided with the proceeds directly from hunters (paying those in Beijing or provincial capitals for necessary services), and able to use those proceeds to pay the opportunity costs of maintaining their lands primarily for wildlife. That may mean, as in Aksai, where intensive pastoralism is incompatible with a high-value argali population, purchasing entire livestock herds, removing those pastoralists from the hunting area, and providing

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them genuine assistance in obtaining new occupations.2 In other areas, it might mean as little as monitoring and limiting livestock herd growth, with no need for dramatic changes to local livelihoods (as in portions of the Dulan hunting area). It must mean, in any case, that commerce provided by hunting enhances the value these wild lands already possess for both local people and governments, acting as a counterforce to incompatible commercial pressures. To curb any tendency for prioritizing short-term profit, these hunting areas must also have more reliable systems for monitoring wildlife populations and for establishing and maintaining harvest quotas. But given the two fundamental reforms I have suggested, these should come relatively easily. The system is a closed one, with incentives to overharvest counterbalanced by the certainty that doing so would be bad for business. As long as there exists a supply of wealthy hunters willing to pay for a large trophy in an essentially wild area, managers suitably equipped and empowered to provide it to them would be well positioned to engage in something that, in the West, would be recognizable as wildlife conservation. Alas, even if reformed in this fundamental sense, international hunting can, at best, form only the cornerstone of a wildlife conservation system for all of western China. The supply of hunters is not inexhaustible, the areas to which they might be transported are finite, and the species of interest are few. Further, trophy hunting as a premise for conservation inevitably contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it depends crucially on the presence of revenues that far exceed expenses (it simply does not cost $20,000 to outfit an argali hunt, although the indirect and opportunity costs may well run this high). In turn, the disproportionate fees paid by trophy hunters depend—at least in part—on rarity. The trophy hunter is interested in novelty and uniqueness. If trophy hunting programs succeed so well that they become ubiquitous, and the animals carrying trophy heads commonplace, it will be difficult to maintain the luxury fees they currently command. A system premised on luxury and rarity can provide a partial model, and can perhaps assist other programs that are less well endowed, but it cannot be expanded without limit. Other applications of the Devil’s bargain will be needed. Subsistence Hunting Most pastoralists, while not lacking for meat, would gladly take the opportunity to supplement their diet with wild game, were it provided. Hunting has traditionally been a minor, but nonetheless substantial, part of pastoral culture and livelihood, and complete prohibitions are currently a source of discontent and distrust directed at governments.3 And there are, in China’s west, a few species sufficiently numerous and with habitats currently adequately safe from threat (even outside of nature reserves) that they could, biologically, sustain a modest subsistence hunt. Blue sheep, Tibetan gazelle, Tibetan wild ass, and Asiatic ibex come to mind. (In fact, up until relatively recently, low levels of such subsistence hunts were tacitly acknowledged and tolerated by government authorities.) However, such a proposal faces immediate difficulties. First, subsistence hunting of most species of interest to would-be consumers is cur-

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rently illegal. Second, pastoralists have recently been dispossessed of any weaponry they might use to kill wildlife. But both of these problems, obvious as they are, are amenable to technical or administrative fixes. Even without a fundamental change in the Wildlife Protection Law (or its parallel legislation at provincial levels), allowances might be made so that intermediaries are permitted to take limited quantities of protected species. Even if government policy is unwilling to countenance the return to an armed pastoral population, ways might be found to allow hunting weapons to be kept at secure locations, checked out (or even rented) temporarily during prescribed seasons by permitted individuals, and thus controlled primarily by the security-conscious state sector. The more difficult issues are those of mortality control, incentives to maintain habitat, and of course, a willingness to allow citizens individual access to state property. At present, no institutions to treat the first two issues exist within China; they would have to develop, presumably, out of the existing (but reformed) trophy hunting programs. As well, current policy assumes that no political entity lower than the province is capable of managing or controlling harvest of wildlife, a commonly held resource. Implicit in current laws and regulations is strong distrust of local people and any informal institutions that might be developed at a local level. Notwithstanding the prominence given to the concept of rational use in laws and documents, rationality is not a virtue assumed to characterize any citizen other than those working for a government bureau or Party office. “Give them a centimeter and they’ll take a kilometer” is the unstated governmental position. There is, to be sure, an element of risk associated with my suggestion that limited subsistence hunting be granted legitimacy in western China. It would be folly to claim that traditional knowledge is always best, or that traditional societies naturally adopt conservation as a practice.4 However, local hunting remains legal in three neighboring countries dominated by pastoral cultures—Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.5 This is not to suggest that hunting has by itself solved any problems there; all three countries face great challenges in conserving wildlife, including limiting unsustainable harvests. But hunting by local pastoralists has, at the least, provided a platform upon which better regulatory systems can evolve. As well, it seems to me that the danger of unbridled overexploitation from locals is contingent on a number of factors that might be examined objectively (even if quantitative data on any are lacking). These can help us assess how high the risks are, and whether benefits that might be accrued to local people and to wildlife conservation in general would be high enough to justify them. I have synthesized these factors in Figure 10.1. First, wild species vary in their resilience to human-added mortality. I have summarized this variation along the right-hand axis of Figure 10.1. It is not merely a matter of the equilibrium density to which the animals will tend to rise in the absence of hunting, but also of the population’s response to hunting (summarized by the term “resource renewal rate”). Species that reproduce quickly but die young are better able to sustain hunting than are those that reproduce slowly over a long time-span. This will be particularly true if the species is also relatively dense (fortunately, the two are usually positively correlated). Second, the degree to which hunters operate in a market setting is likely to affect sustainability. If wildlife is a fungible product that can be exchanged for anything else, any

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Figure 10.1 A conceptual diagram of the potential for sustainability in a subsistence hunt under conditions in which knowledge and control are imperfect. The best prospect (bottom, front) is found where market interactions are weak, population density of target species as a function of its resource renewal rate is high, and institutional oversight is deliberate rather than incidental. Worst prospects (top, back) are at the opposing set of conditions. This conception assumes that the level of technology is constant.

built-in constraints against overharvesting are considerably weakened. If wildlife can be exchanged for money that can be hoarded (or worse yet, accrue interest at a rate higher than its own renewal rate), an incentive will exist to extinguish the resource as soon as possible. Indeed, the left-hand axis of Figure 10.1 simply reiterates the integrity of “subsistence” as a principal underlying this type of use. Wildlife killed for truly subsistence purposes must be consumed relatively locally and relatively quickly, weakening incentives to overharvest. An increase in the degree of integration with distant markets (and thus wildlife’s substitutability) corresponds with a lessening of the subsistence nature of the hunt. Finally, even in subsistence hunts, it is necessary to have institutions that bind individual citizens together for the greater good. Traditional subsistence hunts of premodern cultures are sometimes viewed as having been sustainable based only on taboos, rituals, or inherent conservation ethics, but a sober analysis often suggests that lack of technological ability to overexploit usually played an important part. That is not to suggest that governments necessarily must exert a heavy hand, or that traditional conservation values and mores

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should not be incorporated into an institutional setting. What will assist sustainability is not so much the coercive nature of a feedback system as its focus on deliberately limiting the amount taken by a few in favor of allowing equitable benefits to the overall group. A system in which conservation occurs only incidentally (e.g., as a result of technological limitations) will be more fragile than one in which a group institution exists that deliberately mandates priority for future users (vertical axis, Figure 10.1). Of course, it could be argued that the existing wildlife bureaus at national and provincial levels already provide these institutions. However, they are not only insufficiently staffed to provide this function, they exist at far too coarse a geographic scale. For individuals to be willing to limit personal harvest in deference to other members of the group, that group must be sufficiently small that individual self-restraint is not viewed as coercion. At the same time, boundaries must be set within which quotas (or at least general rules designed to restrict harvest) would apply, and these must be large enough to contain wildlife populations with some degree of demographic integrity. Thus another step is needed: the delineation of hunting management units on a geographic scale that corresponds tolerably well to both human communities and wildlife populations. Even a rough, imperfect stab at this will be much better than none at all. Subsistence rights would be restricted to those living permanently within any given management unit—preferably restricted to the ethnic groups named as meriting autonomous status.6 Within each of these management units, regulations restricting hunting would be needed. How would one begin? Not, I would contend, with a superficial-seeming “scientific” determination, as Chinese academics would likely propose (see Chapter 9). There is no realistic possibility that reliable quantitative estimates of sustainable yield can be developed for any wildlife population in western China, to say nothing of developing them separately for a multitude of management units. Rather, hunting restrictions can be modified after an initial and conservative guess, and by then instituting feedback systems and gradually increasing harvest levels until a point at which demand is tolerably close to being satisfied but the biological population is not exhibiting any danger signals of overharvest. Nature reserves (or at least their core areas), sacred mountains, areas surrounding monasteries, and other locally important areas can be closed to all such hunting. Although conceptually I am discussing a subsistence hunt, participating pastoralists no longer live in a subsistence economy, and I have already suggested that some sort of conservation institution would also be needed to monitor and guide the hunt. Thus, it also makes sense to charge participating hunters a modest fee that would help support the necessary monitoring and regulation. This would be far different from the outsized fees charged to foreign hunters; in fact, for the system to work, fees must be considerably lower than the value of the meat obtained. But taxation is a reasonable and necessary component of ensuring that needed oversight is present, and thus that the harvest enjoyed in the here-and-now is also enjoyed in the there-and-then. One portion of these funds could support a small and simple operation at the management unit level; another portion could help support a beefed-up provincial wildlife office that provided technical and research support. Finally, an institutional authority—presumably existing at the relatively local level

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suggested by these management unit boundaries and incorporating representatives of local pastoralists to the degree possible—would also function to negotiate with land users on behalf of wildlife habitat. Such a proposed subsistence hunt would not occur within core areas of nature reserves, but rather within areas used primarily for livestock production; thus, wildlife could argue only for partial consideration. But given that benefits would now be flowing to pastoralists and that many would wish them to continue indefinitely, the way would now be open to begin discussing limitations on their land use in favor of wildlife. Because the wildlife species I have mentioned as candidates for subsistence hunts have tolerated pastoralism—at least at certain levels—for centuries, there is no evident need for a black-and-white exclusion. But it does not follow that no conflicts at all exist. If blue sheep are valued for subsistence use, it can be legitimately argued that subsistence users be prohibited from grazing their livestock in or near the cliffy areas blue sheep require. If Tibetan gazelles become an accepted supplement to the family diet, that argues for families providing ways for gazelles to pass through the fences that are increasingly transforming gazelle habitat into a chessboard–like grid. If a subsistence use is found for Tibetan wild ass, that should—at the least—provide for greater tolerance on the part of the pastoralist who sees some of his grasses eaten, and who might yet be asked to make sacrifices for other, more sensitive species. Given time and success, such a system might be later expanded to include other species. Commercial Harvest Thus far, the Faustian bargains I have suggested have still not come to terms with what is arguably the thorniest problem of all in China: the widespread demand for wildlife not merely for subsistence, but for all manner of other uses (including, notably, medicinal) that require trade in wildlife parts. Most, albeit not all, of this demand emanates from eastern China and goes beyond what my hypothesized local institutions would be suited to deal with. Still, western China is, politically and administratively, part of China, and would be expected to play its part in meeting this demand. Can a Devil’s bargain, in which wildness is prioritized in order to produce consumable wild products, also be struck when wildlife is to be traded commercially? Valerius Geist has been most outspoken and eloquent in his argument that the lack of commercial markets has been the key to the success North Americans in the United States and Canada have enjoyed in wildlife conservation since the early twentieth century.7 Indeed, prohibition in commerce of wildlife products has been elevated to a cardinal principle in North American conservation systems, taken almost as an article of faith by most wildlife practitioners in the West. In suggesting the possibility of commercial harvest, I do not dispute the importance that prohibiting commerce has played within the context of the North American conservation system. But it is less clear to me that absence of a market is a mandatory requisite for any successful conservation system. To find an example of successful conservation coexisting with a market, one need only look to an exception within the North American system that Geist notes but does not analyze in depth: the harvest and selling of furbearing species’ pelts. If the mere presence of a

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market in wildlife commodities inevitably spelled doom, North America would long ago have extirpated its foxes, martens, and raccoons.8 Further, the system that Geist has so strongly defended, in which dead wildlife can be used domestically in a subsistence-mimicking sense but not sold for profit, also depends critically on the wide acceptance among hunters of the “split-rail” ethic (what historian John Reiger has called the “sportsman-conservationist ideal”). This ethic itself is a descendent of the European tradition of the gentleman-hunter, but—importantly—was further developed in North America from a creed that served to reinforce notions of an aristocracy that excluded most citizens from access to wildlife, to an egalitarian philosophy that explicitly embraced wide and classless participation. Equally noteworthy is that this split-rail ethic developed alongside then-nascent efforts to protect and manage huge tracts of public land in both Canada and the United States, lands that were, and largely remain, devoid of permanent human occupation. Neither the ethic of the exclusive European gentleman-hunter nor that of the citizen sportsman-conservationist has any resonance within the culture of western China (neither the politically empowered Han, nor the numerically dominant Buddhist or Islamic cultures). And as I have shown, relatively little land, even in remote western China, is managed as a public commons upon which any Chinese version of the split-rail ethic might play out. In contrast, markets for wildlife products are highly developed in China. Interest in wild products is not restricted to the wealthy, but rather has deep roots in cultures that many already wish to defend against what they perceive as forces of global homogenization. These factors lead me to question the assumed impossibility of effective wildlife conservation in the presence of commerce. The Pandora’s box that Geist and other theorists of conservation in a Western setting would prefer remain closed has, in China, long since been opened. But if economic benefits from wild products can be channeled in a way that enhances the value of undeveloped, wild land (land that is otherwise at risk of having its primary productivity appropriated entirely for use by people), perhaps there is a case to be made that commercial use of some free-ranging wildlife species can simultaneously support cultural mores and wildlife conservation.9 Here, as in my subsistence hunting model above, I suggest that there are competing risks and values that ought to be weighed against one another in assessing the overall wisdom of legitimizing a commercial harvest (see Figure 10.2). Clearly, the risk of overharvest is related to the biological properties of the animal population. The lowerleft axis of Figure 10.2 integrates both the factors of inherent population density and resource renewal rate (used in Figure 10.1) into a single biological concern. Because there will always be risks, I would contend that the type and amount of cultural benefit to be obtained also be considered (lower-right axis, Figure 10.2). If the cultural benefits from the wild product are high and available to many, higher biological risks may be acceptable. Conversely, only the very lowest biological risks may be worth incurring if commercial use provides something of value only to a very few. Finally, because it is inevitable that market failure will occur in the absence of some type of clear property rights (i.e., by not transferring the value obtained by the consumer to the maintenance of wild habitats), the ability to control harvest levels and ensure integrity

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Figure 10.2 A conceptual diagram of the potential for net social benefit of a commercial hunt for species of high value, where wild habitat is assumed to be prioritized as part and parcel of allowing the harvest. The best argument (top, back) can be made where the biological risk of added human mortality is low, the cultural benefit from obtaining the wild product high, and the ability to control the harvesting and marketing of the product high. Worst prospects (bottom, front) are at the opposing set of conditions.

of the marketed product forms a critical third dimension to this model.10 The vertical axis in Figure 10.2 is essentially a measure of the strength of property rights, which in this case would presumably be land use and access control by a community of local citizens (rather than the absolute rights of an individual owner, as often assumed in Western economics). In suggesting the potential of commerce in wild areas to aid in conservation, I do not wish to minimize the risks. If North American furbearers have thrived despite a market in their pelts, it is not so much because markets per se have served as incentives for conservation as because other factors (institutional or cultural) have interceded to provide for their needs. If demand and/or technology is high—thus fueling a tendency toward overharvest or even extirpation—the social institutions favoring long-term over short-term use must be that much stronger. Human communities must be able to effectively provide habitats for the species they benefit from, and simultaneously police those habitats to exclude free riders. It is far from inevitable that these conditions will be met.

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Figure 10.3 Potential for net social benefit of a hypothetical commercial hunt for three Chinese species of high value (as in Figure 10.2). For musk deer (top, back), biological risk of added human-caused mortality is relatively low, the cultural benefit from obtaining the wild product high, and the ability to control harvesting and marketing of the product high. For Asiatic black bears, the biological risk is relatively high, the cultural benefit is similar to (if a bit lower than) that for musk deer, and the ability to control harvesting and marketing of the product is moderate. For chiru, although the biological risk is moderate, the cultural benefits are low (accruing only to a small number of wealthy, foreign consumers), and the ability to control harvest and marketing is low.

Musk deer

Low

Chiru

h

Hig

Ris

Low k to

Hig

pop h (bio ulation log ica integr l) ity

Low

Ability to control harvest and market (socio-economic)

High

Asiatic black bear

efit

n f be o t oun l) am ultura / e (c Typ

In Figure 10.3, I attempt a positioning of three Chinese wild species along these continua: musk deer, Asiatic black bears, and chiru. All three are vulnerable, and all three produce commodities of cultural value that might conceivably be produced by free-ranging animals or, alternatively, by captive animals. Musk deer produce a commodity of high cultural (and possibly medicinal) value that has a long tradition of use. This value translates into moderate (but, as I’ll show below, not extremely high) monetary value on a per animal basis. Musk deer are also biologically capable of sustaining a reasonably high offtake without becoming extirpated because they reproduce relatively quickly and can achieve reasonably high densities when habitat conditions allow. Further, because only adult males have commercial value, it is not only biologically but economically rational to protect females and young from harvest. Most critically, however, musk deer occupy fixed and relatively small home ranges. Thus, delineating individual musk deer as “belonging” to nearby human communities (which

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might therefore have incentive to protect their habitat) is plausible. If the value obtained from small-scale exploitation of adult male musk deer exceeds that obtained from degrading their habitat (and the costs of excluding nonlocal free riders are not too high), these incentives might be mobilized to simultaneously provide musk deer habitat, a culturally meaningful product, and a bit of local economic development. For this to occur, genuine community-based management, with rigidly enforced boundaries, community-based monitoring,11 and mutually agreed-upon limitations, must develop. Chiru probably have only a slightly lower biological ability to sustain human harvest than do musk deer.12 They can, at least locally, attain extremely high densities, often roaming in groups that number in the thousands. However, although shahtoosh is obscenely expensive and has a cultural history of its own (as does small-scale use and trade by Tibetan pastoralists), it is strictly a luxury item. Its cultural value is restricted to a very few, and its disappearance from commerce would cause little suffering. Most critically, most chiru populations are migratory, with their travels taking them hundreds of kilometers between calving and wintering areas. Property rights to a chiru population would be almost impossible to establish. If one human community elected to reduce disturbance to wintering chiru in order to benefit from selling shahtoosh, its efforts could easily be thwarted by another community that did nothing for chiru but happened to be closer to a migratory route or calving area. Solving the free-rider problem on the enormous expanses of the Tibetan Plateau—and thus effectively limiting harvest to sustainable levels—would seem to be impossible. Together, these factors argue against legitimizing commercial trade in shahtoosh. Yet a third set of circumstances is faced by the Asiatic black bear. Bear gall is also a culturally and economically valuable product. Bears occupy an intermediate place between musk deer and chiru in their home range size and locational predictability. They require far more habitat than do musk deer, but are not migratory like chiru. They are also biologically much less capable of sustaining added human mortality than either musk deer or chiru, equilibrating only when offtake rates are modest. Also unlike musk deer, the commercial product of interest is produced just as much by adult females as by adult males. In bears, the survival rate of adult females dominates population dynamics, but females too would be vulnerable in a commercial hunt aimed at obtaining gall. Finally, unlike solitary musk deer or high-elevation-specializing chiru, bears do well in captivity, and gall from their bladders can be obtained repeatedly. Thus, as current Chinese policy contends, there is no case for legitimizing a commercial harvest of free-ranging bears for their gall. The probability that wild bear habitat could be maintained from incentives to profit from wild gall is outweighed by the difficulties of assigning property rights to bears as well as the likelihood that such a harvest would result in local extirpations. If bear gall is to continue as a legitimate part of traditional Chinese medicine (and cannot be replaced by artificial substitutes), bear farming—with the welfare of bears improved to the degree possible—appears to be the best strategy. In order for a system based partly on consumptive use to work, the price per animal must be high enough to justify incurring the opportunity costs of maintaining the species’ habitat, but not so high that poaching or otherwise subverting the system will be so at-

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Figure 10.4 A conceptual diagram of the potential for sustainability, comparing musk deer with rhinoceros. Although musk is quite valuable on a weight basis, the value per individual animal is moderate, and the sensitivity of musk deer populations to their survival rate is not high (by the standards of large mammals); they thus have moderately high potential to be harvested sustainably. By contrast, rhinos have a very high value per individual animal, and their populations are also very sensitive to survival rate; thus, they have extremely low potential to sustain a commercial harvest.

Musk deer

Pur

Low cha

se

pric

Hig

e/in

h

div

idu

al a

nim

al

Low

h

Hig

Potential for sustainable use

Low

High

Rhino

ate

al r

vity

iti ens

to

viv sur

S

tractive that controls on mortality are impossible to apply. Might there be species whose lives, required to produce the commodity, are priced so highly that no conceivable system can conserve them if trade is legitimized? That is, are there species that return so much profit per capita that any legal killing and trade would quickly lead to uncontrollable and unsustainable harvest rates? I think all species of rhinoceros fit this description (or, at least, that any successful conservation system for them would be absurdly intrusive and expensive), but that musk deer do not (see Figure 10.4). For one thing, rhinos reproduce very slowly under the best of circumstances, so they have very limited capability to withstand added human-caused mortality. But the economics also differ. Although numerous reports use the phrase “worth more than their weight in gold” in reference to both musk and rhino horn, there remains a conceptually important and quantitatively substantial difference: the revenue potentially available from a single rhino is many times that of a single musk deer, and it is the per

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capita price, rather than the per weight price, that matters biologically. Prices for musk and rhino horn, while varying considerably depending on source, quality, and position within the trading system, are both exorbitant, ranging from as low as $8,000 per kilogram to as much as $60,000 per kilogram. But it takes roughly forty adult male musk deer to produce a kilogram of musk, whereas a single rhino horn may weigh 3 to 10 kilograms (depending on species, age, and sex). Thus, even if musk and rhino horn are priced identically per weight, an individual rhino returns a far more lucrative sum to the would-be poacher than does an individual musk deer (individual rhino horns have been cited as selling for between $25,000 and as much as $200,000, whereas raw musk pod prices have been documented as being worth roughly $100 to $250).13 Thus, for rhinos, the economic incentives of continuing to harvest are so high (i.e., poachers would always assess the risks of apprehension and punishment as worth taking), that control over harvest levels would be extremely difficult. The similar “value” of rhino horn and musk should not be allowed to cloud the very different economics and biology underpinning possible conservation strategies. Sustainable use of musk deer has never been done, but remains logically plausible. But for rhinos, sustainable use based on legal trade is a contradiction in terms. I wish to reemphasize that I am not recommending a wildlife conservation system based solely on market-exchange mechanisms. I concur with those who have pointed out the ubiquity of market failures (e.g., legal hunting of musk deer in Russia has evidently not prevented widespread poaching and some population declines14). Particularly in China, with its history of disconnect between value and price, and its raw and unsophisticated version of market economics, it would be folly to blithely assume that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is capable of producing effective conservation where governments have failed. Indeed, a fully market-based strategy is impossible in China if for no other reason than that there is no free market in land. Although usufruct rates are specified for collectives and individuals, all land ultimately belongs to the state; none is privately owned.15 But it remains true that economic incentives accruing to individuals can be tremendously helpful in moving conservation forward. Monetary benefits from consumption, coupled with local-level institutions to ensure sustainability and equitability, could help move wildlife conservation in western China out of its current dilemma. Further, the economic incentives that underlie my suggested schemes are secondary to the cultural ones. What is at stake, it seems to me, is a sense of the wild. True, that means limiting to a large degree mankind’s intrusions. But to alienate mankind from the wild entirely—as I argue current Chinese policy does—is not only contrary to the predilections of most Chinese (as well as non-Han ethnic groups), but—in combination with rapid modernization—is more likely to result in wildland conversion than wildland conservation. It might seem paradoxical that I am suggesting so much killing as an avenue toward wildlife conservation. But it’s not the killing that is important as much as the involvement of local people that such killing requires. Lacking that, the hands-off approach favored by current policy leads to alienation from, and ultimately apathy toward, wildlife.

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GIVING WILDLIFE A VOICE IN LAND MANAGEMENT It is almost time to flesh out my suggestions about how land might be better managed with wildlife in mind. But first, a rather large caveat is needed: even lacking any policy changes prompted by consideration of wildlife, an enormous question mark currently hangs over the vast grasslands and deserts of western China. Future plans for industrial, agricultural, and commercial developments pursued under the aegis of the Great Opening of the West remain murky, but could radically transform the landscape. The potential of various governmental programs now being implemented to affect pastoralism, and thus vegetation, directly (“retire crops, restore grasslands,” “set of four,” and “retire livestock, restore grasslands”) is beyond dispute, but their actual effect remains unknown. What will a traveler to western China’s pastoral lands, mountains, deserts, and nature reserves find ten, twenty, or thirty years hence? Will it look similar to its condition in the year 2007? Will human and livestock populations have increased? Will it, alternatively, have become depopulated, with millions of hectares cleared of livestock, humans happily restricting themselves to specific valleys and transportation corridors, with the majority of the countryside left to recover and provide a paradise of habitat for wildlife?16 Will the nomadic pastoral lifestyle have disappeared entirely, only to find itself replaced by extensive mining, the landscape crisscrossed by new roads and aqueducts?17 Will the place be teeming with tourists? Will the combination of governmental, environmental and economic initiatives lead to healthier grasslands and more potential for wildlife? Are the incentives right, and will implementation be effective? It is, alas, too early to know; these questions can only be kept in mind as we consider the present and the future. Nature Reserves The place to begin consideration of habitat in a modernized system of wildlife conservation in western China is with existing nature reserves. As was true in the case of international hunting areas in developing greater involvement with wildlife, the nature reserve is an existing institution that can form the cornerstone for habitat protection regionwide. But as with the trophy hunting program, nature reserves in China’s west have, for the most part, failed thus far to actively protect and maintain natural ecosystems specifically for biodiversity. As with hunting areas, basic reforms are needed. Most fundamentally, nature reserves should be given full legal authority to control land use within their boundaries. This would require a change in current law (a draft national law on nature reserves was in preparation as of late 2006), and a transfer of power and control away from county governments and collectives that currently use those lands for economic purposes incompatible with prioritizing natural processes. Thus, it will also require funding, because those entities losing part of their economic base will need to be compensated. It will require confronting, head on and explicitly, the competing interests that currently engage in that contest only indirectly and tacitly. At the same time, however, there need to be changes in the draconian regulations governing nature reserves, which currently function primarily as aspirational visions of

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pristine nature but are so divorced from reality that they carry no weight. A new Nature Reserve Law should abandon the current vision for “core zones,” in which even temporary and nonmotorized human presence is essentially prohibited. This vision is neither realistic nor necessary for effective maintenance of even the most wild of western China’s nature reserves. Far more logical would be a simple policy dictating that core zones be reserved for nonextractive, nonindustrial (and, if possible, nonmotorized) human presence. Permanent human occupation, livestock grazing, hunting, and mining would be prohibited (as they are, on paper, at present), but research and small-scale tourism could be accommodated. Buffer zones surrounding core zones of western China’s nature reserves are the logical places to begin implementing the sustainable use concept so often invoked in Chinese writing. Livestock grazing, hunting, and mining could occur, but would be restricted and managed. Reserve staff would retain the rights to limit livestock numbers and enforce seasonal grazing restrictions, and to require mitigations of industrial activities that devalue native flora and fauna. Buffer zones would thus begin to look like their name implies, and provide critical experience in the vital but currently missing art of balancing the habitat needs of native species with the economic needs of people. Management of land use within international hunting areas would also be similar to these buffer zones (the main distinction being that hunting by foreigners would be an explicit objective, and also the primary source of funding). There is ample precedent for such a relaxation of overly stringent regulations. Consider the following quote: All commercial use of the reserves is prohibited. It is illegal to cut the timber; it is against the law to run livestock on the reserves. It is illegal to remove minerals, or to shoot game, or even to walk across the invisible fences that the law has erected along . . . defined borders. This quotation was not written to describe the regulations governing Chinese nature reserves, although it does so accurately. Rather, it was a description of the legal status of the forest reserves in the United States as of 1896, the year in which their scope was expanded to reach 154,000 km2. These reserves subsequently became the first U.S. national forests, which, starting the very next year, were to become managed under a quite different philosophy—one of sustainable use.18 It is this very philosophy of prudent use, leading toward long-term interest in conservation, that is lacking in western China, but is required to reconcile the current conflict between protection and development. The prudent-use philosophy can also be extended to some areas currently identified as experimental zones. But some of the so-called experimental zones, which most reserve plans envision playing host to a variety of economic enterprises (most of which conflict with biodiversity protection in any case), should be abandoned by nature reserves, and de jure management authority returned fully to the counties, townships, and collectives that already possess it de facto. This may result in some reduction in overall size of the protected area system, which may strike at current Chinese pride in its enormous size. Jiang

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Zhigang, a prominent conservation biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has already suggested the China cannot afford its currently sprawling nature reserves,19 and current realities suggest that he is right. However, if substantial portions of nature reserves in western China are reconceived as areas of controlled and limited use (rather than no use), the current system might not be too large, and could indeed be reasonably expanded. What would prudent use within these buffer/experimental areas look like? In a nutshell, it would resemble traditional land use prior to integration with the market economy. Industrial and extractive activities whose products are desired by those living outside of nature reserves would be prohibited. But extensive, low-density use of native flora and fauna by those with traditional land tenure would be accepted, monitored, and limited. Because most pastoralists are no longer insulated from market forces, nature reserve staff must be empowered to enforce restrictions on livestock numbers and areas used. This will require that nature reserve staff understand—much better than at present—critical areas for wildlife, and the degree to which they need to be protected from use or disturbance. It will also require that pastoralists living within nature reserves obtain tangible benefits to compensate for losing total freedom to ply the market as they wish. Finally, there needs to be fundamental recognition that, because nature reserves—particularly within core areas where income generation is impossible—provide critical ecosystem services for all Chinese, they should be supported financially and continuously by public funds. Financing nature reserves via “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (that is to say, capitalism) is inappropriate. Better to simply stick with socialism, in which nature reserve staff run the reserves and the task of income generation falls to everybody else. Certainly, small-scale enterprises that have minor impacts on ecosystem integrity and help the bottom line can be welcomed, but the fundamental attitude has to accept that nature reserves are not capitalistic enterprises. The combination of these three fundamental reforms (reserving land-use rights for nature reserve managers, relaxing unrealistic restrictions and reducing the size of some reserves by jettisoning zones not managed for nature in any case, and funding reserves in ways that remove their present imperative to promote incompatible development) would produce a leaner, but much more functional, nature reserve system. Even if the result were a net loss in total protected area, the increase in quality would more than offset it. Any embarrassment felt by Chinese should be more than compensated for by their ability to talk about these smaller (if still quite impressive) acreages with a straight face. Alas, even a more effectively functioning system of nature reserves can at best provide only cornerstones for habitat protection when considering the entirety of China’s western landscape. Species that persisted only within designated reserves would be doomed to perpetual endangerment, because even the largest of reserves are too small to maintain populations in perpetuity. Beyond Dedicated Reserves and Hunting Areas The task of considering wildlife habitat in areas predominately managed for human uses is always a tough one; at best, wildlife can only be one consideration among many. Fortu-

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nately, if protected areas are sufficiently abundant and well managed, wildlife need not be the sole, or even a particularly high, priority on pastoral lands outside of nature reserves. If viewed as a matrix within which protected areas serve as sources, it is only necessary that species persist at moderate densities within these areas. Further, if combined with prudently managed consumptive use (as I suggest above), the ground upon which any formal measures for habitat protection must be rooted will have been fertilized, as it were, and much more likely to be successful than under the current scheme. Even if no formal mechanism for giving wildlife a voice on these nonprotected lands can be developed, local people will have been provided some incentive to moderate their livestock grazing or other competing activities in favor of wildlife, simply as a function of their being able to benefit tangibly from its presence. However, somewhat later in the evolution of this system as envisaged, it would be appropriate to provide formal mechanisms whereby the by-then strengthened wildlife authorities at local and provincial levels could represent the needs of wildlife amid the other land uses considered. Are there species that are vulnerable to particular developments in particular areas, and for which compromises, even in nonprotected areas, should be made? Are there mitigations that might be associated with an industrial project that would greatly reduce the harm done to a wildlife population of importance? These are the types of questions typically addressed in a developed-country setting; when China is able to address them as well, it will truly have reached the status in natural resource management that it is already so close to reaching in other economic endeavors. To do so, however, the current modes of decision making—secretive and segregated into narrowly defined, turf-conscious bureaus—will have to give way to multidisciplinary teams in which legitimate and competing interests are recognized and balanced. Environmental NGOs, a newly emerging force in China, can help in training and facilitating communication between nascent wildlife management authorities and local residents.20 Ecotourism Notably missing thus far has been any discussion of nonconsumptive ecotourism as a means to add value to wildlife and its habitat. That omission is deliberate. Despite its prominence in general discussions of adding economic value to wildlife, I remain skeptical that ecotourism has much potential to help wildlife in the vast spaces of western China. Certainly, it should always be listed on any menu of options, and promoted if an objective assessment suggests it can provide benefits that outweigh its costs. But I suspect that many who uncritically tout ecotourism’s potential have not spent much time in western China. (Additionally, there has been a tendency for nature tourism in China to morph into intensive tourism, threatening any fragile resources it was intended to protect.21) Why such a pessimistic view of ecotourism’s potential? It is primarily because of the spatial scale and harsh environment in most of China’s west. Systems that depend on economic incentives from nature tourists would seem most appropriate where necessary tourist infrastructure can be centralized, thus minimizing the cost and disruption of providing for people, and at the same time maximizing the probability of their having a

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satisfactory viewing experience. An example that would seem to have potential in China is the construction of canopy-level catwalks and lodges in Xishuangbanna (in southern Yunnan), built over water bodies where wild elephants are known (and induced by the addition of salt) to periodically congregate. (Even here, however, most viewers return home without having seen elephants.) But such examples will be hard to find in western China, where the terrain is forbidding, the elevations high, the travel times long, and the wildlife widely scattered over enormous landscapes.22 Elsewhere within eastern China, ecotourists, if managed well, can potentially make an economic contribution that might plausibly be used to pay the opportunity costs of maintaining wildlife habitat. But even in eastern China, it is far from clear that the economic activity engendered from such tourism acts in any substantive way to protect habitat. It has been widely documented that ecotourism rarely translates into sustained economic development for local people.23 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Wildlife in China’s west has, with some exceptions, persisted through historical time periods and still has the potential for a healthy future. It has been able to survive, largely in the absence of purposeful and directed conservation, because humans have been so limited in their ability to alter the landscape. Just as in other frontier regions of the world, there was little need for conservation when human pressures remained modest. That circumstance is now changing. The relatively undeveloped character of the Chinese west is on the chopping block, but there is no indication that a corresponding development and maturity of the region’s wildlife conservation system is in sight. The strict protectionism that China has embraced as an overall philosophy has begun to reap some dividends, but these gains could be short-lived if wildlife management does not advance as a discipline as the challenges to wild lands increase. Chinese leaders are right to believe that adequate controls are needed to ensure that consumptive use does not quickly become excessive (as it evidently has following the collapse of centralized planning in neighboring Mongolia). But an excessively top-down, bureaucratically rigid, and technology-focused management approach that fails to deal with either the desires or capabilities of local pastoral communities is likely to fail. Instead, bureaus at national and provincial levels should conceive of themselves as outreach agents engaged in helping communities to develop monitoring and feedback mechanisms by which they can both use wildlife and meet the general objectives set by national policy. Community-based resource management remains embryonic and experimental in China,24 but moving in this direction—even if haltingly and uncertainly—seems more likely to lead to a sustainable future than does the current approach. Consumptive use and developing increased authority for local people and their representatives on small scales are not without risk,25 and cannot be done without some initial monetary investments. Local, participatory institutions to manage harvest, curb individual behavior in deference to the group, and defend against state or corporate interests from outside have little history anywhere in China. Yet these must develop in parallel with any

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loosening of currently strict prohibitions. As well, prudent-use strategies should allow for protected areas (albeit perhaps smaller than those currently drawn) in which both commercial activity and local use are explicitly prohibited. In summing up his view of the long history of environmental change in China, historian Mark Elvin wrote: There seems to be no case for thinking that, some details apart, the Chinese anthropogenic environment was developed and maintained in the way it was over the long run of more than three millennia because of particular characteristically Chinese beliefs or perceptions. Or, at least, not in comparison with the massive effects of the pursuit of power and profit in the area provided by the possibilities and limitations of the Chinese natural world, and the technologies that grew from interactions with them. 26 In seeming contrast, I have argued that Chinese beliefs and perceptions have been influential in creating the present difficulties for wildlife (and perhaps my argument is the reason for Elvin’s subsequent modification of this initially strong statement—“or, at least, not in comparison with . . .”—giving some credence to the counterargument that particularly Chinese beliefs may indeed have played some role). But what Elvin describes as being the primary motivation underlying the 3,000-year Chinese transformation of the environment in what I have termed eastern China sounds a great deal like what the current government policy holds in store for western China. To the degree that China becomes more developed (in the sense Chinese desire) even in its wild west, the Chinese might increasingly adopt less utilitarian or anthropocentric views toward nature. But that will be cold comfort for wildlife if such development is associated with the continued pursuit of “power and profit,” and particularly as Chinese technology continues to minimize the limitations imposed by the geography of western China. Development at the cost of western China’s irreplaceable wildness will be a tarnished success. The better standard to which Chinese might aspire would be achieving a modicum of increased affluence and respect in the world, while still retaining substantial portions of their western region’s natural legacy.

APPENDIX

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APPENDIX CROSS LISTING OF ANIMAL AND PLANT SPECIES MENTIONED IN TEXT IN ENGLISH, LATIN, AND SIMPLIFIED CHINESE CHARACTERS

Latin names follow Wilson and Reeder (1993) except where noted. English

Latin

Chinese

Mammals Order Insectivora moles

Taplidae

鼹

Order Scandentia tree shrew

Tupaia belangeri

树鼩

Order Primates slow lorises macaques langurs golden monkeys gibbons

Nycticebus spp. Cercopithecidae Colobinae Pygathrix spp. Hylobates spp.

蜂猴 猕猴属 疣猴 金丝猴 长臂猿

Order Carnivora arctic fox wolf red wolf coyote dhole African hunting dog raccoon dog gray fox red fox

Alopex lagopus Canis lupus Canis rufus Canis latrans Cuon alpinus Lycaon pictus Nyctereutes procyonoides Urocyon cinereoargenteus Vulpes vulpes

北极狐 狼 红狼 丛林狼 豺狼 猎狗 貉 灰狐 赤狐

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Latin

Chinese

Tibetan fox corsac fox mountain lion Canada lynx Eurasian lynx jaguar wild cat mountain cat jungle cat Pallas’ cat golden cat leopard cat clouded leopard snow leopard common leopard tiger Altai weasel steppe polecat Eurasian badger black-footed ferret wolverine raccoon red panda brown (grizzly) bear American black bear polar bear Asian black bear sun bear giant panda civets palm civet

Vulpes ferrilata Vulpes corsac Puma concolor Lynx canadensis Lynx lynx Panthera onca Felis silvestris Felis bieti Felis chaus Otocolobus manul Catopuma temminckii Prionailurus bengalensis Neofelis nebulosa Uncia uncia Panthera pardus Panthera tigris Mustela altaica Mustela eversmannii Meles meles Mustela nigripes Gulo gulo Procyon lotor Ailurus fulgens Ursus arctos Ursus americanus Ursus maritimus Ursus thibetanus Helarctos malayanus Ailuropoda melanoleuca Viverra spp. Paguma larvata

藏狐 沙狐 美洲狮 加大那猞猁 猞猁 美洲豹 欧林猫 荒漠猫 丛林猫 兔狲 金猫 豹猫 云豹 雪豹 豹 虎 香鼬 艾鼬 狗獾 黑足鼬 貂熊 浣熊 小熊猫 棕熊 美洲黑熊 北极熊 亚洲黑熊 马来熊 大熊猫 灵猫 果子狸

Order Phocoenidae Yangtze river dolphin

Lipotes vexillifer

白暨豚

Order Proboscidea Asian elephant

Elephas maximus

亚洲象

Order Perissodactyla Przewalski’s horse Mongolian wild ass

Equus ferus Equus hemionus

野马 野驴

APPENDIX

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Latin

Chinese

Tibetan wild ass zebras Indian rhinoceros rhinoceros

Equus kiang Equus spp. Rhinoceros unicornis Rhinocerotidae

藏野驴 斑马 独角犀 犀牛

Order Artiodactyla wild boar wild (Bactrian) camel vicu~na mouse deer musk deer white-lipped deer elk, red deer Eld’s deer sika deer sambar Pere David’s deer water deer tufted deer muntjaks moose roe deer mule deer white-tailed deer caribou pronghorn antelope goitered gazelle Mongolian gazelle Tibetan gazelle Przewalski’s gazelle saiga water buffalo African buffalo gaur wild yak bison Arabian oryx takin Asiatic ibex markor Himalayan tahr

Sus scrofa Camelus bactrianus ferus Vicugna vicugna Tragulus javanicus Moschus spp. Cervus albirostris Cervus elaphus Cervus eldii Cervus nippon Cervus unicolor Elaphurus davidianus Hydropotes inermis Elaphodus cephalophus Muntiacus spp. Alces alces Capreolus capreolus Odocoileus hemionus Odocoileus virginianus Rangifer tarandus Antilocapra americana Gazella subgutturosa Procapra gutturosa Procapra picticaudata Procapra przewalskii Saiga tatarica Bubalis bubalis Syncerus caffer Bos frontalis Bos grunniens Bison bison Oryx leucoryx Budorcas taxicolor Capra sibirica Capra falconeri Hemitragus jemlahicus

野猪 野骆驼 小羊驼 马来鼷鹿 麝 白唇鹿 马鹿 泽鹿 梅花鹿 水鹿 麋鹿 獐 毛冠鹿 麂 驼鹿 狍 黑尾鹿 维基尼阿鹿 驯鹿 叉角羚 俄喉羚 黄羊 藏原羚 普氏原羚 高鼻羚 印度水牛 非洲水牛 印度野牛 野牦牛 美洲野牛 阿拉伯羚牛 羚牛 北山羊 捻角山羊 喜马拉雅塔尔羊

233

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Chinese

serow gorals chiru mountain goat musk ox argali bighorn sheep blue sheep

Naemorhedus sumatraensis Naemorhedus spp. Pantholops hodgsoni Oreamnos americanus Ovibos moschatus Ovis ammon Ovis canadensis Pseudois nayaur

苏门羚 斑羚 藏羚 石山羊 麝牛 盘羊 加大那盘羊 岩羊

Order Pholidota pangolin

Manis pentadactyla

穿山甲

Order Rodentia giant squirrel Himalayan marmot marmots ground squirrels prairie dogs pocket gophers house mouse domestic hamster zokor musk rat nutria

Ratufa bicolor Marmota himalayensis Marmota spp. Spermophilus spp. Cynomys spp. Geomyidae spp. Mus musculus Mesocricetus auratus Eospalax fontanierii Ondatra zibethicus Myocaster coypu

巨松鼠 喜马拉雅旱獭 旱獭 黄鼠 草原犬鼠 囊鼠 小家鼠 仓鼠 鼢鼠 麝鼠 河狸鼠

Order Lagomorpha pikas Tibetan wooly hare

Ochotona spp. Lepus oiostolus

鼠兔 高原兔

Birds sandhill crane whooping crane black-necked crane cranes golden eagles lammergeyer Andean condor osprey crested ibis saker falcon peregrine falcon

Grus canadensis Grus americana Grus nigricollis Gruidae Aquila chrysaetos Gypaetus barbatus Vultur gryphus Pandion haliaetus Nipponia nippon Falco cherrug Falco peregrinus

沙丘鹤 美洲鹤 黑颈鹤 鹤 金雕 胡兀鹫 康多兀鹫 鹗 朱鹮 猎隼 游隼

APPENDIX

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Latin

Chinese

falcons upland buzzard honey buzzard kites eagle owl little owl Himalayan snowock Tibetan snowcock sandgrouse ring-necked pheasant turkey quails ptarmigans snow partridge blood pheasant white-eared pheasant tragopans peacock Hume’s ground jay barbets hornbills pitas broadbills leafbirds drongos forktails wallcreeper Eurasian starling house sparrow hummingbirds sunbirds hoopoe honey-eaters bulbuls parrotbills bustards shrikes larks snowfinches wagtails redstarts

Falconidae Buteo hemilasius Pernis apivorus Accipitridae Bubo bubo Athene noctua Tetraogallus himalayensis Tetraogallus tibetanus Pterocletes spp. Phasianus colchicus Melagris gallopavo Phasianidae Lagopus spp. Lerwa lerwa Ithaginis cruentus Crossoptilon crossoptilon Tragopan spp. Pavo spp. Psuedopodoces humilis Capito spp. Buceros spp. Pitta spp. Eurylaimus spp. Irenidae Dicrurus spp.

隼 大狂鸟 蜂鹰 鹰类 雕鸮 纵纹腹小鸮 暗腹雪鸡 藏雪鸡 沙鸡 雉鸡 火鸡 雉 雷鸟 雪鹑 血雉 藏马鸡 腹角雉 孔雀 褐背拟地鸦 列鸟 犀鸟 八色鸫 阔嘴鸟 和平鸟 卷尾 叉尾卷 红翅旋壁雀 紫翅椋鸟 加麻雀 蜂鸟 太阳鸟 戴胜 美狂鸟 鹎 雅雀 大鸨鸟 伯劳 百灵 雪雀 鹡鸰 红尾鸲

Muscicapidae

Tichodroma muraria Sturnus vulgaris Passer domesticus Trochilidae Nectariniidae Upupa epops Leucopternis spp. Pycnonotidae Paradoxornis spp. Otididae Lanius spp. Alaudidae Montifringilla spp. Motocilla spp. Phoenicurus spp.

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Latin

Chinese

Reptiles rattlesnakes python king cobra Yangtze alligator sand lizard

Crotalus spp. Python molorus Ophiophagus hannah Alligator sinensis Phrynocephalus vlangalii

响尾蛇 蟒蛇 眼镜王蛇 扬子鳄 沙蜥

Amphibian giant salamander

Megalobatrachus davidianus

大鲵

Insects butterflies

Lepidoptera

蝴蝶

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NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION 1. For information on environmental protection in China (most of which includes very little about wildlife) see Ross (1988); Boxer (1989); He (1991); Smil (1993); Edmonds (1994, 1998); Lotspeich and Chen (1997); Elvin (1998a,b, 2004); Shapiro (2001); Economy (2004); and Harris (2004). Those dealing specifically with water issues include Dai (1998) and Ma (2004). Recent Chinese publications include State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau (1999) and Liu (2002). For general reviews of the status of Chinese wildlife in English, see Greer and Doughty (1976); Qu (1982); Schaller (1990, 1993); Rowell (1983); Shen et al. (1982); Wang (1988); Li and Zhao (1989); and Xu and Giles (1995). 2. Jiang (2001). This is far more than in North America. Sheng et al. (1998) recognize 534 native mammal species in China; the State Environmental Protection Agency officially recognizes 581 mammalian species (McBeath and McBeath 2006) and Wang (2003) recognized 607, but some of these lists reflect extensive taxonomic splitting and inclusion of questionable species, probably in an attempt to move China up the world list. 3. Most authoritatively, Pan et al. (2001) in Chinese, and Lindburg and Baragona (2004) in English. 4. The rangewide survey, completed in the year 2000, while imperfect, is widely credited with having produced the most accurate estimate of panda numbers thus far. The estimated total population as of the late 1990s was 1,590 (Beijing Evening News 2004). In 1993, George Schaller wrote that his panda research project during the 1980s “developed an aura of disillusionment, of a vision crushed by reality, of a bitter wisdom that the panda was doomed. . . . I can only view with irony the fact that never has the panda’s destruction been as rapid as during the years we studied it. . . .” In 2004, he wrote, “In the 1980s, I was filled with creeping despair as the panda seemed increasingly shadowed by fear of extinction. But now . . . the prospects for saving the giant panda are today unequaled. . . .” Schaller (1993, 2004). 5. Verburg and van Keulen (1999) show a map of pastoral versus agricultural China that is useful. 6. “West of the pandas” may seem excessively corny, but I use it deliberately to mimic the Chinese pattern of naming places. Yunnan, for example, literally means “south of the clouds,” Henan “south of the river,” and Shandong “east of the mountains.” Thus, because to so many, wildlife in China is synonymous with pandas, I define western China as daxiongmao xi. 7. Buck (1931); Smil (1984). 8. Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872. The earliest date could be reckoned as even earlier, 1864, if the federal government’s transfer of Yosemite Valley to the state of California specifically for nature protection is counted (Nash 1973). 9. Riley (2004). In 2001, China had an estimated total fertility rate (lifetime births per woman) 237

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of about 1.98 in rural areas and 1.22 in urban areas. It had the lowest GDP of any country with a total fertility rate of under 2.5. Riley cites estimates that China’s population will level off at about 1.4 billion; however, this appears to be on the low side of the range of scholarly estimates. A series of estimates for the year 2050 made in the mid-1990s varied from a low of 1.32 billion to a high of 1.87 billion. A United Nations projection published in 1998 projected 1.48 billion in the year 2050 (www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/). Projections made by China’s State Family Planning Commission in 2002 projected 1.53 billion in the year 2050. 10. Reflecting the contradictions of a still-poor-yet-increasingly-taken-seriously China, the Economist in its October 13, 2003, issue featured a cover photo of the first Chinese manned space vehicle, along with the caption, “Congratulations China!” and then, in smaller print, “Can we stop giving you development aid now?” 11. Until 1998, this was known as the Ministry of Forestry. Reforms in 1998 aimed at reducing central government bureaucracy led to the downgrading of Forestry from ministerial status, and the upgrading of the National Environmental Protection Agency to the State Environmental Protection Administration (Economy 2004). Both are now directly under the State Council but lack the power and clout of full ministries (such as the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Commerce). Other departments (si) within SFA include the Department of Forest Resource Management, the Department of Reforestation, and Department of Fire Protection; www.forestry. gov.cn/jgjj/jgjj.asp. 12. Ma, Zou and Jia (2004). 13. Wu (2002). 14. CWCA was the only Beijing-based agent for foreign hunters in the first decade or so of China’s international hunting program, but dissension within its ranks produced splits, and it now competes with three other government-sponsored units for the same pool of foreign hunters. Because fees have been fixed and services are provided at the local level, none of the four can specialize or offer different pricing or packaging (i.e., they cannot compete for business in any sense a capitalist economy would recognize). They distinguish themselves primarily by personal contact with hunters. 15. In addition to SFA and SEPA, a few nature reserves are administered by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of National Land Resources, the Ministry of Water Conservation, and the Ministry of Construction, which, oddly, also supervises most of China’s zoos. Although SFA manages most nature reserves, oversight and permitting is done by SEPA. 16. Ma, Zou and Jia (2004) note that a township level of wildlife stations is also mandated, and that 37,000 of these offices are staffed by 15,000 people. What is required, however, is that there be a sign hung on an office door indicating the presence of a wildlife station. In practice, these are nonexistent in western China. 17. Shen et al. (1982). 18. Mills and Servheen (1991). 19. See Regier (2001) for an argument that utilitarian attitudes were part and parcel of the movement in the U.S. and Canada to institute game laws, set aside forest preserves, and establish national parks in the late nineteenth century. 20. See, for example, Zou (2002), authored by one of the principal educators of Chinese wildlife professionals.

2. CHINA’S WILD WEST: GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY 1. Economic figures such as these should always be treated with some skepticism, but numbers of a similar magnitude are seen in various other sources. These numbers are from CIA World Fact data and are based on Chinese-supplied GDP/province figures, assuming a then operational exchange rate of $1 = ¥8.2. 2. Bao et al. (2002); Chen (2002).

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3. I have not counted Taiwan as a Chinese province here, but have included the three provincelevel cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, as well as the relatively new provinces of Hainan and Chongqing. 4. World Bank: World Development Indicators database, July 2003. www.worldbank.org.data. Accessed, February 1, 2005. Ahead of California were the United States, Japan, Germany, U.K., and France. Some economists have calculated that California has, at times, ranked as high as fifth (ahead of France), or as low as eighth (below China and Italy), with the fluctuations generally reflecting changing exchange rates and methods of comparing across currencies. See, for example, www.w-edge.org/special.gdp.htm, accessed February 1, 2005. 5. Qinghai, at about 720,000 km2, is about 3 percent larger than Texas; Inner Mongolia, at 1,183,000 km2, is slightly larger than Canada’s Northwest Territories; Tibet, at 1,228,400 km2, is 30 percent larger than British Columbia; and Xinjiang, at 1,660,400 km2, is just a bit smaller than Alaska. 6. Throughout, I will use the Chinese word shan, which means “mountain range” as well as simply “mountain.” 7. Massive as the Qilian Shan is when compared with California’s Sierras, they themselves are both smaller in area and lower in elevation than the Kunlun Mountains, which stretch 1,600 km across Qinghai Province and then form the border between Xinjiang and Tibet, and top out at 7,719 m (25,320 ft). The Kunlun cordillera is, in turn, not quite as long as the Tian Shan, which, including portions in Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan, extends for about 2,400 km—although it has a highest elevation of a mere 7,439 m (24,400 ft). 8. Qinghai Province is also considered inconsequential and unpopulated by Chinese, but its 5.2 million people are some 20 percent more than Norway can claim. They may be bit players demographically in enormous China, but these five “unpopulated” areas would—were they to be considered as one—rank as the world’s fifteenth most populous country. 9. For example, Bishop (1989); Schell (2000); Huber (2001); Norbu (2001); Sperling (2001). 10. Always a highly politicized and contentious issue, the erroneous equating in Western media of virtually anyplace in western China with Tibet was exemplified by the controversy over a poverty alleviation scheme proposed in 1999 that involved relocation of Hui agriculturalists in eastern Qinghai further west into Dulan County. The World Bank, which initially had supported the project, ultimately ceased its participation, not so much from any fundamental dispute with their Chinese partners, but due to the political fallout of appearing to support a program that diluted the Tibetan population within their traditional area. Ultimately, Chinese authorities proceeded with a scaled-down version of the program without World Bank assistance. Ironically, the area ultimately chosen for resettlement of the roughly 40,000 immigrants, although situated within Haixi Tibetan Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, was never an important part of the greater Tibetan cultural area. In fact, immigrants were settled in an already irrigated portion of the Chaidam Basin, which had earlier been occupied by political prisoners, most of whom originated in eastern China. The poverty alleviation scheme may reasonably have been questioned on other grounds—transparency and full accounting of such initiatives are rarely strong suits in China—but the public outcry alleging that such immigration was designed to displace or marginalize traditional Tibetans was never justified. Typical Western-based critiques of the program can be found at http://mirrors.zpok.hu/www.bicusa. org/asia/chinatibet.htm, www.tew.org/development/sum.china.pov.html, and www.elaw.org/resources/text.asp?id=2439. For a view more sympathetic to the Chinese program, see the essay by P. Bottelier of Harvard University at www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/200101/0101a007.htm. 11. I recognize, of course, that the political status of Tibet is an issue of great contention, enormously important both to Chinese governmental officials at high levels and in international diplomatic circles. There is also a residual (if strongly suppressed and less well known) independence movement among Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In evading these issues here, I do not mean to minimize their importance to many people. I treat Chinese sovereignty over the entire area as a

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simple fact because political arguments about it in national capitals are not relevant at the spatial and temporal scale of this book. 12. Kapstein (2004). This has also been my personal, if unquantified observation. 13. Benson and Svanberg (1998: 46), noting the frequency with which Kazaks have been noted to be relaxed and undogmatic about their faith, felt the need to defend Kazaks’ adherence to Islam, reassuring their readers that, although not necessarily evident in writings, mosques, or prayer rugs, Kazaks were observant in the most important sense—privately. They concluded that “Islam has been so integral a part of Kazak society that from the earliest history of the Kazak khanate to the present, being Kazak has also meant being Muslim.” My time among Kazaks (mostly in Gansu, somewhat less in Qinghai, and only fleetingly in Xinjiang and Kazakstan) leads me to support the view that most Kazaks express their faith inwardly and through their personal ethics, clarity of purpose, and adherence to the moral precepts contained in the Koran. With the notable exception of dietary restrictions (Kazaks most assuredly do not eat pork), outward manifestations of religiosity are rare. But because issues of Islamic identity have recently become such a global concern, one might reasonably query which of the two identities is more important to Kazaks. As Benson and Svanberg point out, the two facets of their identity are intertwined. But to the degree a distinction between the two can validly be made, my observations would suggest a slightly different summary statement than that of Benson and Svanberg. It strikes me that Kazaks do not see being Kazak as an avenue toward being a better Muslim; rather they embrace Islam as a way to assist them in being more fully Kazak. 14. Kapstein (2004). 15. This contrasts with Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan, where Russian remains not only the language of government and commerce, but is often the language at home as well. 16. Liu (2002). 17. Decoding the past is more difficult in western China than where Han civilization was dominant, because of the paucity of written records. In China proper, because of a long tradition of documenting events via almanacs and histories, and because written script has remained recognizable for 4,000 years, the patient historian can glean a great deal of information about the past from the written record. The impressive work of the biogeographer Wen Huanran and his colleagues is based largely on historical documentation. But even Professor Wen was limited in his ability to deal with history beyond what is sometimes called “Inner China,” that part of China that has historically been part of Han culture, and that at various times has been included within not only the political, but also the cultural sphere of the Han. For example, Wen was able to produce a richly detailed and impeccably documented history of deforestation within some of what is today Qinghai Province; but almost all of his work is restricted to the eastern quarter or so of this region. Part of the reason is that forests probably were common primarily in this geographic area, being always less so in the higher-elevation, drier climes of the true Qinghai–Tibet plateau. But Dr. Wen was also limited to making inferences about past forests from present ones in these areas in part because, occupied for millennia by pastoral cultures, there simply are no written records available with which to decipher the past. Alas, in western China, one generally must make due with using the present (even if in the form of tree rings of ancient relicts or the pattern of pollen grains deposited in ancient lakes) to infer the past. 18. See, for example, Luosan (1996: 43); Yan (2001: 28); Ye and Dai (2004); Zhou et al. (2005). 19. See also Holzner and Kreichbaum (2001). 20. From Tao et al. (1997) (www://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp039). For stations at Jiuquan and Dulan, years 1994–98 were obtained from the National Data Center of NOAA at http://cdo.ncdc. noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cdo/cdoprod. All seven stations are included under a joint protocol between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Department of Energy, which checked for accuracy and consistency. 21. The most thorough, geographically complete, and analytically exhaustive analyses to date

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appear to be those of Schäfer (2001), Domroes and Schäfer (2003), Gemmer et al. (2003), and Chen et al. (2006). The first two sources display maps of China with almost the entire west showing no significant change in annual precipitation for 1951–99. With respect to precipitation, Schäfer (2001) concluded that “No trends can be found in the dry, north western part of China, excepting Urumqi with an increase of 103 millimeters (thirty-eight percent).” Domroes and Schäfer (2003), while concerned about future drying (as well as warming) in China generally, also concluded that although “precipitation is expected to decrease in most eastern parts . . . slight increases in the western parts are projected.” Gemmer et al. (2003), while cautioning against overinterpretation of data from western China due to small sample sizes, nevertheless tend to show more months with positive precipitation trends in the west than negative trends. In an even broader analysis, Hulme et al. (1994) concluded that data show “a weak tendency for increasing annual precipitation over the last 100 years” in East Asia as a whole, and that while “much of southern and eastern China has experienced reduced annual precipitation . . . Northwest China has seen a slight increase in precipitation.” For their study site in the Keerqin Steppe of Inner Mongolia, Brogard and Zhao (2003) present precipitation totals during 1959–96, suggesting no trend. For the Gansu corridor, Chen et al. (2002) present precipitation trends from twenty-two meteorological stations (of which 11 were in the Hei River Basin, 5 in the Shule River Basin, and 6 in the Shiyang River Basin). None of the twenty-two displayed statistically significant declines from the early 1950s to 1999, although three stations (Sunan, Qilian, Gaotai) had significantly positive trends of precipitation on time. Further west in Gansu, Zhang et al. (2003c) display annual precipitation totals for Yumen and Anxi for 1951–99 that, although not statistically analyzed, do not appear to demonstrate a trend with time. For the Tibetan Plateau, Gao (1995) shows no significant trend for precipitation at Wudaoliang, and Piao and Fang (2002), based on 670 weather stations (which doubtless included many that were not vetted for reliability), show a slow (and probably insignificant) positive precipitation trend for all of Qinghai and Tibet during 1982–99. Du et al. (2004) similarly show a non-significant, positive trend in precipitation for Tibet. For the Tarim River Basin in central Xinjiang, Xu et al. (2004b) show results of a regression of precipitation on time (from 61 weather stations) indicating no significant trend on time during 1956–2000. See also Wang and Gaffen (2001) for evidence of generally increasing humidity in western China during 1961–90. Chen et al. (2006) evaluated trends of potential evapotranspiration (PET), a standardized measure of aridity which is closely related to soil moisture, throughout the Tibetan Plateau over the past four decades. Overall trends were negative (meaning that conditions were generally becoming less dry), particularly during spring. Zhang and Welker (1996) had earlier conducted small-scale field experiments at the Haibei Experiment Station in Qinghai suggesting that environmental conditions similar to those leading to the lower PET documented by Chen et al. (2006) increased the production and growth period of alpine grasses. I also used the same thirty-five weather stations used to create Figure 2.2 (www.cdiac.ornl. gov/ft/tr055/sta205p.dat) to test the simple hypothesis that spring precipitation in western China (which I defined as cumulative precipitation during May and June), which would most strongly influence grassland conditions, had decreased over the past four decades. Only one station showed the significant (P < 0.05) negative relationship that would be expected with spring drying, and it was located in a forested, not a grassland environment. An additional three stations had negative slopes that were significant at the (P < 0.10 level). This number of significantly negative relationships is about what one would expect from thirty-five randomly obtained data sets drawn from an underlying distribution with no true trend. Conversely, three stations showed significantly (P < 0.05) positive slopes (i.e., gradually increasing spring precipitation), and an additional two were nearly significantly (P < 0.10) positive. Of the thirty-five slopes of spring precipitation on time (ignoring statistical significance), twenty-four were positive and ten were negative. 22. Wang et al. (1982) projected back 935 years based on trees along the southern foothills of the central Qilian Mountains; Zhang and Wu (1997) projected back 700 years in a study area slightly further northeast; Kang et al. (1997) projected back 1,835 years just east of Dulan, Qinghai;

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and Qin et al. (2003) projected back 500 years in two study sites in Zhiduo and Qumalai counties, southern Qinghai. 23. Kang (1997). Although this study relied on correlations between tree-ring width and autumn temperature, other such papers (e.g., Tang et al. 1988, Zhang and Wu 1997, Qin et al. 2003) have provided evidence that temperature and precipitation co-vary in their effect on Sabina growth, with warmer temperatures generally coinciding with high precipitation. 24. Sources providing reliable and statistically grounded evidence of a general warming trend in China over the past five decade include Hulme et al. (1994); Liu and Chen (2000); Wang et al. (2000b); Shen and Varis (2001); Domroes and Schäfer (2003); Gemmer et al. (2003); Yu et al. (2003); Du et al. (2004); and Qian and Lin (2004). 25. For example, Liu and Chen (2000) estimated warming rates of 0.016°C/year for annual means but 0.032°C/year for winter means using ninety-seven stations distributed over the entire Tibetan Plateau during 1955–96; Du et al. (2004: 245) reported an annual warming trend of 0.02°C/year in summer but 0.13°C/year in winter for Qinghai and Tibet, 1978–99. Domroes and Schäfer (2003) concluded that “in winter, increasing trends prevail; strongest increases (greater than 1.5°C) can be observed in northwestern and northeastern parts of China,” whereas, “[in] spring and summer no uniform trend can be observed. . . .” Shen and Varis (2001: 382) concluded, “Winters have become distinctly warmer whereas summers either cooled or became slightly warmer.” 26. Du et al. (2004). 27. Piao and Fang (2002); Piao et al. (2004). 28. Jin et al. (2000); Lin et al. (2004); Wu et al. (2006); Wang et al. (2006). 29. Wang and Fu (2004). 30. Yang et al. (2004b). For another example, see Beijing Review (1998). 31. Ling (2000). 32. www.chinaview.cn 2004–09–16 14:41:38. 33. Zhou et al. (2004). In Chinese, mingxian de nuan ganhua qushi. 34. The raw data used by Zhou et al. (2004) appear to be the same as those used by Li and Li (2002) in their description of the Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve area of Qinghai. The latter authors present decadal means of annual precipitation in Yushu and Guoluo prefectures for the months of January, April, July, and October (as well as annual totals). Li and Li (2002) provide a blowby-blow accounting of when precipitation appeared to increase and to decrease, but without any statistical trend analysis, it is not clear what is a trend and what is simply expected yearly variation. Simple linear regressions I conducted on all fifteen possible “trends” (three areas multiplied by four seasons plus an annual total) yielded a total of two trends significant at the 0.05 level—roughly what one might expect if one had fifteen sets of random data with no underlying trend—and both of these were significant increases in precipitation during April. 35. Gemmer et al. (2003); Qian and Lin (2004). 36. See, for example, Wen (1995); Gasse et al. (1996); Meihe (1996); Rhodes et al. (1996); Yan et al. (1999); Shi et al. (2001); Qin et al. (2003); Yang et al. (2004a). That said, it would be a simplification to imagine that western China’s climate was uniformly warmer and wetter during the Pleistocene: there were major fluctuations during that time as well. See, for example, Lehmkuhl and Haselein (2000); Yang et al. (2003). However, we at least know that many lakes were formerly much larger than they are today. 37. According to the Beijing Review (1998), “Investigators have demonstrated that a dry climate, the dominant climate in this area, has caused a reduction in rainfall. . . . Scientists say that the dry climate is a result of the long existence of cold dry and warm dry climates in the region after the plateau rose.” See also Xinhua (2001, 2006). Officials at Bird Island Nature Reserve (which is no longer an island) also held to this view during conversations I had with them in the early 1990s. However, an increasingly active Chinese press has questioned this explanation, and often with equally little data, blamed the problem on overutilization of water or overgrazing. See Bian (1990); Liu (2002: 79); Ma (2004: 186); and Li (2005).

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38. For example, Qu (1994). This author concludes that the influence of irrigation for agriculture around Qinghai Lake has made only a minor contribution to its shrinkage, but despite the plethora of tables and equations, shows no data to actually substantiate his claim that climate change is primarily to blame, stating only that because the lake is in a “semi-natural condition,” local anthropogenic changes could not possibly have had much influence. 39. See Lehmkuhl and Haselein (2000). Additionally, Zhang et al. (2003a), using the organic matter and grain size of sediments from under Qinghai Lake, suggest that the climate around the lake was in a relatively wet period from about 1500 until the early 1950s (particularly so since 1850), reaching a peak about 1950. They state (p. 1454) that “The second half [of the twentieth century] experienced low P/E ratios (a dry climate) as shown by δ18O . . . and supported by the observed fall in lake level. The coarse grain size content, however, shows complex changes. It indicates that river water discharge decreased from the 1950s to lower values in the 1960s and the 1970s, coinciding with low rainfall in the 1970s in the Qilian Mountains. . . .” However, we have already seen that there are no records suggesting a substantial dry period in the Qilian or Kunlun Mountains during the 1960s or 1970s (although it is known to be a time of considerable land conversion around the lake), and Zhang et al. (2003a) later aver as how “large areas of grassland were cultivated to farmland in the 1950s after P.R. China was established, and the river water was used for irrigation. The intense human activity, such as overgrazing or farmland cultivation around the lake, is clearly shown by the increase of magnetic susceptibility of the lake surface sediment over the most recent fifty years. This results in less river discharge into the lake, which affects up to one percent of the lake water balance.” This further suggests that the rapid decline of the lake level since the 1950s is unlikely to have been caused by decreased precipitation. 40. Hwang et al. (2005) provided evidence that other lakes in western China fluctuate in close correlation with yearly accumulated precipitation. 41. For example, Klein et al. (2004). 42. There is considerable variation in how western scientists have used these terms. Definitions include: [Grazing capacity is] “The maximum stocking rate possible without inducing damage to vegetation or related resources.” Society for Range Management (1964), quoted in Bartels et al. (1993). [Grazing capacity is] “the maximum number of animal numbers which can graze each year on a given area of range, for a specific number of days, without inducing a downward trend in forage production, forage quality, or soil.” Stoddard et al. (1975). “Overgrazing means that the grazing [has increased to an intensity] beyond the regenerative capacity of the vegetation and that the pasture begins to change to vegetation with lower productivity and quality. If overgrazing is repeated over many years, this process leads to degradation,” Holzner and Kreichbaum (2001). [Carrying capacity is] “The stocking rate at the optimum grazing pressure,” Mott (1960), quoted in Bartels et al. (1993). Each of these definitions contains a critical undefined word or term, the presence of which simply leaves in abeyance the clarification of what capacity is, and therefore what “overgrazing” is. In the first case, the undefined (but crucial) term is “damage,” in the second it is “downward trend,” in the third “regenerative capacity,” and in the fourth, “optimum.” The point that explicit objectives need to be part of any definition was earlier made by Richard Bell, who observed that “the only embracing definition of carrying capacity is ‘That density of animals and plants that allows the manager to get what he wants out of the system’” (Bell 1985: 153). See also Behnke and Scoones (1993). See Holzner and Kreichbaum (2001) for an assessment of Tibetan rangelands that takes care to define terms. 43. In fact, at least under certain intensities and types of grazing, many plants increase aboveground production (although not necessarily production of root tissue) relative to an ungrazed condition, through various indirect mechanisms. See, for example, Frank and McNaughton (1993). For the Tibetan Plateau, Meihe et al. (2004) have suggested that Kobresia-dominated meadows, which are generally considered to represent high-quality native forage and are highly resistant

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to heavy grazing, owe their abundance to thousands of years’ grazing, thus favoring them over more sensitive grasses. 44. Laycock (1991). 45. Recent Chinese experimental work on plant-animal interactions has avoided this pitfall, and does typically report quantitative responses rather than simply declaring ranges to be “degraded” or not. See, for example, Zhong et al. (1999); Wang et al. (1993); Wang and Li (1999); Li et al. (1999); Zhou (2001); Li et al. (2006). However, there has, to date, been little melding of this more careful scientific work with county- or province-level analyses of range condition. 46. State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau (1999); State Council (2002). Curiously, these two reports, while differing markedly in their estimate of the total proportion of China’s rangelands qualifying as “degraded,” agreed about the yearly rate of degradation, both pegging it at a staggering 20,000 km2, or 5 percent of the nation’s total grasslands yearly. The SEPA report, in addition to providing much more detail, included a more balanced accounting of possible causes for range degradation, whereas the State Council report was peppered with vague and exhortatory phrases, emphasizing the need for building artificial pastures, fences, warm sheds, rodent control, and other technological solutions. The State Council figures were picked up and repeated in a press release issued by China Environmental News on September 13, 2004. Ho (2000b) used the former (and lower) figure. 47. These and other province-wide statistics are cited by both Berry (2003) and Wang et al. (2004) as originating in a Chinese Ministry of Agriculture report from 1999. 48. Berry (2003); Wang et al. (2004); State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau (1999). 49. Most Chinese sources use a three-tiered categorization of “degradation”: light (qing), moderate (zhong), or severe (zhong). It is unclear, however, whether such categorization is done using objective or subjective means. The instruction manual for the early 1980s survey (Northern Grasslands Resource Survey Office 1981, Form V) directs field workers to document the grassland acreage in each degradation category (cross-tabulated by three additional categorization systems of grassland—leixing, deng, and ji), but despite complex formulas for calculating these grassland types, gross grassland production, and carrying capacity, it includes no guidance on how to categorize “degradation.” 50. Foggin and Smith (1996). 51. Ling (2000); Gu (2000b); Berry (2003); Wang et al. (2004). 52. Fan et al. (1999). 53. Qin et al. (2004). 54. Northern Grasslands Resource Survey Office (1981). 55. Range ecologists with Western training or orientation have also pointed out that the underlying assumption of the early surveys—and indeed of range management to the present time—is of a stable and linear relationship connecting degraded, at one extreme, to an imagined climax, ungrazed state at the other. The simplicity of this Clementsian viewpoint has generally been abandoned by Western range ecologists in favor of more nuanced views that incorporate looser feedback between consumers and vegetation, lag times, and multiple stable states. Time lags imply that corrective measures to overgrazing are not necessarily realized in rapid improvements in range condition. Multiple stable states imply that systems do not necessarily slide easily up and down the continuum of disturbance and plant response, but may become fixed at intermediate states regardless of current livestock density. Reducing livestock density in response to an undesirable change in plant composition, for example, might not produce any change. See Laycock (1991); Walker (1993). 56. Northern Grasslands Resource Survey Office (1981: 9). The plan called for the bulk of field surveys to be conducted during 1981 and 1982, with subsidiary, remaining surveys to be completed no later than 1983. 57. The remaining unexplained variation is likely due to elevation and local weather patterns caused by topography (e.g., rain shadows). Somewhat surprisingly, elevation did not emerge as a

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significant predictor. However, this may reflect the fact that only three of the thirty-seven stations were located at elevations greater than 4,000 m, and only seven of the thirty-seven above 3,500 m. I suspect that precipitation totals at each of the four sites, all of which are at elevations generally greater than 3,800 m, are somewhat underestimated by this equation, but by similar magnitudes. 58. Pu (1990: 378). 59. But because of its location within a designated “core zone” of the newly declared Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve, livestock exclusion fences were being erected in 2004, and I estimated that roughly 40 percent of the pastoralists’ traditional grazing lands were thus being legally denied to them. 60. Pu (1990: 252). 61. Zhou et al. (1990). 62. Greer (1969). 63. Local information suggests that the movement was related to military efforts to control Tibetans during the violence of the 1950s, a time that also saw the building of the Golmud-Lhasa highway (completed in 1954). It is likely that domestic livestock in Yeniugou prior to 1984 were mostly yaks, and that production and land tenure systems were similar to those described above for Baizha Forest in the 1990s. Harris (1993). 64. The route of these refugees was indirect and extended over a number of years, stopping at various points along the way, including Hami, Chaka, and Daheba before landing near Golmud (Gao 1985a: 35). Yeniugou was among the areas given over to these Kazaks for grazing following encounters with Qinghai’s warlord, Ma Bufang (Gao 1985b: 113). See also Benson and Svanberg (1998: 72). 65. Harris (1993). 66. Gao (1985b). 67. An undetermined number of yaks were also moved into Yeniugou each winter by the Tibetan pastoralists, who, like the Mongol pastoralists, primarily raised domestic sheep, and whose presence in Yeniugou was technically illegal. This trespassing by Tibetans, who probably had historic ties to the area, had ceased by 1997. 68. Although it is possible that, as documented in Inner Mongolia by Williams (1996, 1997, 2002), richer and/or more mobile pastoralists simply took advantage of the clarification in pasture boundaries to graze in unclaimed areas now that they no longer feared trespass onto their allocated areas. In late autumn 2005, grazing appeared to be taking place far from winter homes, and disputes had again arisen among pastoralists about range allocation. 69. Harris and Bedunah (2001); Bedunah and Harris (2002). 70. Liu (1986). 71. The county’s origins lie in a high-level meeting in Lanzhou in April 1953, at which time what is now both Aksai (for Kazaks) and Subei (for Mongols) autonomous counties were carved from portions of what at the time were Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang (and officially established the following year), and placed under Jiuquan Prefecture in Gansu. All of Jianshe Township is located south of the then-existing Gansu-Qinghai border, and most national maps continued to show the old border (and thus that Jianshe was in Qinghai) until about 2003. Details can be found in Liu (1986) and Yang (1993). Prior to the arrival of Kazaks, the area had been very sparsely populated by semi-nomadic ethnic Mongol pastoralists. 72. Migrants during the 1960s appear to have been officially recognized by having their household registration (hukou) located in Aksai County. Most recent Han migrants appear to be undocumented (i.e., maintain household registrations in their original counties). 73. All documented pastoral families (i.e., those with household registrations in Aksai) had government subsidized houses in Aksai county town. An elementary school and government office in Jianshe had been abandoned in the 1980s, and all children attended school in the Aksai county town. Jianshe Township officials similarly lived in the county town, and rotated temporary shifts staying at the remnants of the government buildings in Jianshe itself.

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74. Measurements, in addition to fundamental site characteristics, included plant species coverage, percent foliar canopy, or basal canopy coverage, percent bare ground, and other, more subjective assessments of plant health; see U.S. Department of Agriculture (1997). See also Harris and Bedunah (2001). 75. Lacking longitudinal studies, the issue of the range degradation’s history—and thus its likely cause—is a difficult one. Holzner and Kriechbuam (2000) attempted to distinguish between recent (approximately the previous fifty years) and ancient (“for centuries or even longer”) degradation on pastures in southern Tibet, estimating that about 50 percent showed signs of “overgrazing and even degradation of ancient origin,” whereas for about 20 percent “overgrazing seemed to be of recent origin” (while about 30 percent was considered to be in an “optimal state”). 76. The pervasive trend since the late 1980s has been for the economies of such pastoral areas to become increasingly integrated with markets; thus, livestock have become a means to generate money, which in turn is used to purchase daily needs. However, as an unintended consequence of regionwide programs to cease timber cutting in areas drained by the Yangtze River (and later, as in this case, the Mekong as well), the Baizha area in Nangqian County became increasingly isolated when commercial forestry ended. Despite generally improved access, livestock in this area are rarely traded, and thus continued—as of June 2004—to be used primarily for subsistence. 77. The traditional practice of turf cutting, although illegal, has been reported by Levine (1998); Holzner and Kreichbaum (2001), and Mallon and Bayar (2002). Once this sod layer underlying Kobresia sedge meadows is removed, that area of ground is essentially lost as potential rangeland. 78. Tibet scholar Melvin Goldstein has argued persuasively that traditional Tibetan pastoralism was a “nonequilibrium” system, in the sense that livestock densities were rarely kept at an equilibrium density with the long-term capacity of grasslands, but instead fluctuated greatly, often exceeding long-term capacity only to be decimated by occasional and unpredictable weather events (generally deep snows during early spring). Because such livestock mortality rates arising from such weather events were independent of the density of livestock, there was no advantage to pastoralists in keeping density low: the proportion of a small herd dying from such unpredictable events was likely to be no different from that of a large herd. Conversely, a larger herd, even if severely diminished by a storm, would be closer to the long-term ideal, and would recover to provide needed subsistence products more quickly than a smaller herd (Goldstein et al. 1990; Goldstein 1996). Goldstein does not claim that under such a system grassland conditions would be entirely unaffected by livestock density. Livestock densities would no doubt have occasionally increased to the point where vegetation would be incapable of responding to the high level of herbivory and trampling, and reduced vigor and species change would begin to occur. Rather, he claims that a long-term balance would have been achieved by fluctuating density of livestock, the result of a dynamic in which pastoralists continually strove to increase stocking to densities above a long-term equilibrium with forage, while periodic weather events knocked those densities down to below the long-term equilibrium. Goldstein highlights the role of Tibetan nobles in reallocating rangelands among pastoralist families under their authority every three years in proportion to the livestock each family had at the time, but it was the inevitability and lack of technological protection from these temporally unpredictable and geographically heterogeneous weather fluctuations that were the key to the long-term stability of such a nonequilibrium system. The triennial reallocation of pastures according to herd size by Tibetan nobles evidently served to spread mean grazing pressure relatively equitably over larger geographic areas; the system worked because, over time, weather events affected all pastoralists, livestock-poor and livestock-rich. But lacking natural herd reductions (with their concomitant human suffering), the pasture reallocation itself would not have been capable of functioning to equilibrate livestock density with grassland capacity, but instead would simply have served as an incentive to build up herds as quickly as possible so as to gain the largest possible grazing area upon subsequent reallocation. Other Western observers have echoed the nonequilibrium theme, emphasizing mobility and

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0.7

0.6 y = -0.1146Ln(x) + 0.9062 R2 = 0.8669

0.5

CV

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0 0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

Mean annual precipitation (mm)

Coefficient of variation (standard deviation/mean) of total annual precipitation as a function of mean annual precipitation for thirty-seven weather stations in western China, mid 1950s–1993. Data from Tao et al. (1997).

flexibility as core elements of sustainable pastoral systems. Western Chinese grasslands are arid, with relatively high yearly variation in precipitation (variation in annual precipitation, usually quantified by the coefficient of variation, standard deviation divided by the mean), is usually inversely correlated with the amount of precipitation, and this pattern holds in western China; see Figure above. We should not be surprised to find that yearly weather changes, acting in a densityindependent manner, often exert a stronger immediate influence on range and livestock condition than does livestock density (although relatively few areas exhibit coefficients of variation greater than 0.30, a value often proposed as the dividing line between equilibrial and nonequilibrial grazing systems; Ellis et al. (1993); Ho (2001a). Daniel Miller has pointed out an additional difference between climate variability in the coldlimited grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau and those of arid Africa, studies of which generated initial interest in nonequilibrial rangeland dynamics. In the latter, the localized and unpredictable weather events that militate against pastoralists keeping herd size constant are droughts, whereas in the former they are more likely to be heavy spring snowstorms. In both cases, the consequence for livestock can be disastrous if the pastoralist has no way to avoid them. But after a drought, the condition of the vegetation available to surviving livestock is worse than beforehand, whereas after the snows from a spring storm melt, vegetation condition for survivors is likely to be good, benefiting as it does from needed moisture. Thus, grassland recovery is probably more rapid after Tibetan Plateau weather events than after droughts in water-limited rangelands. See also Wu and Yan (2002). Thus, imposition of a traditional model in which a single livestock carrying capacity can be identified for discrete areas, and in which optimum production is achieved when livestock are kept continually near that level, is likely to be inefficient at best, lead to chronic range deterioration at worst, and regardless, to be unwelcome to pastoralists. (Even in low-precipitation areas,

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summer pastures in high mountain areas often have riparian, glacier-fed, or subirrigated meadows that produce vegetation independently of that year’s precipitation amount. My own observations supplement the conclusion of Cincotta et al. [1991] that such dependable forage sources are often preferred and sought out by pastoralists, and their abundance and distribution goes a long way toward determining the overall livestock carrying capacity. Such mesic meadows were common in both Yeniugou and Gouli, but rare in Aksai.) However, some proponents of range management based on assumed nonequilibrium dynamics appear to have exceeded the claims originally made for this relatively new paradigm. In defending traditional pastoral practices, some Western writing suggests that in such highly variable climates, livestock density is irrelevant, or that traditional societies were (or are) incapable of damaging their own resource base. This, it seems to me, is an overreaction to ill-advised Chinese programs, anoints traditional pastoralists with a wisdom and social cohesion they may not have had, and saddles today’s pastoralists with the hardships (as well as the benefits) of living in a nonequilibrium state. 79. Li (1994); Chen (1996); Lobsang (1998); Gu (2000a, b); Zhao et al. (2000); Fan and Zhou (2001); Hou and Shi (2002); State Council (2002); Shen et al. (2004); Wang and Fu (2004); Ze (2004); Zhou et al. (2005). 80. Williams (1996, 1997, 2002); Ho (1998, 2000a); Miller (1998, 1999a,b, 2002); Goldstein et al. (1990); Humphrey and Sneath (1999); Foggin (2000); Holzner and Kreichbaum (2001); Banks (2001, 2003, 2004); Banks et al. (2003). 81. The “set of four” program envisages keeping pastoralists on the land, but raising livestock in a “scientific” way (Horlemann 2002). In subsidizing housing (settlement), fencing (territory delineation), forage production, and warm-houses for animals (individual hedges against hard times), the “set of four” program identifies itself as a private-property-mimicking system. It acts as a technological and philosophical extension of the existing agricultural “responsibility system” purporting to provide incentives to conservative husbandry that flow from the tight link between an individual’s control of the grassland resource and the eventual capture of financial benefits. By saying yet more clearly to individual pastoralists, “This is yours: We’ll give you some initial help, now you take care of it well,” the “set of four” program expects that pastoralists will reduce density on overstocked ranges in their own, long-term economic interest. As of 2005, my cursory observations and quantifications of livestock herds had yet to show any evidence of reduced herd size where housing, fencing, and other technological inputs had been established, but perhaps it was simply too early to see any results. Looking carefully at the idealized incentive structure, it is worth asking whether there might be confounding factors acting to weaken it. Where grasslands have clearly been degraded, an important unanswered, but fundamental, question is whether the present direction of vegetation change will continue indefinitely, or whether an equilibrium (albeit perhaps at some level of degradation) will be reached. If degradation due to high livestock density will continue indefinitely, then clearly a feedback loop to the pastoralist will eventually make itself obvious, because yield per animal will continue to decline, and eventually livestock grazing on these lands will cease to be economic. Presumably at some point prior to that, individual pastoralists would see it as being in their own best economic interest to reduce herd size. If, on the other hand, an equilibrium between some sort of degraded vegetative state and high livestock numbers is possible, the link between high livestock numbers and poverty for pastoralists may never become evident to them. It might be possible for pastoralists to stumble indefinitely along a path that produces neither increased wealth for them personally nor restored grasslands. To my knowledge, our current understanding of grassland–livestock interactions in western China is insufficient to distinguish between these two possibilities, despite the obvious implications regarding the efficacy of current policy. See Levine (1998); Miller (1999a,b); Richard (2000). 82. Yan et al. (2000); Fox et al. (2004). 83. “It sounds fine on paper to suggest that China’s future additional consumption of milk,

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beef, and sheep meat should mainly be produced from grassland areas. But, reality is that logistics simply do not permit production of additional milk requirements in grassland areas because inadequate transportation and prohibitive costs preclude this activity on more than a very minor scale. The same holds true for expecting that the vast grassland areas of the North, West, and Southwest should be the source of finished animals (i.e., ready for slaughter). . . . [T]he more remote, and simultaneously poorer land areas have a comparative advantage in calf and lamb production; they are not best suited to the fattening, i.e., finishing, phases.” Simpson et al. (1994: 78). 84. I am indebted to Zhang Yaosheng of the Northwest Plateau Institute of Biology for suggesting some of these ideas. See also Fang (1997) for a view that the Chinese tendency to view environmental protection as solely a governmental responsibility is historically ingrained and remains strong. 85. Anthropologist Dee Mack Williams (1996, 1997, 2002) has argued that grassland enclosures in Inner Mongolia exacerbated grassland degradation rather than ameliorating it, by allowing social inequities to become institutionalized. See also Thwaites et al. (1998). 86. “It is true that producer preference in pastoral areas for ownership of large numbers of livestock seems to be a root problem of low offtake rates and overgrazing. But . . . this attitude is no more irrational than an urban resident obtaining esteem by ownership of material goods such as a motorcycle or a new television set. Ownership of large numbers of animals is a rational production risk avoidance mechanism . . . at the root are poor transportation systems and vast distances that simply result in very low prices to producers in remote areas.” Simpson et al. (1994: 79). 87. Ho (2000b) noted that no length of time was indicated in the national Grassland Law and that at the time, thirty years was the most common time. More recently, a fifty-year period seems to have become common. 88. For example, Zeng et al. (2003) documented a 5 percent loss in grasslands in the Gonghe Basin of east-central Qinghai between 1987 and 1996. 89. See also Goldstein (1996). 90. Banks (2001, 2003, 2004). 91. The 1985 Grassland Law is often referred to loosely as an application of the agricultural “responsibility system” to the pastoral economy. By delineating pastures and providing long-term lease rights to individual families (without the possibility of expanding their area), the purported incentive would be to husband grassland resources carefully, lest a short-term bonanza from an overly large livestock herd create long-term poverty though range degradation. Although the analogy between the agricultural and the pastoral legal basis of the two “responsibility systems” is reasonable, it remains inexact in one crucial detail: the Grassland Law called for grazing capacities to be both determined and enforced by government agencies. Thus, unlike agricultural plots on which individual farmers were free to ply the market, taking whatever risks they deemed acceptable, pastoralists were—in theory—supposed to limit their herds according to fixed, government-supplied quotas. In fact, only the first half of the carrying capacity limitation function was ever conducted: grazing capacities were developed for almost all grasslands, and initial livestock allocations upon the dissolution of the communes reflected the interaction between these densities and land allocated to each family. However, the second half, enforcing grazing capacities, has almost never been done, allowing pastoralists leeway to navigate the course between short-term benefits (larger herds) and the risk of long-term range degradation. The fact that these limits have so rarely been enforced makes the “responsibility system” analogy with agriculture yet more accurate. But the fact that the Grassland Law itself calls for state intervention, presumably to safeguard the long-term health of grasslands, reveals the mixed incentives and often confusing message that government policy has long held regarding the management of grasslands. On one hand, the law attempted a privateproperty-mimicking system, making individuals responsible for, and subject to, the biological limits of their allocated grasslands. On the other hand, it lessened the very linkage it sought to produce between responsible individual behavior and long-term benefit, by suggesting that pas-

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toralists need not concern themselves with grazing capacity, because overintensive livestock use would be prevented by state policy. See Ho (2000b). 92. Ho (1998). 93. Clarke (1998). My own observations in Sunan County, Gansu, also suggest that sedentarization and fencing do not necessarily reduce livestock density. 94. See, for example, Simpson et al. (1994). Ho (1998: 208) states that “in the case of the commune, property rights were vested in an administrative level too abstract and too high for the direct user to feel a sense of responsibility toward the grassland.” 95. Hardin (1968). 96. Per capita GDP increased by a factor of 4.3 between 1980 and 1998, according to the State Statistical Bureau (Lai 2002: 435). 97. Lai (2002). 98. In keeping with the loose way the Great Opening of the West (GOW) has played out in general, even the definition of the “west” has varied, depending on the source, or the activity planned. Yan (2001) describes a core group consisting of Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Chongqing, but that for some purposes, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi would qualify as being “western,” and for yet others, the list would be expanded to include Shanxi, Hubei, Henan, and even Jilin (which borders the Pacific Ocean). 99. Yan (2001). 100. For example, Moneyhon (2003). 101. The nine industrial infrastructure projects were (1) completing the section of the NanjingXian railway from Hefei to Xian, (2) construction of a railway between Chongqing and Huaihua (in Hunan), (3) highway construction in various western provinces (mostly in Sichuan), (4) airport construction, (5) construction of an overhead light rail system in Chongqing, (6) completion of the natural gas pipeline from the Chaidam Basin in Qinghai to Xining and Lanzhou, (7) water projects in Sichuan and Ningxia, (8) construction of a potash fertilizer plant in the Chaidam Basin in Qinghai, and (9) construction of infrastructure for higher education in the west. (Interestingly, two of the largest construction projects in the “west,” the Three Gorges Dam and the Golmud-Lhasa railway, are not included on this list, possibly because they had already received funding prior to the initiation of the GOW.) The tenth large project was the western portion of the “grain-to-green” projects (both via planting trees on cultivated slopes and revegetating converted grasslands), as well as tree planting. Some of these projects had been on drawing boards for years. 102. Asiaweek (2000); Crisp and Tang (2000); Tibet Information Network (2000); China Daily (2001); Schlevogt (2001); Economy (2002); Becquelin (2004); Goodman (2004); Yeung and Shen (2004). 103. In a fascinating digression in a book that otherwise lauds the GOW, Yan (2001: 44) admits that kaifa too readily conjures up the translation “exploit” in English, unfortunately (in his view) suggesting that the GOW exists only to put natural resources to mankind’s use. He suggests instead using fazhan (develop), zhenxing (revitalize), or even baohu (protect), as in his view, these terms would more appropriately stress the sustainable nature of the development that he hopes the program will provide. However, billboards throughout China’s west (not to mention the title of Yan’s own book) continue to use kaifa, so evidently his suggestion has not been adopted. 104. For example, Xinhua (2005). The term “ecological construction” in Chinese (shengtai jianshe) appears to be one of those deliberately vague terms, which can be viewed in one of two ways, depending on one’s predilection. Viewed one way it may be “construction of desired human infrastructure” (e.g., homes, buildings, highways) but always with a view toward ecological principles, in the same way as “green marketing” means “selling things, but with due consideration given to the environment.” Read in an alternative (and in my view, more ominous) way, “ecological construction” can mean “human (re)construction of the natural environment,” suggesting that, armed with enough science and funding, mankind can produce a better “ecological situation” in western China than nature ever did. I believe the latter interpretation, with its shades of Maoist

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philosophy, is not intended to predominate, but the vagueness of the term, as well as its frequent association with the west’s “e lie” (“odious” or “disgusting” as well as simply “harsh”) environment, serves to keep the door open to large-scale human engineering of nature. 105. Caple (2002) catalogued recent mining initiatives in China’s west, concluding that they add up to the colonizing of a dominant power over a weaker one. In Xinjiang, Becquelin (2004) notes that transportation infrastructure projects have been prioritized, and that the approach to the one large-scale environmental remediation effort—rehabilitation of the Tarim River—bears a striking resemblance to the earlier centralized initiatives that led to its degradation. 106. Tuigeng huanlin (“retire cropland, restore forests”) is administered by the State Forestry Administration and its provincial counterparts, and tuigeng huancao (“retire cropland, restore grasslands”) is administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and its provincial counterparts (sometimes agriculture, sometimes animal husbandry). See Katsigris et al. (2004); Xu et al. (2004); Ye (2005). 107. State Forestry Administration (2001, 2003). 108. Zhang et al. (2000); Ye et al. (2003). 109. Feng et al. (2005). 110. Shen et al. (2004). 111. Examples include: “Provincial assistance committee takes seriously the legal rights of pastoralists removed from grasslands” (Shengzheng xieweiyuan guanzhu tuimu qunzhong hefa quanyi), Qinghai Daily, November 1, 2004; “Ecological immigration from the three river’s source area has begun” (Sanjiangyuan diqu shengtai yimin kaishi jizhong banqian), www.xinhuanet.com, October 15, 2004; “Tuwa people bid farewell to nomad life,” www. english.peopledaily.com. cn/data/province/xinjiang.html; “Xinjiang’s Balitun county is among the first county in China to experiment with the retire livestock, restore grassland program” (Xinjiang Balitun xian bei leiru guojia shoupi tuimu huancao gongcheng shidian xian), www.gog.com.cn, August 1, 2004; “Retire livestock restore grassland program progressing smoothly in Maqu County” (Maqu xian tuimu huancao gongcheng jianshe xiangmu jinzhan shunli), Gansu Daily, June 4, 2004. See also Ye (2005). For a Western viewpoint that considers the cultural impacts of the program, see Perrement (2006).

3. THE CHINESE PERCEPTION OF WILDLIFE 1. Above and beyond ubiquitous folktales characterizing wolves as evil, common in Chinese as much as in European culture, wolves in China, unlike in North America, have killed people (and not just their livestock) within the living memory of many adults. During the famines of 1959–61 (as well as lesser ones of earlier decades), wolves were widely, and evidently reliably, reported to scavenge on human corpses, and no doubt also occasionally killed weak or young people when they had neither wild prey or livestock to attack. 2. There exists no Chinese term that carries with it the flavor of the word “conservation” as I use it here—benevolent use, or limitation of use patterns by current generations in favor of future ones. The most often seen term is simply baohu, which translates more nearly to “protection,” or even to the considerably more restrictive “preservation.” Occasionally, one also encounters baohu followed by guanli (“management”), which seems to imply that protection and use are not mutually exclusive. 3. Nash (1973). 4. Nash (1973: 9). Nash (1973: 20) also contrasted this attitude with what he believed to be a more positive one on the part of traditional “Eastern” cultures, including China. However, others (see, for example, Guha 1989) have argued that Nash and other similar thinkers have used a selective reading of Eastern religions in their attempts to show that a biocentric view of nature is universal and has precedent. 5. See, for example, State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau (1999); Yan (2000).

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6. A similar example concerns the issue of fire and its natural role in ecosystems. Even in the United States, with its relatively advanced scientific establishment, its vast information dissemination network, and its relative acceptance of novel or changing attitudes, public embracing of fire as a natural, and in some cases necessary, part of nature has been slow. That said, acceptance of more integrated concepts of fire, if slow, have at least not been obstructed in English-speaking countries by any particular word usage: forest fires and grassland fires have always been called just that. But both the Chinese Forestry and Grassland laws, in unsurprisingly advocating complete fire suppression, use value-laden language to further their policy that no fire can possibly be beneficial. Forest and grassland fires are both referred to as huozai, literally a “fire disaster,” putting to use the sinister connotations of a zai to reinforce to the reader that any fire must, by definition, be a calamity. This has implications for wildlife management, because fire, either deliberately set or ignited by lightning but allowed to burn, is often used as a tool to manipulate vegetation to the benefit of many (albeit not all) wildlife species. A recently published Chinese textbook on wildlife management takes note of this, and pointedly uses the more neutral term for fire, huoshao, in listing it as among the tools that can be used to benefit some wildlife species. See Ma, Zou and Jia (2004: 143). 7. I use the ten-category typology of nonexclusive attitudes toward wildlife, developed by S.R. Kellert (1980). These are termed “naturalistic” (interest in wildlife and the outdoors), “ecologistic” (interest in systems and interrelationships), “humanistic” (interest in individual animals, primarily pets), “moralistic” (concern for animal welfare), “scientistic” (interest in biological functioning of animals), “aesthetic” (interest in artistic or symbolic qualities), “utilitarian” (concern for practical, material value of animals), “dominionistic” (interest in mastery and control), “negativistic” (avoidance or dislike of animals), and “neutralistic” (indifference). See Bodde (1991) for a typology of premodern Chinese attitudes toward nature that, although it does not use Kellert’s model, is broadly similar. 8. Shen, Ables, and Xiao (1982). Schafer (1968: 319) also noted that “In early antiquity the Chinese—if we can depend on fragmentary records of their attitudes—were unfriendly toward wild animals. They regarded them as the enemies of civilization—hateful predators that ravaged crops, despoiled barnyards, and attacked human beings.” See also the discussion in Fang (1997). 9. Examples include Sheng et al. (1988, 1990); Yang et al. (1990); Zhou and Meng (1993). 10. Qin and Qin (1985). 11. Ibid. 12. See also Elvin (2004: 310). 13. Qin and Qin (1985). 14. von Moltke and Spaninks (2000). 15. Xu and Jiang (2004). 16. Lee (1998). 17. Huang (1995). Liu (2004) presented a counter-argument, that because bear bile did not appear in medical material prior to the Tang Dynasty, and afflictions it was used for could be treated in alternative ways, it could not actually be considered a necessary part of the TCM formulary. His view, however, appears to be in the minority among TCM practitioners. 18. For the uniqueness of bear gall, see Hagey (1995); for substitutes see Sano (1995). 19. Fan and Song (1997). 20. For the former view, see Fan and Song (1997); Shang (2000); Shen (2000). For the latter view, see Mills and Servheen (1991); Servheen (1995); World Society for the Protection of Animals (2000). 21. In 2000, the Hong Kong–based Animals Asia Foundation (AAF) signed an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), a GONGO (government-operated nongovernmental organization) affiliated with the State Forestry Administration that would phase out small and poorly run bear farms, transferring their remaining bears to larger, more humane captive facilities termed “bear protection centers” run by AAF. Long-term goals called for the cessation of all bear farming, and in personal conversations in 2004, AAF officials told me they truly believed

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that China would be banning medicinal use of bears within about five years. However, interviews with top officials published by Shang (2000) suggest that the long-term goal of prohibiting TCM use of bears—as opposed to making it more humane—while included within the agreement, probably falls within the “aspirational” sphere of Chinese legal thought (see Chapter 5). 22. Kellert (1980). 23. Schafer (1968). 24. See also Santangelo (1998: 618); for example, “The Ming and Qing period also inherited the concept of ‘wilderness,’ the hostile perception of nature that the late-imperial Chinese found frightening and repulsive. . . . In such a case the ‘artificial’ is seen as a positive product of human civilization, which modifies nature from an adversary to a friend of humankind. . . .” In a study of attitudes in Japan, Kellert (1991) found a similar tendency to value wildlife most when it accords with preexisting visions of beauty and harmony. 25. Here I use only material published originally in English to avoid any biases that might arise from my own translations. 26. See Harris (1991). 27. Zhu (1989). 28. Li and Zhao (1989). 29. Ibid. 30. Xin (2004: 187). 31. The word used here was ai’qiemen, which would more directly be translated as “concubines,” but I elected not to use it. 32. Elvin (2004: 31). 33. Schafer (1968). 34. Ibid. 35. Menzies (1994: 58). See also, for example, Mote (1999: 241). 36. Sterckx (2004: 21). 37. Sterckx (2004: 22). 38. For example, Ip (1983). 39. Laidler and Laidler (1996: 185). 40. Nash (1973: 20–21). 41. Smith (1999). 42. Beijing Language Institute (1984). 43. See, for example, Hsieh (1998). 44. Barr (1985); Zeitlin (1993). 45. Smith (1999: 62). 46. Sterckx (2004: 19). 47. Elvin (2004: 14). See also Elvin (1998b): “So far as we have been able to discover, there was no . . . sentiment among educated Chinese in late-imperial times that wilderness was beautiful or significant in itself, or that the human beings who lived there could have a way of life that was as meaningful as . . . that of the civilized world.” Not that, at this historical juncture, Europeans saw things much differently. “Chinese attitudes to the environment during late-imperial times are . . . not dramatically different from mainstream European ones at about the same time.” 48. Elvin (2004: 323). For discrepancies between attitude and behavior in ancient China, see Tuan (1968). Callicott and Ames (1989) attempted, rather unsatisfactorily in my judgment, to rebut Tuan’s principle argument that although a naturalistic philosophy existed in ancient China that revered nature, it was generally not acted upon. Simply noting that at times environmental destruction was more pronounced than at other times (which Callicott and Ames view as a kind of yin and yang) hardly qualifies as proving that, regardless, Chinese always maintained a naturalistic philosophy as paramount. In any event, Callicott and Ames were writing well before such authoritative histories as that written by Elvin were available. See also Weller and Bol (1998). 49. I have adopted this term, perhaps a bit loosely, from Andrew Nathan (1985: 58). My use

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of the term “optimism” relates more to the assumption that individual and collective interests inevitably coincide, rather than, as in Nathan, that decentralization of power would inevitably benefit the collective interest. 50. “Baohu yesheng dongwu jiushi baohu renlei ziji.” 51. “Baohu senlin jiushi baohu renlei ziji,” etched onto a government sign adjacent to a forest guard station, and “Baohu linzi jiushi baohu yeshengdongwu,” repeated by one of the station guards. 52. Cao (2003); “Baohu shengdong . . . jiushi baohu shengchanli.” 53. Fang (1997) discusses the fear and unease most Chinese have with being “backward” (luohou). 54. With apologies for any misreading of Nathan (1985) on my part. 55. Although he may not agree with my argument or use of “Confucian optimism,” Peerenboom (2003: 48–49, 54) encapsulated this concept as follows: “Few Chinese intellectuals would accept the liberal assumption . . . that people reasonably disagree about what constitutes the good for society. From the pre-historic mythical ancestors Yao and Shun to the Confucian sage-ruler . . . to Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and now Jiang Zemin today, Chinese leaders have been credited with an uncanny ability to fathom what is in the best interests of society. . . . [T]he Confucian literati [i.e., bureaucrats] of old who passed the Imperial examinations thought the ruler should entrust day-to-day governance to them. . . . The Confucian emphasis on hierarchical social roles reinforced the idea that lay people were supposed to defer to the superior judgments of government officials who knew best what was in their interest and the interest of society as a whole. The CCP’s victory did nothing to challenge these fundamental beliefs about the nature of governance or the relations between government officials and the people.” 56. Tu Weiming (Tu 2001) has eloquently argued that Confucianism, at least prior to contamination with Western ideals of modernization, envisioned a unity between man and nature that he called “anthropocosmic,” and that an anthropocentric attitude arose only later. Thus, Tu argues that a revitalized Confucianism has important contributions to make to ecological thinking and therefore to solving current ecological problems. I claim no qualification to question Tu’s view, but would assert that, useful as it may be as a starting point, this conception of unity provides no guidance in making decisions about how to revere self, family, state, and nature simultaneously. See also Tu (1998) and other essays in Tucker and Berthrong (1998). Although many philosophers in that volume argue persuasively that Confucianism would encourage a more harmonious relationship between mankind and nature, there is little evidence that the kind of wilderness and wildlife I support conserving is specifically valued by Confucianism. 57. As Laidler and Laidler (1996) naively characterized the entire, undifferentiated Chinese people. 58. For example, Rowell (1990) described Tibet as having had “a culture that lived in harmony with nature” prior to the 1950s. Vigoda (1989), while admitting to much unfortunate romanticizing about traditional Tibet, asserted that mining was prohibited in pre-1950s Tibet (to avoid disturbing earth spirits), and while admitting that Tibetans hunted and ate meat, repeated others’ assertions that traditional Tibet was a “virtual wildlife preserve.” For similar idealistic representations of Tibetans’ traditional view of nature, see Craig (1999), and a multitude of Tibet-oriented Web sites. Much of the strength of such conceptions in the West is owed to the Tibetan exile community, which for understandable political reasons sees it as in its interest to publicize this romantic view and to contrast it with recent environmental degradation, the blame for which exiles prefer to place squarely and solely on the shoulders of Han Chinese. Huber (2001) provides a useful review. 59. Brantingham et al. (2001). 60. Huber (2003). 61. Waddell (1906: 480). See also Shelton (1921); Clark (1954); Stubel (1958); Ekvall (1968); Norbu (1986: 61–63); Goldstein and Beall (1990: 124–127); Huber (1991); Næss et al. (2004). 62. Combe (1926).

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63. Jagchid and Hyer (1979). 64. Ibid., p. 34. 65. Williams (2002). 66. Terenguto (2004). 67. Harris et al. (1996); Tsui (1996); Harris and Pletscher (2002). 68. Reading et al. (1998); Pratt et al. (2004); Wingard and Zahler (2006). 69. See, for example, Simakov (1989); Benson and Svanberg (1998). 70. Li and Zhao (1989). 71. Wang et al. (1989). 72. Zhao (1996). 73. First by Qiu Mingjiang, published in 1996 by Science Press under the title Yuanhuang jishi, and later by Hou Wenhui, published in 1997 under title Shaxiang nianjian by Jilin People’s Publishing House. (Leopold 1996, 1997). 74. Li (2003). It appears that Li was heavily influenced by time spent in the United States and his reading of the environmental ethics literature in English. 75. Fang (1999); Wu and Hildebrandt (2002); Lu (2003); Turner (2004). 76. Lee (1998). 77. See Xu and Jiang (2004). 78. Guo et al. (1996); Harris (2004). For a contrary view, see Watters and Wang (2002: 524). 79. For examples, see Li (1994) and Luosan (1996). A report on China’s ecological problems written under the auspices of the Nature Reserve Bureau of the State Environmental Protection Agency begins thusly: “We all know that the natural environment constitutes the most fundamental material conditions for the survival and development of mankind. If there was no water, no land suitable for production, no green vegetation rising up to act as a natural barrier, no animal kingdom with which we are mutually interdependent, where would mankind find a home?” (State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau 1999: 1). 80. See, for example, Jiang et al. (1997); Ma et al. (2004a). 81. Wang and Xie (1999). 82. Kellert (1980). 83. Kellert and Westervelt (1982). 84. Kellert and Westervelt (1982: 656). 85. Weller and Bol (1998). 86. Kellert (1983). 87. Tuan (1968).

4. ANIMALS: WILD, CAPTIVE, AND DOMESTIC 1. One of the problems of Chinese alligator conservation is that alligators are fond of eating domestic ducks. Some rural families have responded to the challenge, knowing that alligators are legally protected, by feeding the alligators themselves (a well-fed one presumably being that much less likely to help itself to the family’s domestic waterfowl). This, rather than love for the wild reptile, is more likely the motivation for this particular family. J. Thorbjarnarson, Wildlife Conservation Society, personal communication, September 2004. 2. Those interviewed invariably used the Chinese term huanjing (environment) in referring to what animals needed, whereas the standard translation for habitat (in the zoological sense) is qixidi. This may reflect nothing more than an effort to ensure understanding among the lay public viewing the program, because the former word is more common in the colloquial than the latter. However, huanjing is also used in a more general sense, for example in referring to the human environment or to environmental protection (whereas qixidi is strictly for wildlife). It seems plausible, then, that the word choice was deliberate, intended to once again anthropomorphize wildlife by using terminology relevant to human welfare.

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3. Although no doubt a heretical thought, it merits pondering whether Chinese wildlife in general has benefited from the superstar status of the panda. If the objective is for people to empathize with individual wild animals, one could hardly do better. With its sad-looking eyes, its rumbly gait, its oversized head eliciting an irresistible parental concern even for full-grown adults, its child-like grasp of bamboo and predilection for chewing it while seated or lying on its back, and its nonthreatening demeanor, the giant panda is the poster child for transforming wildlife into pets. Who among us could deny a secret desire to have a few minutes in the safety of an enclosure, romping and playing with a couple of six-month-old pandas cubs? But if the objective is to value and respect wildlife as products of eons of evolution, as participants in complex ecological processes that are unique in their particularity even if they are repeated endlessly along similar lines throughout the world, as consumers of vegetation, and as food for the decomposers that slowly convert them back into soil, pandas are a most unfortunate choice. Alas, the mega-charismatic panda speaks loud and clear to that inclination within all of us to stand in a paternal relationship toward wildlife (a temptation that already resonates deeply within the Confucian tradition), but is almost mute in reminding us that wild animals are, in essence, an inseparable thread within the fabric of their native habitats. 4. See, for example, a very similar image on the official Web site of the Flora and Fauna Protection Department of SFA under “Common Efforts” (www.cnwm.org.cn/wildlife/en/introduction2. htm), as well as under “Kind Attention,” in which all animals are accompanied by people (www. cnwm.org.cn/wildlife/en/introduction1.htm). 5. Montana Constitutional Amendment 41 passed in November 2004 by a margin of approximately 81 percent to 19 percent. 6. Montana State Initiative 143, passed in 2000. 7. Clutton-Brock (1999: 32). 8. Diamond (1997). 9. Captive Asiatic black bears, which are a focus of this chapter, respond to stimuli (but are hardly domestic) and display a generally gentle demeanor when well cared for, but are still potentially dangerous; their keepers do not routinely wander among them. There is also the problem of circus tigers and lions; it seems inaccurate to label them “tame.” 10. There is only one species in the genus Rangifer, that named in Latin R. tarandus. In English, we are referring to a wild animal when we call it a caribou and to its domesticated version when we call it a reindeer. In Chinese, there is no distinction; both are xunlu, literally “tame deer.” 11. Wen (1995). 12. The official translation uses the word “save” here, but there are many possible ways to express a generality such as “save” in Chinese. The Chinese zhengjiu, used in the Law, is the same word used to describe captive facilities where “rescued” animals are delivered. 13. This concept predated the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law. China’s patron saint of environmental protection, Qu Geping, stated with regard to wildlife, that “the principle of careful protection, active propagation, and rational utilization has been followed”(Qu and Li 1981, emphasis added). It is also revealing to compare the role played by captive breeding in the 1988 Chinese Wildlife Protection Law with the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973, with which the Chinese law is often (if inappropriately) compared. Although it has justifiably been criticized, the ESA is usually considered the single most powerful legal instrument for the conservation of rare species yet devised. But the ESA contains not a single reference to captive breeding as a conservation tactic. It does use the more general term “propagation” (albeit without specifying that it is done with mankind’s assistance) in clarifying what is meant by “conservation” as follows (Title 16, Chapter 35, §1532): “Such methods and procedures include, but are not limited to, all activities associated with scientific resources management such as research, census, law enforcement, habitat acquisition and maintenance, propagation, live trapping, and transplantation, and, in the extraordinary case where population pressures within a given ecosystem cannot

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be otherwise relieved, may include regulated taking.” The only direct mention of animals in captivity within the ESA is in Title 16, Chapter 35, §1538, where individual animals already held in captivity are explicitly exempted from the general series of prohibitions on taking. Thus, rather than elevating the value of captive breeding, the ESA distinguishes animals in the wild from those in captivity, providing greater protection to the former. In contrast to the Chinese law’s placement of captive breeding in its justification, the ESA explains its first purpose is that of providing “means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved. . . .” (Title 16, Chapter 35, §1531, emphasis added). The ESA was itself set upon a foundation of existing federal laws that paved the way for individual states to manage wildlife. Among the most important of these was the Federal Aid to Wildlife Restoration Act (the so-called Pittman-Robertson Act) of 1937, which levied federal taxes on hunting equipment for support of wildlife research and habitat acquisition. Under this act, the term “wildlife” was meant to refer to a broad range of species, not merely game species. However, of note is that wildlife is defined (Title 16, Chapter 5b, §669a, 4) as: “any species of wild, free-ranging fauna . . . and also fauna in captive breeding programs the object of which is to reintroduce individuals of a depleted indigenous species into previously occupied range” (emphasis added). Thus, these funds were explicitly excluded from captive breeding programs that had any purpose other than reintroduction of native species. 14. Examples include Deng and Shi (1989) and Lü et al. (2001). Along similar lines, many Chinese zoos continue to feature exhibits of domestic dogs and cats, years after the ban on raising such pets by individual citizens was lifted. Under some logic, as a place of exhibition of things people might find interesting or pretty, there is no reason for domestic animals to be excluded from zoos. But Westerners expect from zoos an opportunity to see species that otherwise live in wild conditions specifically because they are difficult to see in their natural habitats, so they generally find exhibition of domestic animals (other than in children’s petting zoos) a strange melding of disparate concepts. 15. People’s Daily (1992); China Daily (1992). 16. www.cnwm.org.cn/wildlife/en/projectreport3.htm. 17. These budget numbers come from “Overall National Plan for Protection of Wild Fauna and Flora, 2000–2050” (Quanguo yesheng dongzhiwu ji qixidi de baohu zongti guihua), SFA, August 2000, unpublished document. In terms of large project categories, “production bases” are allocated 30.4 percent of total expenditures, whereas “species protection” (which incorporates funding for nature reserves and no-hunting areas) is allocated 26.4 percent. However, within the latter category, breeding centers are allocated an additional 26.8 percent, thus the total proportional allocation for activities requiring captive animals totals 0.304 + (0.264 x 0.268) = 0.375. 18. It is unclear whether these amounts were actually allocated and spent. 19. A number of these new documents came about in response to criticism of the government’s response to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003. SARS is widely believed to have recent zoological origins, and may have been spread by palm civets which are often kept in close confinement near restaurants where they are considered a delicacy. 20. List of fifty-four Terrestrial Wildlife Species with Matured Breeding Technology for Commercial Use (Shangyexing jingying liyong xunyang fanzhi jishu chengshu de lusheng yesheng dongwu mingdan). Available at www.cnwm.org.cn/. 21. Fischer and Lindenmayer (2000). Using a more rigorous criterion of success, Beck et al. (1994) found that only 16 of 145 reintroductions using captive animals (11 percent) were successful (and at least one of the successes, that of the Arabian oryx in Oman, has since become imperiled), Gorman (1999). For more detailed but narrower analyses similarly concluding that captive-reared animals are less likely to succeed than wild animals translocated from other locations, see Ginsburg (1994) for canids, and Clark et al. (2002) for bears. 22. See Balmford (2000). Two recent carnivore reintroductions in the United States also offer some useful lessons. Both the wolf and the black-footed ferret are considered endangered in the

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United States and receive federal protection. Both species were almost completely extirpated in the western states by the mid-twentieth century. However, the prey base for wolves (large artiodactyls, such as mule and white-tailed deer, elk, and moose) had been well conserved, not only in national parks but also in publicly owned areas used for other resources and private lands. In contrast, areas that served as habitat for prairie dogs (rodents of the genus Cynomys)—prey species upon which black-footed ferrets are wholly dependent—had experienced a dramatic decline, to the point where one species, the black-tailed prairie dog, had itself been deemed worthy of endangered species protection. In the mid-1990s, U.S. federal agencies sponsored reintroductions of both wolves (in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, and in wilderness areas of central Idaho) and ferrets (in the best protected prairie dog habitat patches in Arizona, Montana, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming). Wolf reintroductions were conducted quickly and without much scientific preparation; wolf packs from Canada were captured by helicopter and simply let go (in Idaho) or kept in on-site pens for a few months prior to release (in Yellowstone). In contrast, ferret reintroductions were preceded by years of careful captive breeding, and all reintroduced animals were carefully screened. By 2002, it was clear that these two reintroductions had fared dramatically differently. Although wolves were feared and disliked by many rural residents, their populations had increased remarkably (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2003). In Yellowstone, 31 wolves introduced in 1996–97 had by the year 2002 increased to 217. In Idaho, 35 wolves introduced during the same two years had increased to 263. Including wolves in Montana (some of which originated from residents), the total population in the three states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in 2002 was approximately 663. In contrast, the ferret reintroduction programs experienced continual frustration. Despite exhaustively researched captive breeding programs (Vargas et al. 2000), new populations formed from captive-bred individuals did not sustain themselves. At only one of seven reintroduction sites in the United States had the ferret population increased. At the six other sites, the release of a total of 1,272 captive-reared ferrets (in addition to ferret kits born in the wild to these animals) had resulted in a total wild population of only 137 in the year 2002 (R. Matchett, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Lewistown, Montana, USA, personal communication, 2003). The one successful population had among the largest habitat bases. There are numerous possible reasons for the different outcomes of these two reintroduction programs. In particular, success in ferret reintroduction was complicated by the advent of plague (Yersinia pestis), which had not been native to North America but by the late twentieth century had become a major mortality factor for the prairie dogs on which ferrets depend. Even accounting for the effects of plague, however, a strong correlation was found between survival rates of ferrets and the extent of their habitat (i.e., size of colonies of prairie dogs). Where habitat for ferrets remained in large, relatively contiguous patches, the reintroduced ferret populations succeeded. Where wild habitat patches were small, the best laboratory science was incapable of overcoming those natural limitations. By contrast, wolves increased—despite local fears, occasional poaching, and the removal each year of a number of livestock-killing wolves by federal agents—because their habitat (native ungulates) remained healthy. Wolves released were also wild animals and had spent negligible time in captivity. In contrast, released ferrets (even those subjected to a prerelease “acclimatization” period) were all captive born. 23. Kang (2004). 24. For Przewalski’s horse, focus has been primarily on captive breeding. Although the intention was always to move toward reintroduction in the wild, specific planning and funding were predominately oriented toward expansion of the number of animals housed in the breeding facilities. In Xinjiang, the original eighteen horses had increased to 122 by September 2005. In Gansu, the original ten animals had increased to fifty-one by fall 2004. In 2001, authorities at the Xinjiang captive site, in cooperation with the Kalamaili Nature Reserve, reintroduced a group of twenty-seven into an area that had been prepared for the horses by providing water sources. The introduction in August 2001 succeeded for all of a few months; by mid-winter three horses had died,

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and the entire herd had been rounded up and again enclosed on site, under the care and protection of humans. It was never clear whether the deaths were more than would be expected in any such reintroduction attempt (the animals were not fitted with radios), or whether their keepers, having spent years lavishing attention on these individuals (for animals intended for introduction to the wild, a paternalistic style of care does them no favor) panicked at the thought that reintroduction perforce meant coping with the vicissitudes of the wild, and that some amount of mortality, early on, was likely to be unavoidable. See China Daily (2002a, b). When I visited the facility approximately one month prior to the release, the animals scheduled for release appeared quite tame to my eyes. A second attempt occurred in spring 2002, and an additional ten horses were released in late July 2004, both times without apparent incident; these horses are now free of fences for the first time in their lives, and there has been at least some successful reproduction. As of September 2005, the wild herds numbered thirty-two in four separate groups (three female, one male), and ten foals had been born in the wild. The problem was that these animals were still behaving very much like tame horses and showing little aversion to humans (Hu 2004; Jiang 2004a; Hu et al. 2005; Chu Hongjun, Altai Prefecture Wildlife Bureau, personal communication, September 2004. One subadult female had run off and spent the better part of a year with a group of domestic horses; she was ultimately recaptured and taken back to the captive facility). The future of the Przewalksi’s horses held at the Gansu facility remained in confusion as of 2006. 25. Green et al. (2006). 26. Ibid. 27. Parry-Jones and Wu (2001); Xu and Jiang (2004: 50). 28. Green et al. (2006). 29. That musk deer are relatively difficult to raise in captivity is also attested to by their rarity in zoos. They are not present in any Chinese zoos to my knowledge. In the United States, only the San Diego Zoo possesses musk deer, and the species is present in only one or two other zoos worldwide. Foose (1987); T. Clippinger, San Diego Zoo, personal communication, 2005. 30. Hagey (1995). 31. Fan and Song (1997). 32. A number of presentations on this topic were made during heated symposia on Animal Welfare and on Bear Farming at the nineteenth International Congress of Zoology, held in Beijing, August 23–27, 2004, although most remain unpublished. Titles of talks advocating a change in Chinese policy toward bear farming included “The Case for a Uniform Global Ban on the International Trade in Bear Viscera and Derivatives: A View from the United States,” “Replacing Animals with Herbs in Traditional Oriental Medicine and Working to End Bear Farming in Asia,” and “Withdraw the Use of Animals and TCM Will Be Fit to Challenge the European Union (EU) Directive and to Assure Itself a Healthy Future Beyond the Shore of China.” Publications criticizing Chinese bear farming include Mills and Servheen (1991); Highley and Highley (1994); Maas (2000); and Roberts (2001). 33. For musk deer, see Zhang and Zheng (2000); Xu and Jiang (2004). For bears, see Fan and Song (1997, 2001) and Ma et al. (1998, 2001). For both, see also Green et al. (2006) and www. cnwm.org.cn. 34. Tigers encapsulate almost all of the contradictory views held in China about wildlife. Originally present throughout forested China, tigers are an important part of Chinese culture, and are, as is well known, currently threatened by demand for them in traditional medicine. Tigers manage to be a national symbol, top conservation priority, mythical source of medicine, threat to livelihood, and source of both national pride and national embarrassment all at once. Although increasingly rare in the wild, tigers thrive in captivity, and Chinese policy during the 1980s was to take advantage of this by developing tiger farms specifically for their medicinal consumption. The international outcry over a plan to raise these mega-charismatic endangered species celebrities specifically so they could be killed and consumed was more than Chinese authorities could stand, and on May 29, 1993, the State Council formally issued circular [1993] 39, which banned trade in

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tiger parts entirely. This thwarted the plans of a number of tiger-breeding facilities, including the large Hengdaohezi facility in Heilongjiang, which had the usual mixed-up objectives of providing possible genetic stock for supplementing wild populations while also producing traditional medicinal products. Ever resourceful, officials in Heilongjiang transferred most of these tigers to the newly established Northeast Tiger Park just outside of Harbin, where they became the primary attraction at a drive-in wildlife exhibition park for tourists. Initially supported by a government grant, this tiger-tourism facility (which as of 2004 had about eighty tigers as well as a few “ligers” [tiger–lion hybrids]) is now expected to pay its own way, which has proven difficult (in part because it began its existence under the older danwei model of Chinese enterprises, and thus employs more than 300 people). Managers still have hopes of balancing their books by selling parts of tigers that have died naturally, but this is currently prohibited by Chinese law. Officially, the Park and Breeding Center still had plans to assist with in situ conservation of Siberian tigers, but in reality there seemed little prospect for this occurring (Conrad 2000; Green et al. 2006; Xu Yanchun, personal communication, August 2004). Although a few Siberian tigers still live within the Chinese portion of their range in Heilongjiang and Jilin, where, evidently, habitat remains that could support a larger population (D. Miquelle, Wildlife Conservation Society, personal communication, August 2004), it is the population of tigers that lives—or more probably, lived—in the southeastern provinces of Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Fujian that has captured most Chinese interest. These tigers (of the subspecies Panthera tigris amoyensis) are commonly known as “South China tigers,” and thus are closely tied to Chinese national identity. Although official estimates of the number of tigers in this by-now heavily populated landscape had for years been “less than twenty,” surveys conducted in 2001 and 2002 suggested that tigers in this area had been functionally—if not absolutely—extirpated (Tilson et al. 2004). A number of nature reserves have been established in this area, but Tilson et al. (2004) concluded that all were too small and/or fragmented, and contained too few native prey for a viable tiger population to ever be restored in the region. Undeterred, official Chinese policy has been to continue along a path leading toward reintroduction (J. Lu, National Wildlife Research and Development Center, “The South China Tiger Recovery Program,” unpublished abstract from the nineteenth International Congress of Zoology, Beijing, August 23–27, 2004). Most controversially, SFA endorsed a privately funded venture that involved transferring two captive-born tiger cubs from China to South Africa, where they would be trained in increasingly “wild” settings to kill live prey, and—presumably—ultimately form the nucleus of “re-wilded” tigers upon their return to China in 2008 (“just in time,” as noted by the project’s director Li Quan on her Web site, “for the hosting of Olympic Games by Beijing”). The plan is based on boiler-plate ecological themes in addition to cultural and nationalist themes, such as that “throughout Chinese history, the tiger has incited in us a sense of both awe and admiration. . . . [T]he Chinese tiger is historically our cultural symbol. No other animal inspired more imagination, stories, paintings, poetry than the tiger. . . .” But the plan has earned almost universal scorn from conservationists involved with both tigers and Africa (e.g., the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources] Cat Specialists’ Group, the IUCN Reintroduction Specialists’ Group, and Conservation International). Wildlife officials at SFA have not responded to requests to meet with the IUCN groups about their concerns. Official Chinese policy continues to view captive rearing and “re-wilding” as part of a conservation strategy, whereas the IUCN views it as a commercial enterprise and would rather see Chinese efforts spent where they have a chance to assist viable wild tiger populations. See Howe (2003); China Daily (2004a); Tiger Information Center Web site; letters and press releases from U. Breitenmoser, G. Mills, and others, April 2003; the organization supporting the Africanized tigers is at www.savechinastigers.ngo.cn. 35. Shang (2000). Translated and reprinted in International Bear News 10, no. 1 (February 2001): 18–20. 36. There is some evidence that the bile acids from farmed bears are slightly different from those of wild bears, although whether consumers can tell the difference remains an open ques-

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tion. An additional complication is that not all products that purport to contain bear gall actually do. One survey found that of 168 gallbladders of Asian origin seized by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents purporting to be from bears, 140 came from pigs (25 of the 28 bear gallbladders were concluded to have originated from captive-bred individuals). See Espinoza et al. (1995). 37. Obbard et al. (1987); Sheiff and Baker (1987); Larivière (2003). 38. The nutria or coypu (Myocaster coypu) is a large-sized (approximately 6 kilogram) rodent originally found only in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Uruguay. After millions were trapped in the 1800s, Argentina enacted protective legislation, and captive breeding began in Europe in the 1920s. They were introduced into many southern states in the United States, although the largest population (in Louisiana, which measures them in the millions) originated from escape artists. In the early 1980s, Louisiana alone produced about 1.3 million pelts from feral animals. More recently, with restored wild populations in South America, an estimated 2.5 million pelts were harvested from Argentina annually, with only 2 percent of them coming from captive-bred animals. See Gosling and Kinner (1984); Kinler et al. (1987); D’Adamo et al. (2000); Guichón and Cassini (2000); and Bounds et al. (2003). 39. This point has also been made by Zhou and Meng (1993). 40. Bears in the wild can sustain limited hunting, but offtake must be much more conservative than is typically the case with ungulates such as musk deer. Thus, a sustainable harvest of any species of Chinese bear for commercial products is difficult to envision. My assessment of bears in captivity is made based on observation of one of the larger, better-run facilities (that in Dujiangyan, Sichuan), as well as from data in Green et al. (2006), and assumes that poorly managed bear farms will be closed.

5. CHINESE LEGAL INSTITUTIONS AND WILDLIFE 1. Schwartz (1997); Peerenboom (2002: 28). 2. Cheng and Rosett (1991); quoted in Ma and Ortolano (2000). 3. Most commonly seen is the Chinese ying dang or ying gai. Admittedly, English translations of these Chinese laws often employ “shall” for ying dang, but doing so begs the question of how one would then translate Chinese words that really do carry the meaning of necessity and compulsion and leave no doubt about permissibility, such as bixiu. 4. Nathan (1985: 116). For example, Article 35 of the 1999 constitution declares that Chinese citizens are provided freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and protest; Article 36 provides for freedom of religion. Few dispassionate observers would conclude that any of these freedoms are analogous to those assumed in liberal Western democracies. 5. Clarke (2003) also pointed out that understanding is not advanced by the usual translation of the Chinese word xianfa as “constitution.” Doing so inevitably invites comparison to the U.S. constitution, which functions as the framework for how laws are made and interpreted, and in the first ten amendments, as a list of rights that are guaranteed to citizens. Instead, Clarke suggests that the Chinese xianfa is better seen as analogous to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which sets forth ideas that had currency and value at the time, but were not intended to be enforceable by any court of law. Laudable as the sentiment was (and still is), it is difficult to see how a court could enforce the Declaration’s guarantee of the “right to pursue happiness.” 6. Ho (2000b). 7. Alford and Shen (1998: 417): “The general, aspirational terms in which the PRC’s major environmental statutes are drafted and their disjunction from current Chinese conditions . . . leave disproportionate interpretive discretion to sub-national officials. This discretion, which far exceeds that provided by counterpart statutes in other important East Asian jurisdictions, is not adequately bounded by administrative regulations or judicial decisions. China has a substantial and growing body of regulation concerning environmental matters, but these rules are not yet implemented and enforced systematically enough to create predictable, compelling consequences for economic ac-

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tors or to furnish yardsticks by which the citizenry might assess the performance of environmental officials.” Also in Alford and Shen (1997). 8. For example, Yu (1997) harshly criticized what he saw as excessive pragmatism in Chinese law, resulting in failure to restrain the power of Party officials, and failure of the legal system to gain the trust of the public. A prominent Chinese critic, quoted by Clarke (2003: 108), characterized the Chinese legal system’s tendency to ignore tenets of its own Constitution as “abnormal.” 9. See Peerenboom (2002). 10. It is difficult to quantify the extent to which laws are not enforced; anecdotes are unavoidable. In the spring of 1998, a few herding families in Jianshe Township, Aksai County, Gansu, trespassed onto winter pastures allocated to other pastoral families (as well as their own winter areas), claiming that their own spring pastures lacked sufficient grass for their herds. This movement was not only illegal, it circumvented the very purpose of having allocated spring and winter ranges for individual families in the first place. Fixed boundaries were intended to provide an incentive to limit herd sizes to those that could be supported on specific plots; moving herds into pastures reserved for the next winter, even if solving a current problem, no doubt exacerbated a more long-term one. The vice-governor of the local township (fu xiangzhang), upon discovering this infraction, declined to take any action against the offending pastoralists, favoring temporary harmony over long-term sustainability. For other examples in a wildlife conservation context, see Harris (1996c). Poaching of protected species is usually ignored by government officials when done on a small scale by pastoralists (although it is sometimes prosecuted if conducted on a large scale, or when doing so strengthens claims to be combating corruption). The response of wildlife officials to pastoralists killing a protected predator (seen as a threat to domestic livestock) is generally a frown. It is hardly necessary for such an official to explain the situation, which goes about like this: “Yes, I know this was an illegal act and that we need to limit killing of these wildlife species, but the pastoralist is relatively poor, we need to protect his ability to generate income, we can’t very well prosecute him for helping feed his family, and besides, the law is so draconian and inflexible. . . .” Such an attitude is not all unreasonable, but it cannot be said to be legalistic. It is, rather, another manifestation of he qing, he li, he fa. 11. For example, Pye (1996). 12. Hintzen (1999: 169), in characterizing legislating in China, noted that “very little attention is paid to the kind of cultural and social environment in which the new legislation is introduced. Few lawyers will disagree that law is an eminently social instrument. For it to be accepted and applied, law will need to fit into the values and assumptions of the society for which it has been drafted.” 13. Alford and Shen (1998: 411). 14. Unnamed State Forestry Administration official, quoted in McBeath and McBeath (2006). 15. Xu and Giles (1995). According to retired professor Ma Yiqing of Northwest Forestry University, various edicts issued during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the long gestation of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law, on which work was begun as early as 1974. Prior to the 1988 Law, most provinces had their own “hunting measures”—they were not termed laws or even regulations, but rather went under the title of banfa—which primarily set season limits and regulated means of taking. These provincial-level measures were superseded in March 1989 with the implementation of the national law. 16. For example, Zhu (1989); Zhou and Meng (1993); Xu and Giles (1995); Fan and Song (1996); Ma, Zou and Jia (2004). 17. The full text of the national Wildlife Protection Law, the regulations issued pursuant to it in 1992, all subsequent provincial laws and regulations (up to 1994), as well as miscellaneous circulars issued by national and provincial-level governments are available in State Forestry State Forestry Fauna and Flora Protection Office (1994). 18. It also encourages provinces to develop similar local lists to augment the national list, with similar killing prohibitions.

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19. The official English text translates this section of Article 4 as “rationally developing and utilizing wildlife resources.” “Develop” in the context of a wildlife population suggests, however, an effort to increase the size, geographic range, or genetic integrity of a population, whereas the word used in the law is kaifa, meaning to “open up, exploit, use,” making clear that the intent here is that individual animals be used by people in a similar sense that mineral resources are used. 20. See Ross (1988) for a detailed examination of what he termed the “campaign-exhortation” strategy of implementing environmental protection, which “relies on inculcating a unity of values among the central authorities and the populace at large to carry out policies.” Qu (1982: 61) explicitly recognized that this included educating people “about the significance of conserving China’s wildlife.” 21. The lesser attention implicitly given to aquatic species is consistent with the general theme of the Law—many fewer aquatic species are singled out for protection than terrestrial species—but it is also the case that a National Fisheries Law had gone into effect two years prior to the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law. The Fisheries Law, unlike the Wildlife Protection Law, suggested that regulations dealing with specific fisheries issues would emanate primarily from county-level governments. Although there are national-level agencies charged with managing oceanic affairs and surface water, fisheries do not have a separate agency at either national or provincial levels, but rather are subordinate to their corresponding agricultural bureaus. Wetlands come under the jurisdiction of the relevant forestry agencies. 22. The language here is fairly clear in suggesting that provincial-level lists should not overlap the national lists, but instead focus only on species that may be locally in need of protection. Some provinces appear to have done this, whereas others—evidently hedging their bets that parroting the national list is a safer strategy than actually following the text of Article 9—include all those on the national lists on their own lists as well. In either case, the effect of having provincial-level lists is to expand—in some cases considerably—the taxonomic reach of government management and, nominally at least, prohibition on removing individuals from the wild. 23. For example, China Wildlife Conservation Association (1990), providing glossy photographs and short descriptions of many of the 82 mammal, 110 bird, 17 reptile, 7 amphibian, 15 fish, and 25 invertebrate species. In April 1993, a separate directive from the Ministry of Forestry added non-Chinese species to these lists by the simple expediency of having all non-native species listed on CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) Appendix I become first-class key species, and all those on Appendix II become second-class key species. For native Chinese species, correspondence between categorization on the national key-species list and their listing under CITES is not required or expected. 24. A number of articles and books have been written on the genesis, implementation, and problems of the U.S. ESA. See, for example, Clark (1994). 25. The Chinese word here is zhongdian, which I translate throughout as “key,” although other authors use similar terminology such as “focal species,” “priority species,” or simply “species under special state protection.” They are not explicitly called “endangered,” although that, along with being “valuable” or “precious” (zhengui), is invoked as a rationale for being listed. 26. As pointed out by McBeath and McBeath (2006), revisions of the lists, while provided for under the Law, are rare, and the composition of both lists as of early 2005 was almost identical to the original lists published in November 1988. One indication that designation as a first-class species implies a more dire situation or a need for yet increased concern is provided by an exception to the constancy of the lists: All musk deer species, originally categorized as second-class species, were formally upgraded to first-class status by SFA (with approval from the State Council) on February 21, 2003. The circular provided no rationale for the change (nor did it reveal the process underlying it), but it likely resulted from increasing conventional wisdom (lacking reliable scientific data) that wild musk deer were continuing to decline despite their categorization as a second-class species. See Chapter 7. 27. In fact, even this distinction tends to melt away in practice, because provincial authorities often

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cede their power to permit taking of second-class species back to national authorities, either formally (via directing applicants to the SFA) or indirectly (by obtaining assurance over the phone that there is no objection from Beijing). In late 2005, SFA began requiring provinces to obtain its permission before issuing permits to conduct research on second-class species. 28. Using the weaker yingdang language (should, or ought to), as opposed to language suggesting that such actions are mandatory. 29. In Chinese, the word used is chuli, which also means to “treat, manage, settle, deal with.” 30. In discussing frequently heard American critiques on the way laws are actually implemented in China, Donald Clarke (2003: 110–111) notes that there is concern over the “notion of control over administrative discretion. It is often remarked that China ‘lacks’ such controls. This is because one can observe that the National People’s Congress (for example) promulgates an item of legislation; the legislation states that a permit is required to do such-and-such; and it also says that a particular bureaucracy shall decide . . . whether or not to issue the permit. But the law typically lays down no criteria for the bureaucracy to use in deciding whether or not to issue the permit . . . therefore, we conclude that such controls over discretion are ‘lacking’ because we think of them as something that should be there. . . . China, of course, functions politically in a completely different manner. Why would one expect to find in China a system of administrative law that poses and answers the questions important in American administrative law, when the political basis for those questions is absent? . . . [T]he real locus of central political power in China—the real government, as it were—lies, of course, in the leadership of the Communist Party. . . . If we want to look at rules governing the exercise of discretion, we should look at how superior organs . . . control their inferior organs.” 31. “Guojia guli xunyang fanzhi yesheng dongwu.” 32. The Law contains a total of forty-two Articles, but except for a few minor points (e.g., a vague admonition for local governments to “rescue” animals threatened by undefined natural disasters in Article 13, the prohibition of hunting using military weapons or poison in Article 21), the remainder either reiterate policies or prohibitions already stated elsewhere, or provide additional (if still insufficient) guidance regarding implementation of the main points. 33. A surprisingly candid critique of these provincial laws was provided by Si (2000), who noted that many had missed an opportunity to provide management direction based on regional, rather than national, conditions. Partly, as pointed out by Si himself, this reflected China’s legal structure, in which little room was allowed for provincial laws to be independent of the center; provincial laws were required to support the national Law, their primary roles being merely to flesh out local-level details. 34. No two provinces’ regulations contain identical language, but Qinghai’s is typical: “For wild species that are not strictly protected, the relevant wildlife authorities at the provincial level should work together with the relevant units at the county level that have responsibility over production and commerce to develop a strict and organized plan for the hunting and any commerce resulting from it. Any work units or individuals who are not covered by this plan must not arrogate for themselves any authority to produce, purchase, or trade in wildlife or their products.” State Forestry Administration Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Office (1994: 614). 35. On August 1, 2000, a separate list, with the rather unwieldy name “Terrestrial Wildlife Species of Value Because of Their Economic or Scientific Use Requiring National Protection” (Guojia baohu de youyi de huo you zhongyao jingji, kexue yanjiu jiazhi de lusheng yesheng dongwu minglu) was promulgated by SFA. These were species for which sustainable use was supposedly to be allowed, but for which controls on hunting were still lacking. Any use of these species was to be only on the basis of specific quotas produced on a countywide basis, and only according to specific and approved plans. Inclusion on this list also supposedly provided these species with higher visibility, allowing forestry or environmental protection bureaus to justify establishing additional nature reserves in their names (Chen 2001). However, I was unable to find a copy of this list, and it is unclear that it has had any effect in China’s west.

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36. People’s Republic of China (1996). 37. Prior to formal adoption of the 1996 Firearms Law, the operating code appears to have been the “Measures to Manage Firearms” approved by the State Council on April 25, 1981. These measures did not mention pastoralists directly, as did the 1996 Law, and their wording allowed some ambiguity about whether “nonprofessional” hunters might legally possess firearms. The list of occupations for which firearms were permitted obviously did not include “sheepherder/occasional subsistence hunter,” but the second clause of Article 6 in the 1981 Measures appears to suggest that citizens engaged in otherwise lawful hunting could be armed, as long as they were at least eighteen years of age. 38. Section 3 of Article 6, the 1996 Firearms Law contains a provision specifically allowing pastoralists to apply for permission to carry guns while on grazing lands, and Article 10 specifies procedures for such application. Once again, though, we must keep in mind China’s legal tradition and the power relationships likely operating here. Application for a permit to carry a firearm while in a pastoral region may be made, but the Firearms Law provides no guidance regarding the situations in which it should be granted. It seems highly unlikely that many pastoralists even know about this clause, much less have acted on it. Pastoralists with whom I have spoken generally believed that their guns had been destroyed, rendering an application to get them back moot. 39. This is made explicit in Document 2004 (157), promulgated by SFA, in which sustainable, consumptive use is reiterated as a worthy goal, but hunting by citizens is again made virtually impossible. Instead, the conflict between continued demand and limited supply is to be resolved through “vigorously encouraging captive breeding of wildlife.” www.cnwm.org.cn/wildlife/ particular.asp?id=10963, accessed August 31, 2005. 40. In Yunnan, illegal hunting had by the late 1980s become such a problem that authorities ordered a complete, province-wide ban on hunting for three years, beginning on March 1, 1991. While no statistics are available with which to assess compliance, experience in the mountainous area of western Yunnan suggested that the ban was not merely completely ineffective, it was entirely unknown, both to hill tribe hunters and to the county and township officials entrusted with enforcing it. Everywhere we traveled in hill country, local people with strong hunting traditions continued to hunt and always traveled armed. Government and forestry officials could hardly intervene even if they wished to, as they were usually full participants. Thus, it appeared that the dramatic gesture of the complete hunting ban had effect only in places with no wildlife (i.e., cities), but was a nonstarter in precisely those places it was intended to apply to. 41. Leopold (1933: 4). 42. The Chinese word used here is yingdang, the one implying a degree of option on the part of the provinces, rather than the more coercive bixu. 43. Even this minor change is unlikely to have any practical effect, however, because SFA retained full authority over issuing permits for foreigners to hunt in China, without which any new hunting areas cannot operate. 44. “Symbol laws are generally ineffective, because the manner in which they are formulated ensures that they cannot achieve their aims, in order to satisfy the faction that opposes them. On the other hand, the faction striving for their formulation has won a pyrrhic victory . . . [because the] norms and values included in law have no practical consequences.” Ho (2000b: 243). 45. Named priorities were giant panda, crested ibis, tiger, golden monkeys (presumably all three species), chiru, Yangtze alligator, Asian elephant, gibbons (presumably all species), musk deer (presumably all species), Przewalski gazelle, deer (presumably all species), cranes (presumably all species), gallinaceous birds (presumably all species), and two plant taxa—orchids (all) and cycads (all). 46. For example, Watters and Wang (2002) and Nagle (1997). 47. From the outside, it might appear that the wildlife conservation system in Canada and the United States is fundamentally a series of laws. However, these laws and subsidiary regulations

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would have little power in the vast western portions of North America if they did not find resonance among most citizens. Our systems of laws and regulations simply reflect this agreement, formalizing the details of how we achieve our goals of sustainable wildlife populations by mapping out what sacrifices must be made. For example, each state and province in western North America employs specially trained personnel, called wardens, whose responsibility is to ensure compliance with game laws. However, considering the amount of area they have to cover, the number of wardens hired is very small. These few wardens cannot possibly patrol any but a tiny fraction of the places where poaching might take place. For example, the Canadian province of Alberta employs just over 100 wardens to patrol some 638,200 km2, and in the United States, Montana employs about ninety-four wardens over an area of about 367,805 km2. If fear of apprehension was the only, or even the primary, motivating force underlying compliance with game regulations, western North America would have very little wildlife left. Geist (1995); http://fwp.state.mt.us/insidefwp/department/enforcement/warden/wardens_now.html. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of citizens who wish to engage in hunting do not obey rules because they fear the consequences of being caught violating them. Rather, they obey the rules because they understand that only by collectively limiting individual behavior can they assure the sustainability of wildlife populations, and thus of hunting itself. There exists a social compact, an understanding among the great majority of hunters, that their privilege to hunt is dependent on following the rules. Assuming the continued strength of this understanding, poaching would increase very little even if all the wardens in western North America disappeared overnight. 48. Examples in English include Ye (1990); Xu and Giles (1995); Fan and Song (1996); Xu et al. (1999). Examples in Chinese are too ubiquitous to merit citing.

6. NATURE RESERVES: POOR SUBSTITUTES FOR COMPREHENSIVE NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 1. Becker (1996). 2. In about 2000, entrepreneurs and government agencies based in Golmud began capitalizing on a legend generated by a Taiwanese businessman who claimed that Yeniugou must certainly have been the fairyland of bliss that ancient Daoist mythmakers were envisioning when they spoke of the abode of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West. 3. Alas, I am forced to be a bit cagey here, both because the proposal does not include an explicit vision, opting instead to make specific recommendations for future management (and thus I must extrapolate to what I believe the results of that management would be), and also because the document was provided to me most reluctantly, so I must be careful to allow some ambiguity in revealing that I have seen it. As of late 2005, this proposal had not been approved by provincial forestry officials, and I was given the impression that it was viewed—not unreasonably—as a gambit from Golmud to generate investment and jobs. 4. There is no evidence that range fires have ever occurred in Yeniugou or similar areas. Although a naturally occurring process in many ecosystems, fire is very unlikely to be an important factor in alpine, unproductive, and frigid grasslands and sedge meadows of Yeniugou. Lightning strikes occur occasionally during summer, but this is also the wettest season, and in any case mean temperatures remain cold. More importantly, there are few places in Yeniugou with sufficient biomass to sustain a range fire. If fire were a natural process here, however, stopping it would not necessarily enhance biodiversity conservation. Similarly, there is no evidence that man-caused fires have ever burned much besides herder tents. 5. Captive individuals of most of these species are rare if extant at all in China; thus it seems that any captive populations at this center would have to originate from capture of immature individuals from Yeniugou itself. This is the most common method for initiating captive populations of wildlife in China; see Chapter 4. 6. Presumably most of these tourists would be from Taiwan. The proposal does not make

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this explicit (and erroneously states that most visitors in the 2000–2001 period were from Japan), but as of 2005, most of the roughly 200 tourists arriving yearly were from Taiwan, with smaller numbers originating in Korea, Japan, and the PRC itself. 7. The nature reserve proposal is not explicit about what tree species would grow in this climate, which naturally supports no plant life larger than small shrubs. 8. The proposal’s authors were from Xian and had spent only one day in the field prior to writing this nature reserve proposal, but had seen earlier reports I had provided to government authorities, from which they took their wildlife abundance estimates. They evidently assumed that conditions as of the early 1990s continued unchanged and never realized that later reports I’d written had documented the loss of chiru from Yeniugou. A second great irony in this proposal is that it was written, in part, to take advantage of the increasing concern for grassland health in the headwaters of China’s major rivers, the recent conventional wisdom being that irrational grazing practices had contributed to the increasingly common large floods in the Yangtze River (particularly the deadly flood of summer 1998). Thus, the proposal made frequent mention of the downstream benefits in the Yangtze drainage from better management of Yeniugou. Alas, a quick look at even the simplest provincial map would have clarified to the authors that Yeniugou is not part of the Yangtze River drainage at all, but rather that all its water flows internally, into the Chaidam Basin. 9. Statistics in this section come from Yan (1989); Zhu et al. (1996); MacKinnon et al. (1996); State Forestry Administration Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Office (2003); Xie et al. (2004); the State Environmental Protection Agency’s Nature Reserve Web site, www.sepa.gov.cn/ eic/650772345178292224/index.shtml (updated October 2004); and Jiang (2005). See also Li et al. (2003). (Because of difficulties in determining exactly what qualifies as a nature reserve, particularly at the county level, all these statistics should be viewed as approximate. No two sources give identical numbers or area for any given time period.) In the last of these, conservation biologist Jiang Zhigang (2005) goes so far as to suggest that the area encompassed by China’s nature reserves is already larger than the nation can reasonably afford or cope with. 10. For example, Wang et al. (1989). 11. For example, Zhang et al. (2000) pointed out that when the 9,168 km2 Yarlong Zangpo Nature Reserve in Tibet was established it already included 114 villages, with 2,358 households and a total population of almost 15,000. The 10,800 km2 Xilingol Nature Reserve in Inner Mongolia was established in 1985 and upgraded to national status in 1997. It was later included within the UN’s Man and the Biosphere Program, which seemed appropriate, as it included a population of about 100,000 people and about a million livestock (WWF 1998). Zhumiulangma Reserve was also estimated to contain a human population of over 67,000 in the early 1990s (IUCN 1993: 114). 12. Li and Li (2002); Li et al. (2003); Cai (2003). 13. The Qilian Shan in Gansu; Sanjiangyuan and Kekexili in Qinghai; Arjin Shan, Lop Nor, Kalamaili, and Taxkorgan in Xinjiang; and Zhumiulangma and Qiangtang in Tibet together account for over almost 711,000 km2—about eighty Yellowstone National Parks. 14. The National Nature Reserve regulations of 1994 (State Council announcement 67, October 9, 1994; reprinted in State Environmental Protection Agency Nature Reserve Bureau 2002) hold that “Nature reserves are intended to provide for representative natural ecosystems, natural refuges for precious and endangered fauna and flora, or places for protection of natural relics of special meaning. Regardless of whether terrestrial, aquatic, or marine, definite acreage is to be legally distinct, subject to special protection and management measures.” 15. IUCN (1994). 16. Article 26, Nature Reserve Regulations of 1994. But these “strict prohibitions” (jinzhi) are followed by an important caveat: any of these activities may be allowed if legal under other (unspecified) laws or administrative regulations. 17. Article 18 of the regulations begins by using the vague Chinese word keyi (i.e., it is “OK” to do something) in describing the degree of compunction in designating these three zones within a reserve, but shortly afterward uses the somewhat stronger yingdang (“ought to”) when refer-

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ring to designating a core area. An additional reason that this three-tiered zoning is so common in Chinese nature reserves may be the language in Article 30, which states that if no zones have been demarcated, management as envisioned under the “experimental zone” category is prohibited (and thus there is no way for reserves to generate income). 18. Nature Reserve Regulations, Article 29. 19. Jiang (2005). 20. This is made explicit in Article 7 of the 1995 “Nature Reserve Land Management Regulations” (promulgated as announcement 117 of the State Lands Bureau as well as SEPA), which states that existing uses or authority are not changed by designation of the area as a nature reserve. Peter Ho (2001c) has argued that such legal ambiguity regarding land rights is intentional. See also Schwartz (2004) for a discussion of conflicting mandates given to local authorities on the question of pollution control. 21. State Forestry Administration (2002, 2004). 22. Li and Han (2001); Glacy (2002); State Forestry Administration Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Office (2003); McBeath and McBeath (2006); Xie (2004); Xie et al. (2004). 23. The Kunlun Nature Reserve plan for Yeniugou, reviewed above, also makes frequent reference to the objectives of the Great Western Development Strategy, discussed in Chapters 2 and 10. 24. “[N]ational government annually allocated 30 million RMB to national NRs [nature reserves]. They are mostly expended on infrastructure development. . . . It is relatively easy to get funds for physical construction, but much harder to get funding for maintenance and basic operations. As a result, PA [protected areas] managements are allowed and encouraged to set up their own sources of funding through a number of economic ventures; hotels, ecotourism developments, museums, zoos, sales of specimens, etc. . . . [T]he net result is a systematic tendency to overexploit user value by means of economic ventures,” Xie et al. (2004). 25. Harkness (1998); WWF (1998); Liu et al. (2000b); Jim and Xu (2004); Xie et al. (2004). 26. Liu et al. (1999, 2001, 2004). See also Swanson and Kontoleon (2000). “An official with the SEPA stressed that despite a rapidly increased number of nature reserves being established, laws still cannot be fully observed and enforced. In some areas, local authorities only have had their eyes on immediate, temporary or partial interests, illicitly exploiting resources and carrying out destructive construction within nature reserves. Worse still, about 44.2 percent of nature reserves have no special management setup and one third of them, no professional management personnel at all. In this case, to enhance supervision and management over the nature reserves has become a major task facing concerned administrative departments in China.” State Forestry Administration Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Office (2003). 27. Ouyang et al. (2002). 28. Zhao and Zhao (1991); Thwaites et al. (1998); WWF (1998); Ran et al. (2001); Glacy (2002); Wang et al. (2004). 29. Mackinnon et al. (1996) list the size of the Qilian Shan Nature Reserve as 4,790 km2. 30. Wang and Gao (2002); Zhou and Yang (2006). 31. This is based on my own unpublished report to the World Bank on the potential for biodiversity conservation in Sunan County, a part of the Qilian Reserve, and interviews with Reserve staff in Zhangye, July 2002. 32. See IUCN (1993: 88) and Zhao (2002: 139), who labels the Arjin Shan a “pristine plateau landscape” and a “natural paradise” for hoofed animals. Also see Butler et al. (1986). 33. Achuff and Petocz (1988). 34. Bleisch (2000). 35. Bedunah and Harris (2006). 36. www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/China/2001/0905disc.htm. 37. Fox and Tsering (2005); Joe Fox, Tromsö University, Norway, personal communication (2004); Su Jianping, Northwest Plateau Institute of Biology, Xining, personal communication (2005).

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38. Examples include panda reserves in Sichuan (Sichuan Giant Panda Reserve Administration 2002), a number of reserves in the Qinling Mountains (Shaanxi Nature Reserve Administration 2003), the Dujiangyan area in Sichuan (Dujiangyan Municipal Government 2003), Cao Hai Nature Reserve in Yunnan (Ren et al. 2004), and the Bawangling Nature Reserve in Hainan (Fauna and Flora International 2005). 39. Trefethen (1975); Reiger (2001).

7. SPECIES STORIES 1. Schaller (1998). 2. There are actually a number of species that are all commonly called musk deer. Although there is no dispute that all belong to the single genus Moschus, the number of species recognized varies depending on the source. Groves and Grubb (1987), Wilson and Reeder (1993), and Wang (1998) recognized four species, but some Chinese sources (e.g., Sheng and Xu 1992, Sheng et al. 1998, Zhang 1999) recognize a fifth species. The distribution of Moschus moschiferus (yuan she in Chinese) is in north-central and northeastern China, into Mongolia and Russia, and is essentially disjunct from the other species. M. chrysogaster is sometimes called M. sifanicus (and vice versa), and there is contention over whether this animal (ma she) represents one or two species, but in any case it is the main species in China’s west. M. berezovskii is usually called the “forest musk deer” (lin she), and the center of its distribution is in Sichuan, although it may have geographic overlap with the previous species. Most (but not all) recent authors recognize M. fuscus in Yunnan and adjacent Myanmar, and there is additional contention over whether another species, M. leucogaster, exists, if it is a subspecies, or represents nothing more than unusual pelage of one of the other species. All are similar ecologically, all produce musk, and all face largely the same conservation challenges. Herein, I simply refer to all as “musk deer.” 3. See Green (1989); Yin (1995); Homes (1999); Parry-Jones and Wu (2001). 4. Based on official exchange rates, Chinese musk in the 1980s had a value of from about $2,500/kg to $5,000/kg, although calculations using black market prices in China and estimated weights of musk pods suggested a local value of over $40,000/kg. The latter might be an overestimate, and prices were noted to vary considerably with quality (with individual shipments to Japan going for as high as $70,000/kg), but as of the late 1990s, best estimates were that wholesale prices were about $11,000/kg and regional retail prices about $21,000/kg. Parry-Jones and Wu (2001: 6–7). 5. Ouyang (1986); Sheng (1987). 6. Zhang (1979, 1983); Zheng and Pi (1979); Yan et al. (1979). 7. Some earlier taxonomists classified musk deer as belonging to the same family as “true” deer, and Scott and Janis (1987) proposed that the family Moschidae be included, along with Cervidae, in a superfamily named Cervoidea. 8. Adult males of another species endemic to China, the water deer (Hydropotes inermis) of China’s southeast, have similar-looking fangs, but H. inermis is not closely related to Moschus, and the modified canines probably evolved in each genus separately; see Scott and Janis (1987) and Groves and Grubb (1987). 9. Zheng and Pi (1979); Green (1987b). 10. See Harris and Cai (1993); Schaller (1998: 143). 11. For example, during his intensive field work over two years, Green (1987a) saw his study animal only 151 times, observing musk deer for only about sixty-four hours out of 1,521 hours of field work. In the more open habitat of southern Qinghai, I observed musk deer 217 times during 1989–90 (Harris and Cai 1993). 12. Zheng (2003) provides an estimate for Qinghai Province as of the late 1990s that is less than half of the 1973 provincial estimate, although it is unlikely that either number is reliable. Musk deer are difficult to census, and obtaining reliable estimates requires either considerable field

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efforts or heroic assumptions. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that musk deer have declined in a few specific areas where reasonably good estimates had been developed in earlier years. For example, in Baizha Forest in Nangqian County, Qinghai, local people who had worked with me in studying musk deer in the late 1980s were unanimous in their opinion that, as of 2004, musk deer had become rare. Similarly, in 2002, a team from the CAS Institute of Zoology abandoned an attempt to study musk deer in the Qilian Mountains, where Ouyang (1986) had found moderate densities persisting as late as the mid-1980s. While in the same area, local informants told me that musk deer had formerly been common but could no longer be seen. I heard similar stories from local people in Dulan, Qinghai. See also Yang et al. (2003); although population estimates contained therein are unreliable, data on musk purchased by local TCM companies probably reflect real trends, and these suggested dramatic declines in musk deer populations during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai, Tibet, and Shaanxi. Mallon and Bayar (2002) also reported apparent extirpation of musk deer in an otherwise wildlife-rich area of southern Qinghai. In February 2003, presumably as a response to indications of a continuing decline, SFA elevated all musk deer species from key species category II to category I. 13. Xu and Jiang (2004: 81). 14. Combe (1926: 114) suggests that female as well as male musk deer were taken by traditional Tibetan hunting means: “Muskdeer are always caught [using snares made of yak-hair rope], never shot.” See also Waddell (1906: 483) and Huber (1991). For the notion that Tibetan musk was historically seen by Chinese, Persians, and Arabs as the highest quality musk (as well as for details about the trade in musk over the past two millennia), see Yin (1995). 15. Harris (1991). This story or variants of it has been recounted everywhere I’ve been in China’s west where musk deer habitat exists. Pockets of effective protection have always existed, but circumstantial evidence suggests that areas effectively denied would-be poachers have been relatively small. In 1989–90, we commonly encountered musk deer within 3 to 4 kilometers of a county-level forest protection station in southern Qinghai, and within 2 to 3 kilometers of a locally important Buddhist monastery. However, we found evidence that musk deer poachers had camped about 3 kilometers from the monastery, and very likely passed by it while entering and exiting. 16. Parry-Jones and Wu (2001) estimated a domestic demand of 500–2,000 kg/year, although the accuracy of this estimate is clouded by the likelihood that a large proportion of traditional Chinese medicines purporting to contain musk probably do not. 17. These are prices mentioned to me by local pastoralists in 1989–90; Parry-Jones and Wu (2001: 6) report black market prices of up to ¥2,000 per musk pod. A local forestry official noted to me that prices for raw musk pods had jumped dramatically during the late 1980s, roughly coinciding with the time period in which India gained more effective control over musk deer poaching, and thus likely reducing supply and channeling more demand toward Chinese musk deer populations. 18. There has never been a formal system of game wardens established in China. In forest areas or nature reserves, an informal system of forest guards (hulinyuan) existed, but those who did not poach or assist musk deer poachers themselves were concerned primarily with stopping illegal timber harvest. In 1989, the chief of a provincial wildlife bureau told me that any musk obtained from the wild and entering manufactured products was only that obtained from animals that had died naturally—for example, those falling from cliffs. But even a minimal amount of time spent in musk deer habitat would be sufficient to expose the likelihood of chancing upon naturally killed adult male musk deer as similar to that of being struck by a falling meteorite. 19. Green (1986, 1987a); Shrestha (1989, 1998); B.J. Kattell, Colorado State University, personal communication, 1990. 20. Knowler (2004). 21. Both the potentials and problems associated with such community management of musk deer are usefully informed by the example of community management of vicuña (Vicugna vicugna) in high Andean puna regions of Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia. The vicuña is the wild ancestor of

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the domestic alpaca, and has for centuries been prized for its high-quality wool. Because of its fine fiber, vicuña wool routinely sells at the wholesale level for $500–600/kg, and up to $3,000/kg at the retail level. Given a mean annual production of 0.125–0.25 kg/year, this would suggest a per animal value for the principal vicuña product (wool) of only slightly less than the per animal value of musk. Given the general poverty of campesinos and the difficulty of enforcing hunting bans in the Andes, the history of vicuña populations prior to the 1970s was, unsurprisingly, one of unceasing decimation. From rough estimates of well over a million animals existing at the time of Spanish conquest, it was thought that the entire species consisted of as few as 6,000 individuals in 1965. The response to this decline followed predictable lines: establishment of a nature reserve (the foremost being Pampa Galeras in Peru, in 1966), continued domestic hunting bans, and bans on international trade via CITES. By the mid-1970s, protection within Pampa Galeras had been sufficiently successful that the vicuña population there had increased and was showing evidence of overgrazing. Culling of vicuña occurred during 1978–80, as well as relocation of some vicuña to two newly established reserves in Peru. Protection succeeded largely because of the promise that, once vicuña populations were healthy again, campesinos might be able to reap direct economic benefits: wool from vicuñas could be shorn from live animals, and thus renew itself more quickly than if it was shorn only from animals that were first killed. In 1987 CITES allowed trade of limited quantities of shorn vicuña wool, and in 1994, CITES formally reclassified the entire species from Appendix I to Appendix II, permitting international commerce in vicuña fiber shorn from live individuals. Within Peru, property rights to vicuñas were formally vested with local communities in 1992. Today, the worldwide population of vicuña is estimated at over 200,000, most in wild or semiwild conditions. Most are also subject to occasional roundups and shearing from local, collectively managed vicuña-wool-marketing associations. In general, the reform of the system existing prior to the 1970s, complete legal proscription on use combined with lack of property rights (and thus individual incentive to conserve) to the present system (use rights vested with communities) must be judged a success. Although vicuñas arguably are slightly less “wild” than prior to the shearing programs, the population increase, together with the renewed enthusiasm for their presence on the part of local people, is a record to be envied. However, two important characteristics differentiate the vicuña situation from musk deer. First, vicuñas are a herd-living animal, capable of reaching relatively high density without causing range deterioration, whereas musk deer are solitary. Thus, a large community effort invested in both managing vicuñas and harvesting their wool is compensated by a correspondingly large payoff: roundups are highly labor intensive, requiring the work of entire communities, but result in the shearing of hundreds of vicuñas each time. Thus the scale of both community effort and profit differ from that potentially available from musk deer, where each community might potentially have only a few to perhaps a dozen adult males within its defendable area. Second, live shearing of vicuña wool is technically much more easily accomplished than live extraction of musk. Unsurprisingly for an animal that early on became successfully domesticated, vicuñas have a temperament that allows for safe handling and shearing. In fact, the current shearing system is not new at all, but represents the reincarnation of a tradition begun in Inca times. In contrast, musk deer are excitable and nervous, and each live capture represents a high risk to the individual animal. The vicuña conservation system has also encountered new challenges. Complaints of poaching have resurfaced (profits to campesinos have usually been disappointing, suggesting that safeguards against profiteering by middlemen have been insufficient). Demand for vicuña wool has been less than was initially hoped. Perhaps of most relevance to musk deer conservation in China, costs to individual communities managing vicuñas in Peru have increased sharply as the government department in charge of vicuña management has advocated building long (12 kilometers) and expensive fences to contain local populations and ease their capture. As in western China, many Peruvian campesinos are initially positive toward fence-building—especially because they are generally paid for with government-supplied loans—but then find it difficult to profit from the animals contained

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within as they repay the loans. There are also increasingly worrying signals that vicuñas are not well adapted to living within isolated 10 km2 habitat patches, and the demographic and genetic costs of such insularization (lower conception rates, higher mortality rates, smaller body sizes) are beginning to manifest themselves in economic terms. For this reason, it has recently been suggested that management of free-ranging vicuñas would be not only a better biological strategy, but a more effective economic strategy than the semi-wild conditions increasingly found in Peru. See Ponce del Prado (1984); Bosch and Svendsen (1987); Wheeler and Hoces (1997); Elton (1998); De Roy (2002); Lichtenstein and Vilá (2003); and Meerburg and de Jong (2003). 22. Lomolino and Channell (1995); Channell and Lomolino (2000a, 2000b). Among wellknown species that have survived as remnants only within the periphery of their original range is the giant panda. 23. It also, of course, has the chiru (or Tibetan antelope), but it must share this glory with Tibet and Xinjiang. 24. Allen (1940: 1221) wrote of the Przewalski’s gazelle that its geographic range “is difficult to define on account of the lack of records, but may provisionally be taken as the Ordos Desert of southern Mongolia, westward into Alashan and to the north-central border of Kansu,” and didn’t even mention Qinghai Lake. The Chinese bio-geographer Zhang Rongzu (1999) categorized the Przewalski’s gazelle not as a Tibetan Plateau species but rather as a “Mongolian-Xinjiang area species,” and in addition to its current distribution around Qinghai Lake, depicted its historic distribution as being included within the geographic blocks he termed Bameng-Yiming-Helan Shan, Alashan (both of which primarily overlap Inner Mongolia), as well as Qilian Mountains, LanzhouTianshui, and the Gobi-Hexi Corridor (which generally cover eastern and central Gansu). Nowak and Paradiso (1983) considered it a resident of “subdesert steppes of north-central China.” Maps included by both Schaller (1998: 112) and Jiang et al. (1995: 242) show the historic distribution of Przewalski’s gazelle including the Hexi Corridor (in Gansu) as well as northern Ningxia and western Inner Mongolia. See Wang and Schaller (1996) for a depressing account of the state of wildlife in Inner Mongolia as of the mid-1990s. 25. The word “retreat” is sometimes used in this connection. I have used the word “refuge” here, but in either case, caution against thinking of the species as a “refugee,” which would suggest that animals that formerly lived in habitats now denied them by humans have physically gotten up and moved to safer places, much as people might move their families away from areas of war or famine. Qinghai Lake is a refuge not in the sense that gazelles “moved there” from Gansu or Ningxia, but rather that animals survived there when they couldn’t elsewhere. 26. Examples include Jiang et al. (1996, 2000, 2001); Jiang and Li (2000); Li et al. (1999a, b); Liu and Jiang (2004). 27. To further confuse matters, at least three of these gazelle species are given the same common appellation in Chinese, usually referred to simply as huangyang (yellow sheep) by locals in whatever area each species happens to be. Where there is overlap between Przewalski’s gazelle and Tibetan gazelle, Tibetans refer to both as goa. 28. In general, the horns of Przewalski’s gazelles are thicker and curve inwardly more than do those of Tibetan or goitered gazelles (although goitered gazelles also have an inward curve, and in any case, one needs adult males to use horns as a cue), they are somewhat more robust of body than are goitered gazelles, and have a less pronounced rump patch and appear less fleetof-foot than Tibetan gazelles. But given realistic field conditions and no preexisting information, mistaken identity is an easy error to make. In the past five years, scientists have discovered two new, apparently isolated and small, populations in Tianjun and Gonghe counties, both of which are approximately 50 kilometers (straight-line distances) from Qinghai Lake. In both cases, local pastoralists knew of the existence of these animals, but never had reason to think that these local gazelles were noteworthy, even if they knew they differed from Tibetan gazelles. 29. Weighing from 20 to 30 kilograms and standing about 0.6 meters at the shoulder (Li 1989), these gazelles share with the other three the characteristic of invariably appearing larger-bodied at

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a distance than they actually are. Nothing in their bodily proportion belies their diminutive stature, but if one obtains a chance to get very close, they seem to shrink in size. Przewalski’s gazelles around Qinghai Lake commonly use the abundant grass Acnatherum splendens (itself an indicator of heavy domestic livestock grazing in this particular habitat) for visual cover; they need only enter the tall grass to disappear from sight completely. Przewalski’s gazelles are slightly smaller and more delicate than Mongolian gazelles, and a bit shorter than goitered gazelles, although Tibetan gazelles are generally smaller yet (Nowak and Paradiso 1983; Schaller 1998). 30. Schaller (1998) also describes fine-scale habitat segregation of Tibetan and goitered gazelles in places where their geographic distribution overlaps, with Tibetan gazelles preferring the grassy, and sedge-covered hills while goitered gazelles are found almost invariably in flatter, shrubby terrain. My own observations in the Qilian Mountains are similar. 31. Laidler and Laidler (1996: 45) erroneously assert that the goitered gazelle is “now believed to be extinct in China,” but in fact, it is present not only in Qinghai, but also in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang (as well as in Mongolia and most central Asian countries and extending westward all the way to the Arabian Peninsula). For recent status of the Mongolian gazelle, which has declined recently, particularly in the Chinese portion of its range but, as of the early 1990s, still numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Inner Mongolia, see Wang et al. (1997). 32. Overlap in diets, and therefore potential for one species to eliminate forage needed by another, varies by season and by specific location. A study in southern Mongolia in autumn suggested high dietary overlap between Mongolian gazelles and domestic sheep/goats (Campos-Arceiz et al. 2004), whereas a study in the Kunlun Mountains in summer found little dietary overlap between Tibetan gazelles and domestic sheep/goats (Harris and Miller 1995). One analysis of dietary overlap between Przewalski’s gazelles and domestic livestock suggested considerable potential for competition (Liu and Jiang 2004), whereas another (Li et al. 1999a) suggested little niche overlap. In either case, without knowing more about availability of the resource to the gazelles, interpretation is difficult. 33. Milner-Gulland and Lhagvasuren (1998). 34. Wen (1995: 40). 35. Gao (1985b). 36. Clarke (1994). 37. Jiang et al. (1995, 1996). 38. Jiang (2004: 162). 39. Li et al. (1999c, 1999d). 40. Yoakum (1978: 119); Schemnitz (1994). 41. As of mid 2006, prices for successfully taking an argali in China were $21,500 in Gansu and Qinghai ($19,500/hunter if two or more hunted together), and $26,450 in Xinjiang (except in the Pamir area, where the Marco Polo subspecies cost $29,000). These prices were fixed and had not changed for about ten years. If they seem high, consider that in Mongolia (where prices were more fluid, depending in part on negotiations between in-country and foreign outfitters), it cost from $26,000 to $33,000 to take an argali in the Gobi Desert in the south, and from $45,000 to $50,000 to take the increasingly rare Altai argali, generally considered to be the largest in the world. 42. Feng (1991); Schaller (1998). 43. Harris and Ali (2002). 44. See also Geist (1987). 45. Schaller (1998). 46. Ibid., p. 89. 47. Harris (1993). 48. Bedunah and Harris (2002). 49. Harris and Bedunah (2001); Harris and Pletscher (2002). 50. Harris and Loggers (2004). A shorter, ten-day visit to this area in October 2005 confirmed this general trend.

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51. Harris and Loggers (2004); Harris et al. (2005). 52. Harris and Miller (1995); Harris and Pletscher (2002); Yu et al. (1999). 53. Lee (1988). 54. The other three hunters were Williams’s wife, Modesta, Malcolm T. White of Pueblo, Colorado, and Robert K. Chisholm, of Wichita, Kansas. Also accompanying the party were Lit Ng, a California-based businessman who had long maintained ties to authorities in both Gansu and Qinghai and who had encouraged trophy hunting as a means toward better conservation, and Chris Klineburger of Seattle, Washington, who was among the most active U.S.-based agents for international hunters. In Subei, the Chinese, for their part, wished to make their first-ever foreign hunt a success. They hired ten horses, four individual guides, and a “service team” of forty-three people to tend the hunters’ camp (Zhao 1999). Williams was defeated in the 1990 election by Ann Richards, who was subsequently denied reelection by George W. Bush. 55. Babington (1990); Marshall (1990); Masters (1990). 56. The hunters, probably following the opinions of their Chinese hosts, argued that the argali were Ovis ammon darwini, although they later changed this to claim that they were of the subspecies O. a. dalai-lamae, both listed under Appendix II of CITES. USFWS agents claimed the specimens were of O. a. hodgsoni, listed under Appendix I. As if this confusion were not enough, Bunch et al. (1990), based on a single sample from one of the animals shot, later called these animals yet another subspecies, O. a. jubata, which if even a valid subspecies, generally had been thought to have inhabited lower hills considerably further east of Gansu, and was probably already extinct. 57. Chinese taxonomy considers only argali south of the Yarlung Tzampo River in Tibet as hodgsoni, and all argali further north on the plateau (including all those that are subject to trophy hunting in the Kunlun and Qilian ranges) as O. a. dalai-lamae. The official Chinese decision to restrict O. a. hodgsoni to those animals living in the southern part of Tibet was hardly coincidental. This governmental position was taken at a closed meeting in Xian during the summer of 1991, after the U.S. government had requested input on their proposed regulatory changes on argali, but before the rule of June 23, 1992, had become finalized. EU import regulations were also in a state of flux at this time, later concluded by requiring import permits (i.e., from the EU states) for species included under CITES Appendix I (Grimm 2002). In summer 1991, the only intraspecific regulatory distinction within O. ammon was that of CITES, which classified O. a. hodgsoni in Appendix I, while all other argali were classified in Appendix II. This distinction had earlier been adopted at the behest of India, which desired stricter protection for its small and vulnerable population of argali while recognizing that the species needed less strict protection in countries further north. At the time, few if any thought about the implications for a species with such murky sub-specific taxonomy, but those implications had by now become clear to Chinese officials: obtaining international approval for killing and exporting argali from Qinghai and Gansu would be vastly more complicated if these animals belonged to the subspecies the Indians had succeeded in placing in Appendix I. Much more flexibility could be obtained by simply concluding that animals in Qinghai and Gansu were of a subspecies listed only in Appendix II. Thus, the Ministry of Forestry (later reorganized into the State Forestry Administration) declared that, henceforth, argali in Qinghai and Gansu were to be considered dalai-lamae. 58. Federal Register, Doc 92–14588, 50 CFR Part 17, RIN 1018-AB-42, Vol. 57, No. 121: 28014–23. This rule abandoned the notion of distinguishing the level of protection needed based on uncertain subspecies, and instead classified argali by country. A further lawsuit by groups wanting to further liberalize imports of argali, seeking to overturn these regulations, was denied in August 1993; see Nowak (1993). 59. China Daily (1993a, b). Additional pressure on tiger populations is caused by the demand for pelts, often by Tibetans, who have traditionally displayed their wealth by sporting tiger (or leopard) skins on their robes. 60. Both the common names for Pantholops hodgsoni—chiru and Tibetan antelope—are accepted. I have come to increasingly favor chiru, because although the species is definitely Tibetan,

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it is, in fact, not an antelope, but rather more closely related to goats and sheep. It is also the sole living member of the genus Pantholops, so giving it an unusual sounding name reflects its genetic uniqueness. See Gatesy et al. (1997); Schaller (1998); and Kuznetsova and Kholodova (2002). 61. Wright and Kumar (1997); Ma et al. (2004b); for vicuña, see Meerburg and de Jong (2003). 62. Schaller (1991, 1998); Harris and Miller (1995); Schaller et al. (2006). 63. Although one would hardly recognize how difficult it is to produce scientifically sound estimates of chiru from the popular literature. Following Schaller’s (1998) estimate of 75,000, Feng (1999) estimated a population size of 100,000 to 120,000, Xi and Wang (2004) guessed 150,000. A news item in the People’s Daily (2003) reported that the chiru population within Tibet had increased from 70,000 in 1999 to over 100,000 in 2003. Most Chinese guesses are developed by extrapolating from densities calculated over limited areas, but beyond the problems of inappropriate sampling and use of statistics (Chapter 9), chiru are a species for which density is a most elusive concept. These animals are almost always on the move, often in very large herds, and their density is largely a function of how one decides to define the area within which they live. 64. Harris (1993, 1996b); Fox and Bårdsen (2005). 65. Schaller (1998); Harris et al. (1999); Cai (2003). 66. Information in this section largely comes from Zhao (2003), as well as informal interviews with provincial officials in Qinghai. 67. The last specimen died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo; see Taber and Payne (2003: 69). For bison, see Reiger (2001). 68. Wright and Kumar (1997); Zhen (1999). 69. Representatives from the three provinces and various nature reserves met with central government officials in the city of Korla, Xinjiang, in August 2002 to agree upon a protocol for cooperation in anti-poaching efforts (unpublished minutes, in Chinese). See also China Daily (2004b). 70. Fang (1999); Wu and Hildebrandt (2002); www.snowland-great-rivers.org. 71. Petitioned to do so in October 1999, the USFWS initiated formal review of the species’ status in April 2000, made a “twelve-month” finding that endangered status was appropriate on October 5, 2003, and finally added chiru to the list on April 28, 2006. U.S. Federal Register 50 CFR Part 17, RIN 1018-AF49. 72. Xin (2004); Xi and Wang (2004). A popular book dealing with all of Qinghai’s wildlife (Xie 2003) featured a chiru photograph on its cover. 73. China Daily (2005). The other five mascot candidates were the tiger, the “golden monkey” (China is home to three species; presumably this was a generic golden monkey with characteristics of all), giant panda, black-necked crane, and an artificial amalgam cartoon primate that was intended to conjure up the mythical Monkey King from the classic novel Journey to the West. Proponents of each spared no effort to explain why their favored animal best exemplified the Olympic spirit, or China’s first-ever hosting of such a large international event. Most people I spoke with, however, were under no illusion that the mascot competition was about anything other than economic development. Each animal was associated with a region of the country: the chiru was promoted vigorously by Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Tibet, while Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu supported the giant panda, Yunnan the golden monkey or black-necked crane, and southeastern provinces (plus Heilongjiang and Jilin) the tiger or the cartoon monkey. Each region harbored hopes that, by winning the mascot competition, their status would be elevated on the maps of tourists, and perhaps even more importantly, global corporations seeking investment opportunities. In the end, the Olympic committee, in a bureaucratic compromise worthy of Solomon, selected none of the six species, opting instead for cartoon images of “Five Friendlies,” which were given names that, when put in a particular order, sounded similar to “Beijing welcomes you” in Chinese. One of these childlike images, Yingying, was declared to be a chiru (or at least an “antelope”—it’s difficult to be sure because the photo featured on the official Beijing Olympic Web site was of a goral, Naemorhedus

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goral), based presumably on his diminutive goat-like horns. It seems unlikely that this decision pleased officials in Qinghai and Tibet, or justified their substantial investments in the mascot competition. See http://en.beijing2008.com/80/05/article211990580.shtml. 74. Su Jianping, Northwest Plateau Institute of Biology, Xining, Qinghai, personal communication, June 2005. 75. Schaller et al. (2003, 2005); Fox and Bårdsen (2005); Su Jianping (ibid.). 76. Information on possible fragmentation caused by the transportation corridor from Su Jianping (see note 74). There are also indications that chiru are sensitive to human disturbance, and are less likely to inhabit areas with pastoralists; see Fox and Bårdsen (2005). 77. Schaller (1998, 2000). 78. Until recently, most Chinese sources called this species Myospalax baileyi (see, for example, Li 1989; Wang et al. 2000a), but accepted Latin nomenclature is now Eospalax fontanierii (Wilson and Reeder 2005). 79. Perhaps in part because of their common Chinese name, shutu, literally “mouse-rabbit,” many Chinese mistakenly believe that pikas are rodents. It would be overly verbose to refer to “rodent and lagomorph control,” particularly given that larger hares are rarely considered pests; thus, it is not surprising that “rodent control” in Chinese mostly refers to nonrodent pikas. In attempting to educate the general populace a bit, Andrew Smith (one of the foremost experts on pikas) and I published a short article on plateau pikas in the increasingly popular Chinese National Geography in 2004 (Smith and Harris 2004). But having clarified that pikas are lagomorphs, I won’t belabor the point, and hereafter translate the Chinese directly, acknowledging that “rodents” in this context usually includes pikas. 80. Smith et al. (1990); Hoffmann and Smith (2005). 81. The Ili pika (O. iliensis of western Xinjiang) may be the rarest; Li (2004). 82. It is ironic, if probably unintended, that the specific name honors George Nathaniel Curzon, who served as governor-general of India at the turn of the twentieth century. It was Curzon’s initiative to blunt Russia’s influence in Tibet and increase British trade and influence that ultimately led to the Younghusband expedition of 1903, during which British soldiers killed a number of Tibetans, leading, indirectly, to Chinese suspicion of foreigners—particular British—in Tibet for decades thereafter. See Richardson (1984). 83. Fan et al. (1999). 84. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the degree of rangeland degradation in western China. Government statistics claim that grassland degradation has increased in the past three decades, so if poisoning pikas was intended to improve rangeland health, it (by itself) evidently didn’t work. 85. Krebs (1999), based on work by Lebreton and Clobert (1991), provides a compelling argument that, on mathematical grounds alone, it cannot be expected that a mortality-focused strategy would be effective in reducing the population growth rate of most rodent species because with their short-generation times, their growth rates are far more sensitive to fecundity rates. See also Leirs et al. (1999) for a criticism of a single-minded focus on increasing mortality rates as an approach to regulating rodent numbers, and Shi et al. (2002) for a data-based model suggesting that Brandt’s vole (Lasiopodomys brandti), considered a pest in Inner Mongolia, could more effectively be controlled by limiting fertility than by poisoning. 86. However, secondary poisoning, that is, the death of other, nontarget species as a result of eating poisoned pikas, is still a significant issue. Very few studies have been done to assess this, but it is commonly acknowledged that small predators, including weasels, badgers, and small wild cats (of which western China is home to three species, Felis bieti, F. silvestris, and Otocolobus manul) are often killed by eating the carcasses of poisoned pikas. For example, in June 2005, I visited a “wildlife rescue center” in Xining, Qinghai—which in fact functioned as little more than a parking lot for abandoned pets of city dwellers and the odd sick or injured wild species picked up by pastoralists or farmers prior to their becoming embalmed specimens in the dank and dusty dioramas of the center’s basement where local students were given an introduction to the province’s

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wildlife—and was told that the center’s resident mountain cat (F. bieti) had been found near death as a result of eating poisoned pikas. 87. I saw evidence suggestive of exactly this dynamic in the grasslands west of Qinghai Lake in 2005. Pikas had evidently been poisoned—pika burrows were evident but no pikas were observed, and given the ease with which pikas can be observed when they are present, this suggests to me they had recently been poisoned—but I noted substantial areas with high densities of zokor mounds, which I had not observed during previous observations in the area from 1991 to 2004. This dynamic remains hypothetical, and should be investigated more rigorously. 88. A similar argument has been put forward by Holzner and Kriechbaum (2001). 89. Smith and Foggin (1999) have argued that plateau pikas deserve recognition as a keystone species. For the concept applied to prairie dogs, see Kotliar et al. (1999) and Kotliar (2000). The keystone concept remains contested, but see Kotliar et al. (2005) for an overview of prairie dogs’ role in facilitating the presence of other species. 90. Chien and Smith (2003). Important ecological services provided by pikas may also exist on a smaller scale. Small insects that serve as pollinators may use pika burrows for protection during severe weather that typifies many of western China’s mountain ranges even during summer. Thus, a paucity of pikas might indirectly lower the reproductive success of some species of flowering plant (G. Schaller, Wildlife Conservation Society, personal communication, August 2005). 91. A creative attempt has been made in some areas to encourage raptors to remain in areas of high pika density, by building artificial perches (from either wood or cement posts). Most raptors are fast while flying but are at a disadvantage initially if they must get airborne from ground level, so they preferentially rest on the structures from which they can achieve some lift. This is why raptors are so often seen using telephone poles (which, incidentally, are increasingly uncommon in western China, as the new fiber-optic system has largely been buried underground). I know of no studies to evaluate the efficacy of raptor platforms in controlling or reducing pika populations, but at least the idea has merit in encouraging native predators. My personal observations suggest that these platforms are generally not maintained by pastoralists or government agencies, and poorly constructed or damaged platforms are often not sufficiently straight or rigid to induce perching by raptors. 92. For example, Shi (1983) concluded that pikas reached high densities only where vegetation had already been reduced; where vegetation was dense, pika densities remained low or moderate. Zhang et al. (1998) suggested that application of rodenticides aimed at pikas alone resulted in only temporary reduction of pikas, which returned to pretreatment levels in five years; it also resulted in increases in zokors. More effective control was obtained with a combination of rodenticides and livestock exclusion. Interestingly, Bian et al. (1999) found that fencing per se, independently of livestock density, had a depressing effect on pika densities, probably because it facilitated perching by raptors that preyed on pikas. Similarly for zokors, Wang et al. (1993) found that although vegetation was lost entirely on mounds resulting from zokor digging, nutrient levels, plant diversity, and above-ground biomass were all higher in the area immediately surrounding the mounds than on control areas, suggesting a long-term ecological function for such disturbance. Bagchi et al. (2006) found similar dynamics in Ladakh. For reviews, see Schaller (1998), Smith and Foggin (1999), Fan et al. (1999), and Zhang et al. (2003b). Experimental work has been also been done on Lasiopodomys brandtii in Inner Mongolia with similar results; see Zhong, Wang, and Wan (1999). 93. Jiang and Xia (1987); Hou and Shi (2002). 94. See, for example, Schaller and Gu (1994); Harris et al. (1996); Harris et al. (1999). It also appears that intrinsic soil conditions are important for allowing the development of high pika densities. Soils that are too rocky or too wet appear inhospitable to construction of burrows, and thus limit pika densities even in the presence of sufficient vegetation. 95. Fan and Zhang (1995). These authors, despite lifting from pikas and zokors the entire burden of range degradation, are not willing to absolve them of blame entirely. In particular, they believe

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that pikas are still implicated in the creation and/or spread of “black beach” (tuban in Chinese, literally “bald spots”). See Gu (2000a) for the view that “black beach” is more likely associated with excessive grazing pressure. 96. For a balanced review of prairie dog/livestock interactions, see Detling (2006). 97. Li (1989: 717). 98. Hou and Shi (2002: 228). 99. Hou and Shi (2002: 233). 100. “The idea that small mammals cause rangeland degradation across the plateau has lost favour among scientists though is still a common perception among land owners and managers. However, we believe that the current poisoning campaign will have disastrous consequences for many avian and mammalian predators . . .” Zhang et al. (2003b: 291). 101. For example, in assessing the EU-supported Qinghai Livestock Development Project of the early and mid-1990s, Goldstein (1996) commended continued research on rodent control. A recent State Council Circular (2002), while promoting biological control of rodents, supported continued use of poisons. According to my own interviews with county Agriculture and Livestock Bureau leaders in Sunan County, Gansu, poisoning and other measures to reduce rodents were being enthusiastically implemented as of 2001, and may have included funds supplied by the World Bank pastoral development project (with or without its knowledge). Some 30,000 ha of grassland in Sunan County had recently been “treated” for pika or zokor control. One recent book promoting development in the region where Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai abut even goes so far as to blame pikas for a reduction in biodiversity (Shi and Wang 2004: 196). A new investment of 7.5 billion yuan from the central government, largely targeted at pika control in Qinghai, was announced in March 2006 (China Daily 2006a) and as of early 2007, widespread government-mandated pika poisoning was once again common. 102. In my personal experience, this includes ethnic Tibetan pastoralists. They might be Buddhists and dislike killing, but in their disdain for creatures that appear to compete with their livestock for food, many take attitudes not unlike ranchers in the North American west. 103. A draft management plan for Qinghai’s giant Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve, while largely concerned with reducing livestock pressure, calls for “rodent control” over 22,800 km2, which, if only about 16 percent of the Nature Reserve’s total, still represents an area larger than Israel. The draft (but never adopted) proposal for a new nature reserve in the Kunlun Mountains (discussed in Chapter 6) also concluded that degradation of grassland by rodents was severe and that artificial methods were needed to reduce rodent levels “to the lowest level possible within five years,” despite the authors never having visited the area. 104. Diamond (1997). The Przewalski’s horse may not be the true ancestor to the domestic horse, but is classified as belonging to the same species as the currently supported favorite for that honor, the tarpan. One could also add to this list the two Chinese species beyond the geographic scope of this book, the wild boar Sus scrofa (ancestor of the common pig, but so common in many countries beyond China that it is not worth considering here) and one of the domestic cattle breed ancestors, the gaur (Bos frontalis [ = gaurus]), which evidently persists in small numbers in the southernmost portion of Yunnan (Wang 1998). The wild progenitor of one of Diamond’s fourteen large mammals, the wild water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), has now been extirpated within China, although small populations persist in other Southeast Asian countries. 105. Epstein (1969); Clutton-Brock (1999); Wiener et al. (2003). 106. Olsen (1990); Schaller (1998). 107. Sexual dimorphism is also much greater in wild yaks than in their domestic descendents; females wild yaks weigh, on average, only about one-third of males, whereas the difference in domestic yaks is usually 25 to 50 percent. See Epstein (1969) and Miller et al. (1997). 108. Miller et al. (1994); Schaller and Liu (1996); Cai (1997); Schaller (1998); Harris et al. (1999, 2002). 109. My counts suggested that between 1,200 and 1,300 wild yaks inhabited approximately 1,100

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km2 of the upper reaches and tributaries of Yeniugou during the early 1990s. In 2002, I counted almost 1,700 wild yaks, but it is unclear how much of that difference reflected a true increase and how much might have been due to movement into the survey area from other places. Wild yaks are still reasonably abundant in the vast reaches of the Qiangtang and Kekexili Nature Reserves, but reports suggest no single area of concentration comparable to Yeniugou. The remote Aru Basin studied by Schaller and Gu (1994) had an estimated 1,000 yaks, but within an area about twice as large (and Fox et al. 2004 reported a substantial decline to only about 200 observed by 2002). Liu and Yin (1993) extrapolated a total population of about 8,000 for the entire 1,230,000 km2 of Tibet in 1989. 110. See Guo and Chen (1997) and other references in Miller et al. (1997). 111. Lu et al. (1993) and Miller (1997) estimated that yaks were domesticated about 4,000 years ago. 112. Some popular misconceptions may date all the way back to Przewalski. He killed thirtytwo wild yaks in the early 1870s, and at times presents them as dangerous because they are so difficult to kill (at least with the weaponry Przewalski had at his disposal). However, reading his report clarifies that most all wild yaks fled from him, and the only advances occurred when yaks were already mortally wounded. See Prejevalsky (1968: 187–201). 113. The number of yaks present historically is, of course, unknown, but reliable reports of early explorers suggest that their geographic range is today only a fraction of what it once was; thus, a large reduction in overall population seems a reasonable interpretation. Recent population estimates have included 14,000 (Cai 1997); 15,000 (Miller et al. 1994, Schaller and Liu 1996); 20,000–40,000 (Lu et al. 1993); and 60,000–70,000 (Wang 1998). I suspect the lower estimates are closer to the truth than the higher ones. There is no evidence that wild yaks remain in any other country (Miller et al. 1997). 114. For example, Waddell (1906: 484) suggests that by early 1900s, yaks were already somewhat rare around Lhasa and, in marked contrast to Tibetan wild ass, could only reliably be found in the distant Qiangtang. For descriptions of Tibetans hunting wild yaks, see Combe (1926: 108), and Norbu (1986: 61). For the tradition in general, see Huber (1991). 115. Gansu Province Wildlife Protection Office (n.d.). 116. Single calves are born, at most, in alternate years (and perhaps less frequently). The earliest date of reproduction under wild conditions is unknown, but based on other wild cattle, is unlikely to be younger than four years of age. Hayssen et al. (1993). 117. Pastoralists have long known that wild genes could be bred back into domestic yaks, and it is probably occasionally beneficial. Chinese scientists, ever optimistic that rationality can speed up progress over mere tradition, have also been busy experimenting with breeding wild yaks into domestic lines (Lu et al. 1993; Han and Lu 1997). Any impediments to hybridization in the wild would therefore be behavioral, not physiological. Documenting hybrids in the field is difficult, as many domestic yaks are pure black and their offspring may therefore not display coloration that would reveal hybrid parentage. I observed a female domestic yak traveling with a mixed-sex group of wild yaks in Aksai, Gansu, in August 1997, but was unable to determine if she survived or later bred. Wild yaks in Yeniugou gave every indication of being pure, but during 1996–97 one Mongol herder broke with local tradition by grazing his group of twenty-five domestic yaks there year-round. In September 1997, while camped nearby, I noticed a solitary male wild yak trailing his group of domestic yaks, whereupon the herder immediately rode off to the group, bringing them closer in and scaring off the wild bull. He told me later that he had no desire for wild blood in his domestic yak herd, which presumably would have been the result had he not been able to keep any bred female under his control. However, in 2002, I noticed for the first time a single wild yak with a small but noticeable white patch on its face, suggesting a history of hybridization. In October 2005, a somewhat larger group of forty or so domestic yaks had again been herded into Yeniugou (by a different pastoralist), once again raising the specter of future hybridization. 118. Elvin (2004).

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119. That any environment could simultaneously provide habitat for the cold-fearing, water-loving Asian elephant and the cold-hardy, desert-adapted camel seems biologically bizarre. While it is true that fossils of camels have indeed been unearthed at Zhoukoudian (the site 42 km southwest of Beijing made famous by the discovery of Peking man), these Pleistocene camels probably were gone well before the warm period characterizing the Shang and Zhou dynasties in which elephants roamed nearby, and they may not have been the modern species Camelus bactrianus ferus, but rather a now-extinct ancestral species (Olsen 1988). 120. Wen (1990), reprinted in Wen (1995). 121. Tulgat and Schaller (1992); Hare (1997); Schaller (1998); Wang (1998); Reading et al. (1999, 2002); Liu Naifa, Lanzhou University, unpublished data. Recently, undocumented reports suggest that the first of these populations, that in the Taklamakan, has been severely reduced or even extirpated due to activities associated with oil development. 122. As of 1995, there were approximately 350,000 domestic camels in China, with the largest number in Xinjiang, followed by Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Qinghai. However, this number had decreased by some 50 percent in the preceding decade, and there is little indication that the trend has reversed, so there are likely fewer domestic camels now. http://usda.mannlib.cornell. edu/data-sets/international/90014, accessed August 3, 2005. 123. The primary natural predator is the wolf, although snow leopard kills are also known (Tulgat and Schaller 1992). 124. Reading et al. (2004) reported that the year-round home range of a satellite-collared female wild camel in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert was an astounding 17,232 km2 using what is called the “minimum convex polygon” method of delineation. This method often produces an upward bias, but even using a more unbiased method (known as a “ninety-five percent kernel” method), her range covered some 8,696 km2. In any case, she was known to have traveled no less than 4,500 km2 during the year. The home range for a collared male during only four winter months was 6,298 km2, although this was probably biased downward by the low number of locations the satellite transmitter produced. Although the sample is limited, these data tend to corroborate the conventional wisdom that wild camels travel widely. 125. Personal communication, Mamil, director, Aksai County Forestry Bureau, May 2005; Yuan Guoying, Xinjiang Environmental Protection Bureau, quoted in www.chinese-embassy.org. uk/eng/xw/t142605.htm, accessed August 2, 2005. 126. The annual budget of Annanba as of 1998 was less than 100 dollars yearly, although it was set to rise after it was upgraded to national-level status. However, the township of Annanba continued to promote and defend local pastoralists’ raising of domestic camels within the reserve. 127. Lop Nor lies approximately 200 km southeast of the site of China’s recently discontinued nuclear weapons testing program. The lake itself has essentially dried up, the water level receding dramatically in recent decades due largely to irrigation diversions of the Tarim River upstream (Liu 2002, Ma 2004: 96). About forty-eight detonations occurred at the test site, which was established in 1964 (the last atmospheric test was conducted in 1980). China formally ceased testing after its July 29, 1996, underground test, announcing that it was joining the worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing. See T.C. Wallace and M.A. Tinker (1996), “The Last Nuclear Weapons Test? A Brief Review of the Chinese Nuclear Weapons Program,” www.iris.edu.new/irisnewsletter/ fallnews/chinese.html, accessed August 3, 2005; W.R. Johnston (2005), “Database of Nuclear Tests, China-PRC: Introduction,” www.johnstonarchive.net/nuclear/tests/PRC-ntests0.html. 128. Seymour et al. (2003); J. Hare, Wild Camel Protection Fund, personal communication, July 2005; see also S.L.P. Coulter (undated), “What’s So Tough about Pipelining across China?,” www.aset.ab.ca/pdffiles/article4-china.pdf. Note, however, that the camel photo included is of domestic, not wild camels. 129. Li et al. (1996). For a popular yet thoroughly researched and accurate overview, see Quammen (2003). 130. Until relatively recently, tigers lived in Xinjiang, at least in Tarim River valley and surround-

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ing areas (Hedin 1991). They would probably have been the Caspian tiger Panthera tigris virgata, which extended westward into Central Asia and toward the Caspian Sea by way of Afghanistan and Iran. Although largely gone in the early twentieth century, a few observations were made as late as the 1960s; the last confirmed specimen was killed in 1976 (Jackson 1985; Prynn 2003). There are some tigers still living in remote valleys of southeastern Tibet (Qiu and Bleisch 1996). 131. Paquet and Carbyn (2003). 132. Harris (2006). 133. See Coggins (2003) for positive as well as negative attitudes toward tigers. 134. Wang (1998); Zhang (1999); Wang (2003). 135. In their book on Tibetan mammals, which is otherwise full of measurements from museum specimens, Feng et al. (1986) list none at all for the dhole, and include only a single anecdotal report of a pack preying on livestock from 1973. The more recent summary of late-1990s wildlife surveys in Qinghai (Zheng 2003) does not even mention the species. Schaller (1998) similarly has little to say about them. 136. I was skeptical when first hearing about the presence of dholes (in Chinese, chai, or chai lang) in the area, because local people in North America often use terms such as “brush wolves” loosely when unable to distinguish wolves from coyotes. However, I observed a dhole at close range in 1997, heard dhole vocalizations in 2000, and observed the pack of seven referred to here with a 40x spotting scope over a period of about nine hours on September 24, 2003 (Harris 2006). 137. In Yeniugou, we documented an apparent increase of white-lipped deer during the 1990s, and both local guides and Chinese Academy of Sciences personnel confirmed that they were very rarely seen prior to 1990 (Harris and Loggers 2004). They have evidently maintained their presence in southern Qinghai’s Nangqian County as well. Despite rumors of large-scale poaching, local forest officials told me in June 2004 that they had increased and were seen routinely. Although my time there in 2004 was not nearly long enough to confirm this, I did see white-lipped deer from the forest guard station, as well as from the Yushu-Nangqian highway. Although known from Subei County on the northern portion of the Danghenan Shan in Gansu, white-lipped deer had rarely been seen on the range’s southern slopes in Aksai County prior to 2002, but have recently been reported from Aksai. 138. Schaller and Gu (1994) reported that domestic sheep in the Qiangtang ate mainly Stipa and Leontopodium whereas Tibetan gazelles ate almost entirely Oxytropis and Potentilla. We found very similar patterns in summer 1991–92 in Yeniugou, where overlap of broad forage categories between Tibetan gazelles and domestic sheep herds was estimated at 0.02–0.03 (for female and male gazelles respectively), where 0.0 is completely different diets and 1.0 is identical diets; Harris and Miller (1995). However, see Campos-Arceiz et al. (2004) for concerns that in Mongolia, domestic sheep may consume relatively more dicots, and the potential for forage competition with Mongolian gazelles (Procapra gutturosa) is somewhat higher. 139. Both Mongolian and goitered gazelles are known to form larger groups. Schaller (1998); Milner-Gulland and Lhagvasuren (1998). 140. In addition to my own qualitative data, see Fox and Bårdsen (2005) for quantitative data suggesting that Tibetan gazelle are not appreciably displaced by pastoralists. 141. Klingel (1977); Shah (2002). 142. E. hemionus, in turn, is considered to have five subspecies, which variously are called khulan or onager, the local names not necessarily coinciding with the subspecific designations (Reading et al. 2001). See Ryder and Chemnick (1990) and Groves (2002). 143. Gao and Gu (1989); Schaller (1998). Recent Chinese statistics suggest that wild ass are considerably more abundant. For example, Qinghai currently estimates a population of almost 81,000, Tibet estimates 70,000 within the Qiangtang Nature Reserve only, a recent survey in western Gansu estimated over 1,200, and an older estimate for the Arjin Reserve that is still sometimes cited suggests some 30,000 there (Butler et al. 1986; Liu 2001; Xinhua News Agency 2003; Zheng 2003). However, it is almost certain that these are overestimates.

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144. Gansu Province Wildlife Protection Office (n.d.). 145. Schaller (2002) documented an apparent numeric increase in the Aru Basin of the Qiangtang Reserve in Tibet. 146. According to Combe (1926: 114), Tibetans hunted wild ass with “guns in summer and with snares in winter.” The snares are made out of yak-hair rope. Ekvall (1968: 53) reported that Tibetan pastoralists in Gansu “disdain [wild ass] as food,” although they would occasionally hunt them for hides. In their discussion of recent Tibetan hunting practices, Goldstein and Beall (1990) mention hunting of other species, but not of wild ass (despite their being “abundant” in their study area). 147. The Third Dalai Lama prohibited killing and eating horses, although this prohibition was not always obeyed. See Jagchid and Hyer (1979: 41). Reading et al. (2001) suggest that Asiatic wild ass may also have increased recently in Mongolia. 148. According to the minutes of a training workshop in 2002, some Qiangtang Nature Reserve staff report herds of Tibetan wild ass in winter of up to 2,000 individuals. See also China Daily (2002c). 149. Jackson (2000) describes locally dramatic losses of barley, mostly to Tibetan wild ass, in two areas of the Zhumiulangma Nature Reserve. See also Zheng (2003); Fox et al. (2004); and Schaller et al. (2005). 150. Xinhua News Agency (2003). 151. Fox et al. (1991); Shackleton (1997). 152. Wang Wei, Zheng An Travel Adventures, Beijing, unpublished data. 153. Wang (1998); Zheng (2003).

8. TROPHY HUNTING: OPPORTUNITIES SQUANDERED 1. Or at least, so it seemed until mid-August 2006, when the SFA suddenly announced that it would pit the four legal organizations representing foreign hunters against each other in an auction for the rights to specified hunting licenses. The story was picked up by the Chinese press and, once translated into English, quickly found its way to the international media as well. The furor over the announcement of a small change in pricing strategy for hunts that had been ongoing for nearly twenty years caught SFA officials flat-footed, and they quickly postponed the auction (as well as, at least temporarily, the entire hunting program). Most surprising was that the controversy originated with Beijing-based NGOs and Internet users, not merely the predictable foreign-based voices that tend to oppose all hunting. Perhaps these Chinese groups were simply unaware that SFA had been permitting foreign hunts for species it otherwise considered off limits. More likely, domestic consternation at the announcement of auctioning the right to kill protected species was rooted in doubts that government bureaus would put the funds to good use (Beijing Youth Daily 2006; China Daily 2006b). 2. Species of the genus Ovis are among the most sought-after trophies worldwide, and are by far the highest-value trophy species in China. Excluding only the rare wild goat called markhor (Capra falconeri), which lives primarily in Pakistan, argali command the highest trophy prices in the world, chiefly because of the impressive and beautiful horns of mature males. Adding to the allure are the habitats in which most species of Ovis are found: usually mountainous, often remote, almost always challenging terrain in which to find, stalk, and ultimately kill the animal. Further, in the case of argali, the animals are naturally extremely wary and difficult to approach. Thus, skill in hunting is required, more so than in the case of some species that, even if subject to strong hunting pressure, by nature remain relatively unwary. Put simply, argali are smart, and bagging one is thus all the more of an honor. Although many more blue sheep are taken by trophy hunters than argali, blue sheep are both considerably more numerous than argali, and much less of conservation concern. 3. Kellert (1980) found that 80 percent of Americans surveyed disapproved of trophy hunting, although 82 percent approved of traditional, native subsistence hunting, and 85 percent approved of

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hunting for meat. (Interestingly, George Bird Grinnell, one of the founders of the Boone and Crockett Club, which maintains a book documenting record trophies and is often closely associated with trophy hunting, objected to wasting the meat of game killed, considering taking only trophies as in violation of the sportsman’s ethic.) Writer Ted Kerasote has raised doubts about the ethics of trophy hunting as it is sometimes practiced. While arguing that hunting is not only sustainable, but often more environmentally benign than its alternatives, and for some, a spiritual experience, Kerasote (1994, 2003) has also pointedly questioned the superficial rewards of interest to some trophy hunters. I bring up the ethical arguments not to add further scorn, but to point out the difficult road that trophy hunting has to travel to gain widespread acceptance. I don’t mean to dismiss these ethical arguments, as much as to skirt them by pointing out that ethical norms in China often differ from those some readers will have. 4. Individual adventurers from Europe and North America entered China as early as the 1870s, pursuing various species of sporting interest. Perhaps most famous among the hunters were Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., sons of the American president, in 1928 (Czech 2005). However, excepting the early initiative by Robert M. Lee in 1981, no formal governmental program of permitting foreign hunters existed in China until the mid-1980s. See O’Gara et al. (1988); Cai et al. (1989); Qin (2004); Wang and Gu (2004). Also, Wang Wei, Zheng, An Adventure Travel Company, Beijing, “A Report on the Status of International Hunting in China” (Guanyu woguo guoji shoulie qingkuang de huibao), unpublished mimeo, 2004 (in Chinese). 5. Swanson (1992: 65). 6. Swanson (1991). 7. Ibid., p. 4. Italics added. 8. Barbier (1992). 9. Freese (1998: 192). 10. The arguments back and forth on the merits of consumptive use, especially trophy hunting, are too voluminous to do justice to here. Case histories suggesting success in linking trophy hunting with conservation include Anderson (1983); Martin and Taylor (1983); Caro (1986); Lewis et al. (1990); Murindagomo (1992); Metcalfe (1994); Child (1995); Freese (1997); Johnson (1997); Lewis and Alpert (1997); and Teer (1997). Mordi (1989); Balakrishnan and Ndhlovu (1992); and Parry and Campbell (1992) have critiqued trophy hunting programs, arguing that they have failed to empower local people as much as advertised. The need to link local people to the economic use of wildlife using appropriate and local mechanisms has been stressed by Abel and Blaikie (1986); Bell (1987); Hough and Sherpa (1989); Brechin and West (1990); Hill (1991); Murphree (1994); and Norton-Griffiths (2000). See also Lindsey et al. (2006, 2007) for recent reviews of trophy hunting’s successes and problems in Africa. 11. Caughley (1985); Fowler (1988); McCullough (1990, 1992); White and Bartmann (1997); Turchin (1999). 12. Shackleton (1991). 13. Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) constitute one of the few counter-examples. Poaching has recently progressed to the point where normal reproduction has evidently been affected: the birthrate has declined due to the extreme rarity of adult males. However, saiga poaching has been primarily for the medicinal values of the horns, not their trophy value. Thus, young males were probably killed as well as old males, so the parallel to trophy hunting programs is inexact. Milner-Gulland et al. (2003). 14. Geist (1975, 1983); Hutchins and Geist (1987). 15. Hogg and Forbes (1997). 16. Murphy et al. (1990); Singer and Nichols (1992); Jorgenson et al. (1997). 17. Thelen (1991); Harris et al. (2002); Festa-Bianchet (2003). 18. An oft-repeated but rarely seriously examined claim, promulgated by those who wish to defend trophy hunting at any cost, is that males that are the objects of trophy hunts are too old to participate in breeding, and thus their removal causes no effect whatever at worst, and may act to

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improve survival of others at best (for example, Wang and Gu 2004). There is no evidence of such reproductive senescence among the male wild sheep and goats that have been studied. Ironically, one species for which there has been no legal trophy hunting in China, the wild yak, may in fact display such a behavioral dynamic. Although rigorous studies are lacking, my observations suggest that at least some old males remain far from females during the breeding season, appearing to take no interest in them (see also Schaller 1998: 137). 19. Sutherland (1990); Sutherland and Reynolds (1998). 20. Jachmann et al. (1995); Kurt et al. (1995). 21. Coltman et al. (2003). 22. Festa-Bianchet et al. (2004). 23. Coltman et al. (2005). 24. Hogg and Forbes (1997). 25. Coltman et al. (2003). 26. In this Alberta population, the yearly probability of being shot by a hunter once having reached legal size was approximately 30 percent. 27. Harris and Pletscher (2002); Wang Wei, Zhengan Adventure Travel, Beijing (May 2004), unpublished data. 28. Harris and Pletscher (2002); Harris et al. (2005); unpublished information provided by Aksai International Hunting Area. 29. Names of these hunting areas sometimes differ and are rarely official, so considering them on a county level reduces confusion. As of 2004, Xinjiang had international hunting areas in Baicheng, Bu’erjin, Fuyun, Hami, Hejing, Qiemo, Tacheng, Tashiku’ergan, and Tulufan counties; Gansu in Akesai and Subei counties (Subei’s consisted of two distinct areas, the Hashiha’er area in the Qilian Mountains and the Mazong Shan area in the Gobi Desert abutting Mongolia), as well as Zhangye “city” (in the isolated Dongda Shan, bordering Inner Mongolia); and Qinghai in Dulan (within separate townships, Balong and Gouli) and Maduo counties. Although Tibet had yet to formally establish any hunting areas, preliminary experimental hunts for argali had taken place south of Lhasa and for white-lipped deer in Linze County, and Tibetan officials seemed anxious to establish formal hunting areas (Tibet Forestry 2000). There were an additional three officially recognized in Sichuan, and approximately a dozen other, small, and rarely visited international hunting areas in central and eastern provinces. 30. Further east, 52 red deer, 32 takin, 11 sambar, and a few additional species were taken during the same time period. Data courtesy of Wang Wei, Zhengan Adventure Travel, Beijing (May 2004). 31. Impressive as these permit fees might seem, they are actually some of the lowest among countries to which hunters might otherwise travel for these species. For example, the desert-dwelling Gobi argali, which goes for $21,500 in Gansu ($19,500 if two or more hunters come as a group) can also be hunted in Mongolia, where prices range from $26,000 to $30,000. Blue sheep, which cost from $5,900 (if in a party of three or more) to $7,900 (for a single hunter) in China, cost from $9,000 to $11,500 in Nepal. Ibex prices in China are comparable to those available in Mongolia and Central Asia. 32. Liu et al. (2000a). 33. Gansu Forestry Bureau (1990). 34. Yang (1993). 35. Ibid. 36. Da Kai, Buerjin Hunting Area, personal communication, June 2001. 37. I observed 31 argali rams and 16 ewe/lambs, as well as a group of approximately ten ibex in two hours of observation in July 2001, including a few very large (old) rams. Yu et al. (2000) has also documented the existence of a healthy population here and in nearby areas in the Tian Shan. 38. Liu (1995).

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39. Zhao Lianghong, Subei International Hunting Area, personal communication, May 24, 1999. 40. The $21,500 for a “Gansu” argali (or $19,500 if two or more hunters come as a group) may also have been lower than the market could easily bear. In an economic valuation comparing willingness to pay for various types of argali among international (albeit mostly U.S.) trophy hunters, the “Gansu” argali ranked second in perceived value only to the Marco Polo argali (the mean bid for the “Gansu” type was about 85 percent that for the Marco Polo type), and higher than other types of argali inhabiting Xinjiang (Stiver 1989). But, for reasons that have never been clear, China prices “Gansu” argali lower (approximately 25 to 33 percent lower) than it does the Marco Polo sheep, and also lower (approximately 19 to 21 percent lower) than others inhabiting Xinjiang. 41. In April 2006, the village leader—waiting until a private moment when no county-level staff were within earshot—asked me to relay his complaints to higher officials that compensation at this level was still insufficient. He viewed blue sheep as forage competitors to domestic livestock, and believed pastoralists should be better compensated for the protection they had provided to them. 42. Johnson (1997); Arshad et al. (2002); Bhagwandas (2004), “Centre Issues Permits to Hunt 93 Rare Animals,” January 25, 2005, www.dawn.com, accessed July 24, 2005. 43. Amgalanbaatar et al. (2002). 44. Although this may be giving too much weight to the existence of a written “area” or even a boundary line on a map. Given the appropriate incentive (i.e., money), provincial officials have also allowed hunters to take trophies outside of such a designated area. In 1987, an American hunter killed a white-lipped deer in southern Qinghai when there was no designated area for him to do so. In 2000, an Iranian killed a wild yak in Yeniugou, even though this area has never been designated for such international hunting, and hunting of wild yaks had not been officially authorized. 45. Harris and Bedunah (2001) analyzed the livestock industry in and around the Aksai hunting area. As of 2001, there were approximately 50,000 domestic sheep/goats and 2,000–4,000 horses and camels affecting argali habitat. We concluded that although the presence of livestock is not entirely incompatible with wildlife, levels and patterns of grazing substantially limited the argali population. During winter and spring, when forage options are limited, argali and domestic sheep/goats subsisted on the same plant species. Although the total amount of plant material is unlikely limiting, combinations that produce acceptable mixtures of energy and protein were no doubt made much more difficult for argali to obtain by the high levels of domestic grazing. Further, domestic herds appear to displace argali, moving them out of areas that presumably provide optimum combinations of forage quality, forage availability, and predator avoidance. Similar numbers of livestock inhabited the Hashiha’er hunting area of adjacent Subei. In Gouli, Dulan, where more productive pastures allow for easier coexistence between wildlife and livestock, herds of sheep, goats, and yaks are present on every hillside. They have only a minor affect on blue sheep, the primary trophy species in Dulan, but wild yaks and musk deer have already been extirpated from the area, and argali lead a fugitive existence. 46. Harris and Pletscher (2002). 47. It is also the sort of development that early hunting groups, usually focused on what we now think of as trophy hunting, were active in opposing. For example, an early activity of the Boone and Crockett Club was to oppose the granting of a right-of-way for a commercial railway through the newly established (if not yet effectively protected) Yellowstone National Park. See Reiger (2001: 158). 48. In December 1998, a group of professionally armed poachers (who, it happens, were also officials of adjacent Yanchiwan Township, and thus de facto officers of the Yanchiwan Nature Reserve) entered the Aksai hunting area by crossing the Danghenan Shan, killing fourteen wild yaks, four wild ass, and three Tibetan gazelles. They had intended to return the way they arrived, but when they found their way blocked by heavy snows, had no choice but to drive through Jianshe Township in Aksai, where they were discovered. Aksai hunting area staff assisted in the apprehension

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and investigation of this incident, but were not authorized to arrest the poachers. In fact, hunting area staff were not able to persuade county police to make the long drive to where the poachers were being held until they promised to reimburse the cost of fuel for the police vehicles. 49. Despite only modest benefits accruing to local people even in the Dulan International Hunting Area (where, in contrast to others, some attempts were made to funnel some benefits to lower levels), most local pastoralists were quite supportive of the hunting program in the early 1990s (Liu 1995). However, what Liu did not report is that, at the time, local officials deliberately turned a blind eye to modest levels of local hunting by pastoralists. Tacit permission for local hunting, although illegal, was probably a wise move on the part of Dulan managers: blue sheep were clearly sufficiently numerous to sustain some additional hunting, and the goodwill of local pastoralists was critical. In helping to deter poaching, pastoralists were not only helping the hunting program, but also helping themselves because by far the most damaging poaching came from organized gangs arriving from outside the county. Pastoralists in Dulan thus may have gained only modest benefits from foreign hunting, but paid even less in opportunity costs: they could still graze their livestock and, occasionally, hunt. But by the early 2000s, this situation had changed somewhat. Pastoralists in Dulan, as elsewhere in China, were disarmed, and thus effectively prevented from subsistence hunting. This removed a benefit for them at the same time that it contributed to a yet larger blue sheep population. By 2004, attitudes of locals toward the hunting program seemed closer to grudging acceptance of the status quo than anything resembling the enthusiasm claimed by Chinese sources. 50. Liu (2001); Wang and Gu (2004). 51. An underlying, but to my knowledge untested, assumption is that Americans are willing to pay higher prices than are Europeans.

9. CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE 1. Joseph Needham has written eloquently (if lengthily) on early Chinese scientific achievements, but others have pointed out that advanced technology should not necessarily be equated with advancement of scientific thinking, and that there were cultural or historic reasons why the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century occurred in Europe rather than in civilized and centralized China. See Qian (1986) and Bodde (1991). There is also no doubt about the tremendous emphasis placed on science and technology, particularly since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. However, science and technology are not always identical, and at times focus on one detracts from the other. As reflected in wildlife science, Chinese “sci-tech” of late has been heavy on the tech, and lighter on the science. See Tsou (1998). 2. Baum (1982) provided a typology of Chinese science in general. His argument, perhaps by now somewhat dated, was that the relative paucity of modern scientific achievement in China was not due to chance events or even to the constraints of “formal administrative relations, organizational structures or incentive systems,” that is, the long history of autocratic and bureaucratic rule, but rather that scientific progress had been “fettered by a series of endemic constraints that have their origins . . . in the more abstract and elusive realm of human cognitive and normative behavior—i.e., in the realm of culture.” Baum identified five “modal characteristics of traditional Chinese culture,” all closely associated with Confucianism but also having survived the tumultuous transition to the communism of the early 1980s, that acted to impede scientific progress: cognitive formalism, narrow empiricism, dogmatic scientism, feudal bureaucratism, and compulsive ritualism. He defined cognitive formalism as “a propensity to perceive and interpret the world of natural and social events in terms of patterned configurations,” that is, to classify, systematize, and simplify complex phenomena into discrete categories that have an existence independent of those phenomena. Cognitive formalism insists on categorization even when the phenomena in question possess no traits that would admit of individual quantification. In contrast to cognitive formalism, narrow empiricism is the failure to link facts with theory, myopically focusing on what is directly in front to the exclusion of context. A narrow empiricist loses sight of the critical interaction be-

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tween observation and theory, the unending dance in which each informs and improves the other in a mutually reinforcing dynamic that ultimately leads toward increasingly reliable knowledge. Baum described dogmatic scientism as a “propensity to idealize science, to reify and universalize its precepts, thereby elevating it from a method of inquiry to the status of canonical dogma.” In doing so, “the key elements of skepticism and induction—so vital to the methods and purposes of modern scientific inquiry—were largely jettisoned.” Feudal bureaucratism, in Baum’s lexicon, referred to enforced leadership by a small clique and emphasis on the leadership of a few individuals at the expense of consultation among the rank and file. Finally, in naming compulsive ritualism as a factor in obstructing Chinese science, Baum noted that the importance of ritual is hardly uniquely Chinese, but that its pervasiveness may be: “The tendency to induce such ritualized behavior is endemic in a culture that strongly emphasizes formal propriety, individual dependency, and the denial (or repression) of ambivalence and doubt. Such a culture is not . . . highly conducive to the full flowering of the scientific spirit, for ritualism is a mask used to obscure reality, to avoid uncertainty, and to artificially resolve ambiguity. But modern science takes uncertainty and ambiguity as a given and strives—by its very nature—to penetrate the mask of the apparent in order to ascertain the nature of the real.” See also Bodde (1991: 108, 144–146). 3. Chen and Guan (1997) offer a surprisingly frank admission of inadequacy of the attempt to standardize a national wildlife survey. 4. Those familiar with state-of-the-art distance sampling can be excused for wondering how on earth it is possible to generate a detection function with a sample size of only one. Indeed, it is not. Any line going in any direction can be drawn if it must pass through only a single point. The paper in question managed this feat by recourse to a simplification of distance sampling theory, which, unintentionally, mandated the use of one particular variant, the negative exponential model. If this form of detection function, which has the least-desirable statistical qualities, is assumed, then a line can in fact be drawn based on a single datum. It is, however, unlikely to be very useful, and is, in any case, based on only the thinnest of theoretical underpinnings. For the example, see Gao and Yao (1997); for the simplification of distance sampling, see Sheng and Xu (1992); for a critique of both, see Harris and Burnham (2002). Of course, even a single observation is more than none. A group from the same biological institute published an estimate of the number of brown bears for the entirety of Xinjiang using observations of bear signs (in addition to any they observed directly) supplemented by interviews of local herders. They accumulated thirty-eight observations of sign, but no direct observations. They thus managed the incredible feat of estimating the total population of brown bears within an area of 333,000 km2 without ever actually seeing a bear (Gao et al. 2000). For similarly ambitious extrapolations based on small samples, see Liu (1996). 5. For the estimated number of white-lipped deer, see Wu and Wang (1999), although Sheng and Ohtaishi (1993) offered an alternative estimate of “50,000–100,000.” Even if the latter is more accurate, there would not likely have been greater than 80,000 in a single county of Qinghai. For more on white-lipped deer abundance, see Kaji et al. (1989), Miura et al. (1989), and Schaller (1998); for my observations in Nangqian County, see Harris (1991). 6. Wang and Sheng (1988); Zheng and Zhu (1990). 7. Liu (2001: 199). 8. The logistic equation, a simple caricature of population growth, is presented in almost every ecology textbook, and equally often accompanied by the caveats that, while the equation is mathematically elegant, it cannot be expected to actually predict anything in the field. It is presented as a conceptual starting point and for convenience in abstract models. In fact, it is not merely overly simplistic, but for a variety of reasons, very likely to overestimate actual sustainable yield. 9. The statistic required is called rm, and the value used (0.3), albeit a guess, was not unreasonable. But the author never stopped to consider how different the resulting estimate would have been had he used the equally well-supported guesses of 0.2 or 0.4 instead. (Answer: quite different.) 10. The denominator 4 is specific to the logistic growth model.

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11. See Larkin (1977). As a conceptual matter, most wildlife managers have long-since abandoned the quest for obtaining “maximum sustained yield,” understanding that, even were it more easily estimated, achieving it results in high risk of unintended negative consequences, both for the species of interest and for others sharing its ecosystem. 12. Recent textbooks by Jiang et al. (1997) and Ma et al. (2004a), although relying greatly on Western science and providing an admirable service in linking these advances to the Chinese situation, provide no background whatsoever on the social dimensions of wildlife management, and no information on the development of conservation as a human endeavor. Another textbook used at China’s principle post-secondary wildlife training center (in Harbin, Heilongjiang) introduces Chinese students to important English texts (in English), but is entirely technical in nature, missing an opportunity to introduce students to the conceptual underpinnings of the field of wildlife management (Zou and Zheng 2002). There is a textbook dealing entirely with the history of Chinese zoology (Guo et al. 2004), but the content here is purely technical, and in any case this book, unlike the others, restricts itself to Chinese achievements. 13. “Numerous observers have drawn a causal connection between the retardation of China’s scientific development in the modern era and classical Chinese philosophical tendency to seek order and harmony by dividing the human and physical worlds into a number of intuitively fixed categories . . . [which] tends to substitute configurative inventory-taking for systematic analysis.” Baum (1982: 1168). 14. Liu et al. (2000a). 15. It does not help the credibility of this study that, according to local sources, most data were obtained during one-to-two-day visits to the area by one or two of the article’s co-authors, and that during field visits, the authors rarely got out of their vehicles. 16. Examples include Yang et al. (1988) (marmots), Wei et al. (1989) (giant pandas), Yang et al. (1990) (musk deer), Chen (1991) (Daurian ground squirrels), Jiang et al. (1993) (Mongolian gazelles), and Hou et al. (2000) (Asiatic black bears). 17. Guo and Zheng (2005). 18. In both cases, I omitted review articles that had minimal or no “Methods” sections. For the Chinese papers, I compared number of characters in the Methods section with the total number of characters in the paper. For English-language papers, I counted numerals as well as words in both the Methods and the entire paper. In both cases, I used “methods as a proportion of the entire paper,” because one would ordinarily expect a longer, more detailed Methods section in a longer paper. Although my selection process was not random, there is little reason to suspect it of being biased in one direction or another. Both parametric and nonparametric tests indicated that the finding of larger Methods sections in the Western papers was unlikely to be a result of sampling error. 19. www.wildlife.org/professional/index.cfm?tname=university, accessed June 7, 2006. 20. The College of Wildlife Resources at Northeast Forestry University in Harbin, Heilongjiang (China’s northeastern-most province) is the only academic unit in the entire PRC that formally takes its primary mission as that of training wildlife biologists. It is, by any standards, a large department, with its own separate building (including various laboratories and classrooms), employs over sixty full-time teaching and research staff, and in the year 2000 had 650 undergraduate and about 40 graduate students. Graduates of the College, which until the early 1990s was part of the then-Ministry of Forestry, are commonly found in provincial-level forestry offices in every Chinese province, as well as in many units of the provincial and national Academy of Sciences. Alumni dominate the state-level bureau of Fauna and Flora Protection within SFA. As of 2004, there were rumors that SFA planned to expand the existing small wildlife group at their own Academy of Forest Sciences in Beijing, creating a large research center that would rival the now independent College in Harbin, but little progress had been made. 21. Examples of zoology or biology departments where a few professors conduct applied wildlife-biology research (in addition to, or as distinct from, research that would be more naturally

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categorized as zoology), include those at Beijing University, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University, West China (Sichuan) Normal University, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou University, and Inner Mongolia Normal University. They must compete for funding and status with those conducting more-favored organismal and molecular biology research. 22. Principally the Institute of Zoology in Beijing, but also the Kunming Institute of Zoology, the Northwest Plateau Institute of Biology (Xining), and the Xinjiang Institute of Biology, Pedology, and Desert Research. Provincial-level forestry bureaus employed only a few biologists each, and supported almost none of their own research or monitoring. 23. Guojia ziran kexue jijin. 24. Within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (and some, although not all, universities), both M.S. and Ph.D. degrees must be completed within a set number of years: generally two for the former, three for the latter. Of the three years for a Ph.D., much of the first year must be devoted to coursework (including obligatory classes unrelated to field biology), and the last year is usually required for analysis and write-up. This often leaves only a single year for field work, which is rarely sufficient to obtain useful data.

10. A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA 1. An understanding of the history of wildlife conservation in North America suggests that a utilitarian view is neither uniquely Chinese, nor is it inconsistent with or antagonistic to other ways of valuing wildlife and wild lands. The flexible and multidimensional conservation system currently operational in the United States owes much to the philosophy of George Bird Grinnell, whose efforts belie a contradiction between “use” and “conservation.” Grinnell favored a systematic and European technological approach to forestry in the United States, and supported Gifford Pinchot’s “wise use” view of forest conservation. Grinnell was also a founding member of the Boone and Crockett Club, an association of aristocratic “gentleman-hunters” whose objective was to preserve game species so that “there might still be good hunting which should last for generations.” However, Grinnell was also the founder of the Audubon Society, dedicated to preservation of nongame species, opposed both commercial development and hunting within Yellowstone National Park, and was a prime mover in the designation of Montana’s Glacier National Park, where hunting is also prohibited (Reiger 2001). 2. Elsewhere, I am critical of poorly considered programs to evict pastoralists from their lands. However, there are places where it seems appropriate, and the international hunting area in Aksai is a case in point. Biodiversity, in the form of argali hunting, has already been designated a priority, and studies have already shown that livestock grazing, at least at high densities in certain areas, is detrimental to argali. Here, grassland degradation is not an abstract concept, blindly assumed to apply based on broad policy statements; both field surveys and local people’s experience have shown that it is severe. Perhaps even more importantly, removing pastoralists from certain sections of Jianshe Township in Aksai has many fewer implications for human dignity and cultural conservation than is the case in many other places in western China. Resident pastoralists in this region have a local history of no more than fifty years, and only a handful have a connection that long. Most, instead, are ethnic Han who immigrated to Jianshe in the 1960s or even later. Further, almost none of the “pastoralists” live on the land; instead, they live in homes already provided to them in the county seat, visiting their herds only occasionally during the year. The actual herding is accomplished by contract laborers who originate elsewhere. In short, pastoralism here has already ceased being a culturally meaningful lifestyle, having already been transformed into simply another commercial activity. 3. Although I conducted no rigorous surveys, almost all pastoralists who I spoke with were aware that hunting had become illegal with the passage of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law; the most common phrase used when I asked whether they hunted was “they don’t let us hunt” (tamen

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bu rang women da), but they were not pleased with the prohibition. See also Næss et al. (2004) and Fox and Tsering (2005). 4. Hames (1987, 1991). 5. Karpov (2000); Victor Brezkin, Kara-Balta Regional Society of Kyrgyz Hunters and Fishermen, Kara-Balta, Kyrgyzstan, personal communication, July 2001; J. Wingard, personal communication, December 2005. 6. Singling out some for subsistence rights while excluding others runs contrary to current Chinese enthusiasm for unity (tuanjie), but is consistent with recently emphasized policies focused on clarifying property rights. It is also consistent with the officially averred desire to provide autonomy for ethnic minorities, who also generally have stronger traditions of subsistence hunting than do Han Chinese. Most ethnic minorities in China’s west live either in designated autonomous regions (i.e., Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia), prefectures (most of Qinghai, western Sichuan), or counties (various portions of Gansu). 7. Geist (1985, 1988, 1995); see also Hawley (1993). 8. In sparsely populated areas of Canada, however, a modified system of territoriality (registered trap lines) augments harvest limitations for trappers. The registered trap-line system trades off ease of access for increased responsibility to a specific area. Trappers with registered lines are required to trap actively each year, but their inability to easily move their operations elsewhere is a powerful disincentive against overexploitation. Registered trap lines confer limited property rights: trappers must still obey provincial regulations and bag limits, but their exclusive trapping right to the region solves the problem of open access. There can be no free riders to legally take advantage of prudent management by registered trappers: the trappers themselves can benefit from their own conservative behavior, but, conversely, have only themselves to blame for the consequences of short-term overexploitation. Of note is the relatively large number of Canadians to whom fur trapping is still a significant source of income, not merely a sporting activity. The system seems to stay in balance; this may in part be explained by the relatively low price that each animal brings and the relatively high replenishment rates of most fur-bearing species, but the quasi-territoriality of trapping areas no doubt also plays an important role; see Todd (1981) and Obbard et a1. (1987). For information on registered traplines in Canada, see for example Poole and Mowat (2001), www.ubcic.bc.ca/files/ pdf/rilq2005/ch14_Hunting_and_Trapping.pdf and http://www.gov.mb.ca/conservation/wildlife/ hunt_trap/trapping_guide/rtl_system.html. 9. In fact, one proposal for doing this has already been published in China. Ju and Jiang (1992, 1996) suggested that a contract system for wildlife be instituted that would explicitly put wildlife production on a market footing. Their proposal was innovative and courageous, in that it questioned the fundamental paradigm underlying Chinese policy toward wildlife; it deserves serious consideration. Unfortunately, Ju and Jiang (1992) did little to flesh out how contractors producing wildlife would be able to protect habitat, particularly as nonlocal people would be allowed to act as contractors. 10. “If property rights can be economically established and commercial use of a species is profitable, a strong force exists for preservation of the wildlife concerned. On the other hand, if private property rights do not exist and there is open-access to commercially valuable wildlife, the tragedy of the commons is liable to occur and species may be driven to extinction by commercialism,” Tisdell (1999: 50). 11. Because musk deer have relatively predictable routes and small home ranges, it is not too difficult to obtain a rough (if not highly scientific) indication of their abundance. They would seem a candidate for community-based monitoring without need of high technology. Consistency, objectivity, and documentation would be the key. An interesting example is provided by the monitoring of argali done by local staff at the Aksu-Djabagly Zapovednik in Kazakstan, where, for over thirty consecutive years, teams of observers positioned themselves at set locations on the same four to five dates each year. An attempt to begin locally based monitoring in a nature reserve setting is reported by van Rijsoort and Zhang (2005). See also Du Toit (2002) and Moller et al. (2004).

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12. Although no population-dynamic studies of either species exist to support any such assertion quantitatively, they are similarly sized ungulates that probably have similar patterns of life-history elasticity. Musk deer sometimes produce twin fawns, suggesting that they might be slightly better adapted to coping with increased mortality from humans. Additionally, the product of interest from chiru, their fine wool pelts, is produced by females and young as well as males. Thus, a chiru hunt would lack the built-in incentive inherent in a musk deer hunt to kill only the least demographically important segment of the population. 13. For rhino, www.davidshepherd.org/core_pages/animal_facts/rhino.shtml, accessed February 2, 2005, www.american.edu/projects/mandala/ted/rhino.htm, www.cnn.com/earth/9611/04/rhino. For musk deer, Homes (1999) and Parry-Jones and Wu (2001). 14. Homes (2004). 15. Most of the arguments made by the various authors in Anderson and Hill (1995) favoring markets as vehicles toward conservation are really about privatization of wildlife, or of commerce in wildlife on privately held land. These are different circumstances than what I am proposing here, which is commerce in publicly owned wildlife on public land. The Western cultural underpinnings of markets assumed by the economists in Anderson and Hill (1995) also lessen the usefulness of their argument in informing the question at hand here. 16. According to the Xinhua News Service, plans exist to spend 26 billion yuan during 2005–2010 to institute the “retire livestock, restore grasslands” program over some 667,000 km2 of pastoral China. The program is described as a combination of complete livestock removal, pasture fallow, and rest/rotation systems. According to Qin Yucai, leader of the agro-forestry and ecology group under the State Council’s GOW (Great Opening of the West) team, experimental results from Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Ningxia suggest that this can be accomplished with no net reduction in livestock capacity through artificial pastures and other technical measures. China Environment News (2004). 17. In addition to wide-scale irrigation that has had serious impacts downstream in such basins as the Tarim in Xinjiang (Liu 2002; Ma 2004) and the Hei in Gansu (Wang and Gao 2002), there is currently a 40 km-long aqueduct that transfers water from the Datong He in Qinghai, over the Qilian Mountains to Qingwangquan in Gansu, and (as mentioned in Chapter 8) a planned water transfer from the Kharteng into the Dang He in Gansu. But the scale of these projects and their environmental impacts would be dwarfed should the western route of the huge “south-north water transfer” (nan shui bei diao) project ultimately be built. Work has already commenced on the eastern and central portions of this scheme, whose goal is transferring water from the Yangtze (which often floods) to the Yellow River (which now runs dry hundreds of kilometers before reaching the sea in most years). At last report, the western route, which would be technically the most challenging despite having the shortest route (due to the topography and elevation) was still under consideration. This project would take water from the Yangtze River just south of Yushu, Qinghai, cross nine mountain passes and six additional large drainages before finally delivering it to the Yellow River near the Qinghai-Sichuan border, a location just southwest of where it swings back north toward the town of Maduo (Yang 2005b). Even grander plans may exist to move water all the way from the Yarlang Zampo (Brahmaputra) River into the Yangzte. See Huang (2004) and China.org.cn (2006). 18. Trefethen (1975: 97). 19. Jiang (2005). 20. For the foreseeable future, fundamental decisions in resource use will remain the purview of the government; NGOs, despite their recent meteoric rise, will have limited ability to move beyond what governments are willing to do. Ho (2001b); Wu and Hildebrandt (2002); Schwartz (2004); Yang (2005a). 21. For example, in Sichuan. See Swanson and Kontoleon (2000) and Fang (2002). The former authors argued that tourists (largely foreign) were willing to pay (WTP) considerably more than was being realized at Wolong. However, their WTP figures should be treated with caution: at least

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some survey respondents were interviewed prior to actually visiting Wolong. My experience leading American tourists to Wolong suggests that most are excited to see captive pandas and willing to support the captive breeding center financially, but are disappointed with the reserve itself, and generally anxious to leave once having seen the captive pandas. 22. Fang (2002) seems to suggest that ecotourism in western Sichuan, a largely pastoral area, might succeed in producing incentives toward conservation. However, the only success story Fang points to is that of Jiuzhaigou, a relatively small protected area of forests where the alternative uses would be logging or terraced agriculture, and even here, Fang provides no evidence that wildlife has benefited. Other sources have suggested that Jiuzhaigou is overrun with tourists, and that local environmental damage has resulted. 23. Li and Han (2001). 24. Plummer and Taylor (2004). There have recently been efforts, supported by international NGOs, to support bottom-up conservation efforts in Zhiduo County, southern Qinghai. 25. Reading et al. (1998); Pratt et al. (2004). Wingard and Zahler (2006) provide a detailed report indicating that institutions to curb hunting in Mongolia have failed to ensure sustainability of a number of species. 26. Elvin (2004: 471).

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INDEX

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Aalders, Marius, 94 Achnatherum splendens, 45, 46, 131 Acta Theriologica Sinica (journal), 204 Aesthetic view of wildlife, 63–64, 76 African buffalo, 152, 154, 233 African hunting dog, 161, 231 Agriculture. See Livestock grazing Agriculture bureaus, 97, 150 See also Forestry bureaus; Wildlife institutions Aksai County Wildlife Protection Station, 179 Alford, William, 19, 94, 261n7 Alligator. See Yangtze river alligator Altai weasel, 107, 149, 232 Ambio (publication), 34 American black bear, 141, 232 American elk, 80–81 Andean condor, 9, 234 Andean vicuña, 141, 233, 270n21 “Anna Karenina principle,” 151 Annanba Wild Camel Nature Reserve, 118, 138, 157, 159 Antelope. See Chiru; Pronghorn antelope; Saiga antelope Arabian oryx, 233, 257n21 Arctic fox, 5, 231 Argali, 5, 98, 133, 172, 177 characteristics of, 132–133 classification of, 117, 139–140, 274nn56–58 decline of, 108, 110, 117 economic value of, 133, 179, 183, 183–184, 273n41, 282n2, 285n40 foraging and food, 134–135, 136 geographic distribution, 133–138, 137, 138 grassland degradation and, 136, 137 hunting of, 133, 136, 138–141, 171, 180–187 laws and regulations protecting, 137, 139–140 livestock grazing and, 136, 137, 138, 140–141, 285n45 in nature reserves, 138

Argali (continued) population density of, 136 study of, 196–197, 196–198, 196–199, 201, 285n45 threats to, 135–136, 140–141 trophy hunting and, 133, 138–141 Arjin Shan Nature Reserve, 111, 117, 143, 159, 163 Artificial rearing. See Captive breeding and propagation Artificial selection, 166, 175–177, 177 Asian elephant, 6, 81–82, 127, 152, 156, 165n45, 280n119 Asiatic black bear bear farming, 62, 82, 89, 221, 252n21, 259n32 bear gall harvesting, 62, 88–90, 221 captive breeding of, 86–90, 220–221, 256n9 commercial harvesting of, 220–221 perception of wildlife and, 62 Asiatic ibex. See Ibex Asiatic wild dog, 97–98. See Dhole Aspirational nature of Chinese laws, 94–95, 99, 103, 114, 123, 224 Astragalus spp., 43 Badger, Eurasian, 107 Bai language, 27 Baizha Forest grassland study, 40–42, 41, 47 Balong Township, 180 Banks, Tony, 51 Baohu (protection), 60, 76, 79, 251n2 Barbets, 6, 235 Barbier, Edward, 172, 173 Baum, Richard, 173 , 286n2 Bear, 5, 100 bear farming, 62, 82, 89, 221, 252n21, 259n32 bear gall harvesting, 62, 88–90, 221 See also American black bear; Asiatic black bear; Brown bear; Polar bear; Sun bear Bell, Richard H.V., 209 “Big iron rice bowl” mentality, 49 Big-game hunting, U.S., 80 bighorn sheep, North American, 173, 176–177

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330

INDEX

Biodiversity conservation, 107, 116. See laws, Chinese; Nature reserves; Policies, Chinese Biodiversity Working Group of the State Council, 76 Biological controls, 110 Biology. See Population biology; Science, Chinese wildlife Birds in nature reserves, 107, 118 translocation of, 79 See also individual birds Bison, 10, 143, 152, 160, 233 Black-footed ferret, 232, 257–258n22 Black-lipped pika. See Pika Black-necked cranes, 5, 6, 234, 275n73 Bleisch, Bill, 117 Blood pheasant, 5, 235 Blue sheep, 98, 106 behavior and characteristics of, 168 commercial harvesting of, 169 conservation success and, 122, 169 foreign hunter fees paid, 184 geographic distribution of, 168 habitat of, 134 hunting of, 171, 178–183, 213, 217, 282n2, 286n49 in nature reserves, 106–107 population abundance, 168–169 price charged to foreign hunters, 179 subsistence hunting and, 213, 217 Boar. See Wild boar Breeding. See Captive breeding and propagation Broadbills, 6, 235 Brown bear, 5, 6 bear gall harvesting, 62, 88–90, 221 behavior and characteristics of, 62, 88, 90, 110, 121, 149, 162 decline of, 117, 162 human interaction and problems with, 162–163 hunting of, 170 laws protecting, 163 population density, 287n4 Buddhism, 25, 26 perception of wildlife and, 65–66, 72, 73 Bu’erjin hunting area, 181m 185 Buffer zones, 112, 113, 225 Bulbuls, 9, 235 Bureaucracy. See Government wildlife institutions; Policies, Chinese Burhan Buda Shan, 180 Bustards, 9, 235 Butterflies, 7, 235 Buzzards, 5, 107, 149, 235 California vs. Gansu in size, 22–23, 23 Camel. See Wild camel Captive breeding and propagation, 16 animal welfare and suffering, 86

Captive breeding and propagation (continued) of Asiatic black bear, 87–90 commercial farms and, 82, 89, 90 for economic reasons, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90 for education and research purposes, 84 effect on wild populations, 90 future of wildlife and, 209 government portrayal and view of, 83–84 history of, 82–84 for hunting purposes, 102 of musk deer, 87–91, 125 of nutria, 90 problems of, 17–18 rationale for supporting, 84–87 reintroduction into wild programs, 79, 83–87, 98, 258n24 reproduction affected by hunting, 172–173 as “rescuing” method, 115 tiger breeding, 89 Wildlife Protection Law and, 100 zoos and, 63, 64, 75, 84, 87, 132 See also Domesticating wildlife Captive vs. natural habitat studies, 193 Carex moorcroftii, 45 Carex spp., 43, 45 Caribou, 5, 6, 133, 142, 233, 256n10 Carnivores, 159 See also Asiatic black bear; Brown bear; Dhole; Sun bear; Tiger; Wolves Categorization systems in science, 200–203 CCTV (Chinese national television), 78 Ceratoides compacta, 45 Ceratoides spp., 43 Chengdu Panda Base, 78 China: west vs. east, 7–9, 8 China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, 76 China Science and Technology Daily, 34 China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), 14, 238n14, 252n21 China Wildlife Protection Association, 105 Chinese Academy of Sciences, 143, 207, 226, 240, 289n24 Chinese-American meteorological program, 30 Chinese-argali-hunting-program, 139 Chinese Gansu Argali Hunting Program foreign hunter fees paid, 183 Chinese national television (CCTV), 78 Chinese vs. Western ideas/perceptions captive breeding and propagation, 87 domestic vs. wild animals, 79–82 laws, conservation and wildlife, 92–95, 97, 104 management of wildlife, 15 of management of wildlife, 15 “rule of law” vs. “rule of men,” 94, 95 scientific methods and approaches, 199 species comparison: North America with China, 5

INDEX

Chinese vs. Western ideas/perceptions (continued) use of wildlife, 60–68, 75–77, 101, 209, 229 zoos, 257n14 See also Perception of wildlife Chiru, 5, 106, 117, 234 behavior and characteristics of, 10, 121 commercial harvesting of, 220, 221 conservation/protection efforts, 61, 118, 143–145 decline of, 73, 110, 121, 142–143 economic value of, 141, 143 foreign demand for, 121, 141, 143 geographic distribution, 142 hunting of, 144–145 migration patterns, 144–145 in nature reserves, 143–144 poaching of, 108, 117, 118, 141, 142–144 publicity about plight of, 10, 64, 143 scientific surveys about, 143–144 shahtoosh (hair), 108, 141, 145 study of ageing from teeth, 202–203 subsistence hunting and, 144 use of horns, 141–142 CI. See Conservation International CITES, 14, 15, 139, 140, 143, 144, 182 import/export office of, 14, 182 Civets, 6, 76, 82, 86, 232 Clarke, Donald, 92, 95, 99, 261n5, 262n8, 264n30 Classification of wildlife, 97–98 Climate changes, 29–36 climate trends study, 30 droughts, 27, 34, 50, 247 drying trends, 23–24, 29–35 grassland degradation and, 34, 35 permafrost reduction, 34 precipitation trends, 23–24, 24, 32 study of causes, 35 temperature increases, 33–35 vegetation growth and, 33–34 warming trends, 33–35 weather patterns, study of, 33 Clouded leopard, 5, 232 Cognitive formalism, 286n2 Colobinae. See Langurs Commercial harvesting Asiatic black bear, 220, 221 chiru, 220, 221 as conversation theory, 217–224, 219, 220, 220 musk deer, 220–221 potential for sustainability, 222 risks of, 218 social benefits of, 219, 220 value and earning potential, 222–223 Common leopard, 5, 10, 232 Communism, 54, 168 laws and, 93 perception of wildlife and, 71

331

Confucianism laws and, 93, 94 perceptions of wildlife and, 68–72, 115, 203, 209, 254nn55–56 Conseil International de la Chasse, 191 Conservation Force, 170 Conservation goals. See Future goals and ideas for conservation Conservation International (CI), 14 Conservation systems, Chinese, 16–19 “Constructing” nature reserves, 115 Consumptive use of wildlife, 84–90, 101, 121–122 Asiatic black bear, 88 as a conservation approach, 170–173, 217–224, 219, 220, 228 ideas for future reform, 210–211 models for the future, 211 musk deer, 122 in nature reserves, 116 perception of wildlife and, 16–18, 77 sustainable consumptive use, 211 See also Commercial harvesting; Farming, wildlife; Medicinal use of wildlife; Poaching Controlled experiments in wildlife science, 193 Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. See CITES Cordyceps sinensis, 42 Core zones, 112–114, 225 Coyote, 5, 231 Crested ibis, 98, 127, 234, 265n45 Crop cultivation, 55, 56, 112, 132, 210, 224 Culture, ethnicity and language, 24–27 Culture and wildlife science, 194–200 CWCA. See China Wildlife Conservation Association Dalai Lama, 25, 74 Dang River, 180 Daoism, 65–66, 109 Darwinian evolution theory, 175 Deer Eld’s deer, 127, 233 mouse deer, 5, 233 Pere David’s deer, 5, 82, 83, 84, 233 roe deer, 5, 233 tufted deer, 5, 100, 233 See also Musk deer; White-lipped deer Deforestation, 27, 68, 70, 116–117, 130, 209–211, 240 Degradation defined, 37 See also Deforestation; Grassland degradation; Rangeland degradation Demographic issue in hunting, 171–175 Deng Xiaoping, 54 Density dependence, 171 Density estimates in wildlife science, 195 Department of Fauna and Flora Conservation, 14 Desert biome nature reserves, 111

332

INDEX

“Desertification disaster,” 35 See also Climate changes Development in Western China. See Great Opening of the West Devil’s bargain, 18–19, 189, 191 future goals and ideas for conservation, 211–213, 217 Dhole, 97–98, 98, 121 behavior and characteristics of, 161–162 decline of, 159, 162 geographic distribution, 161 Diamond, Jared, 81, 154 Guns, Germs, and Steel, 151 Distance sampling in wildlife science, 195 Dogs. See African hunting dog; Asiatic wild dog; Dhole; Raccoon dog Domestic animals vs. wild animals, 79–82 Domestic camel, 157 Domestic goat, 180 Domestic hamster, 145, 234 Domestic pig, 82 Domestic yak, 153 Domesticating wildlife, 81, 151, 153–154, 155 See also Captive breeding and propagation Domnionistic perception of wildlife, 63–64, 76 Dong Zhiyong, 105 Dredging, 112 Drongos, 6, 235 Drying trends, 23–24, 29–35 droughts, 27, 34, 50, 247 See also Climate changes Dulan, precipitation trends in, 24, 32 Dulan hunting area, 178, 179, 180, 182–184, 187 Dunhuang, precipitation levels in, 24, 31, 32 “Dynamic incentive structure,” 172, 178, 188, 248n81 Eagle owls, 9, 107, 149, 235 Eagles, golden, 107 Eastern China vs. western China, 7–9, 8 Economic reforms of 1970s, 54 Economic statistics for Western China, 21 Ecotourism, nonconsumptive, 227–228 Eld’s deer, 127, 233 Elephant. See Asian elephant Elevation, Western China, 23 Elk. See Red deer Elvin, Mark, 3, 67, 229 Retreat of the Elephants, The, 156 Endangered animals lists, 97, 100, 132, 140, 144 See also CITES Ethnicity, language and culture, 24–27 Environmental awareness, 75–77 ESA. See U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 Eurasian badger, 107, 149, 232 Eurasian lynx, 107, 232

Eurasian starling, 6, 235 Experimental zones, 112, 113 Extinction by hunting, 171 Fairbank, John King, xiv Falcons, 5, 6, 9, 107, 149, 235 Farming, wildlife bear farming, 62, 82, 89, 221, 252n21, 259n32 commercial farming, 82, 89, 90 game farming, 14, 102 See Captive breeding and propagation Fauna, native, 4–10, 5 Ferret, black-footed, 232, 257–258n22 Festuca, 43, 46 Fifth Brigade at Gouli grassland study, 41, 42–43 Finches, 107 Firearms Law, 1996, 100–101 First- vs. second-class animal distinctions, 97–98 Fisheries bureaus and wildlife protection, 97 Fishing, regulations for, 112, 113 See also Hunting Floods in Western regions, 27 See also Climate changes Foreign-based hunting agents, 179, 181, 190 Foreign demand for chiru hair, 121, 141, 143 for hunting areas, 171, 178 for musk deer, 124 prices charged to foreign hunters, 179 Foreign hunter fees paid for, 183, 184 Forest degradation, retreat and reduction, 156 Forest retreat and reduction See also Deforestation Forestry bureaus, 14, 95–99, 108, 147, 179 Forktails, 6, 235 Fox, 5, 100 See also Arctic fox; Red fox; Tibetan fox Free-ranging animals. See Domestic animals vs. wild animals Freese, Curt, 173, 178 Fu Xiaofeng, 34 Funding hunting operations, 181–186 nature reserves, 114–115, 117, 119, 226 wildlife science, 207 Fur-bearing animal harvests, North American, 84, 89–90, 290n8 Future goals and ideas for conservation, 210–211 commercial harvesting, 217–224, 219, 220 Devil’s bargain and, 211–213, 217 ecotourism, nonconsumptive, 227–228 habitat protection models, 224–227 nature reserves and, 224–226 subsistence hunting, 213–217, 215 trophy hunting, 211–213

INDEX

Game farming, 14, 102 Gansu economic statistics for, 21 ethnicity and culture in, 25 grassland degradation in, 38 hunting in, 171, 177–180, 179, 182, 187 nature reserves in, 111, 112, 116, 118, 138 population density, 22, 27–29, 29 precipitation trends in, 24 Przewalski’s gazelle in, 127 size of vs. California, 22–23, 23 wild yak in, 153 wildlife/livestock conflicts, 30 Gaur, 233, 278n104 Gazelles, 5, 128, 233 See also Goitered gazelle; Mongolian gazelle; Przewalski’s gazelle; Tibetan gazelle GEF. See Global Environmental Facility Geist, Valerius, 217, 218 Gelugpa Buddhism, 25 Genetic material, preservation of, 83 Giant panda, 2, 5, 14, 78, 87, 232, 237n4, 256n3, 265n45, 275n73 behavior and characteristics of, 7–9 captive breeding and propagation, 78–79, 87 Chengdu Panda Base, 78 classification of, 98 in nature reserves, 78, 116 reintroduction into wild programs, 87 Giant squirrel, 98, 233 Gibbons, 5, 6, 265n45 Global Environmental Facility (GEF), 15 Global warming. See Climate changes Goat. See Chiru; Domestic goat; Mountain goat Goitered gazelle, 5, 197, 233 conservation success of, 163–164 hunting of, 171, 178 Golden eagles, 6, 98, 107, 108, 234 Golden monkeys, 4, 5, 9, 265n45, 275n73 Golmud Foreign Affairs Bureau, 108 Gorals, 5, 234, 275–275n73 Government wildlife institutions, 14–16 Grass burning, 112 Grassland degradation, 20, 29, 36–40 argali and, 136, 137 climate changes and, 34, 35 degradation defined, 37, 39 grassland surveys, 39–47 lack of data on, 38–39 livestock grazing and, 36–39, 47–52, 52, 149, 150 pastoralists/pastoral systems and, 47–51 pika and, 146 “ranching” model and, 48–50 “retire cropland, restore grasslands” program, 55, 56, 132, 210, 224 “retire livestock, restore grasslands” programs, 56, 224

333

Grassland degradation (continued) “set of four” policy for grasslands, 48, 53, 224, 248n81 socioeconomic factors affecting, 49–54, 52, 53 in Tibetan Plateau, 131 zokor and, 146, 148 Grassland Law, 1985, 39, 51, 57, 249n91, 252n6 Grassland survey studies attributes of, 41 Baizia Forest, 40–42, 41, 47 Fifth Brigade at Gouli, 41, 42–43 Jianshe, 41, 44–47 Yeniugou, 41, 43–44 Grazing grasslands, 36–39 See also grassland degradation; Livestock grazing Great Cultural Revolution, 54 Great Leap Forward, 54, 107, 116, 130, 155, 164 Great Opening of the West, 20, 54–57, 210 future goals and ideas for conservation and, 210 Green River Society, 144 Grizzly bear. See Brown bear Gross Domestic Product (GDP) statistics, 21 Ground jays, 107 Ground squirrel, 145, 234 Ground water deterioration, 31, 35 Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond), 151 Gurengou hunting area, 181 Habitat degradation, laws on, 94, 99 Habitat protection theories, 224–227 Han people, 24–25 perception of wildlife, 66, 76, 77 Hardin, Garrett, 48, 51 Hashiha’er hunting area, 180 Hei Hai (Black Sea), 105, 106 Hei River, irrigation overuse of, 117 Hejing County, 181 Helan Mountains, 127 Himalayan marmot, 164, 234 Himalayan snowcock, 9, 235 Himalayan tahr, 5, 10, 233 Ho, Peter, 94 Honey buzzards, 5, 235 Honey-eaters, 9, 235 Hoopoes, 7, 235 Horn growth, 175 Horn harvesting argali, 121, 133 chiru, 121, 141–142 rhinoceros, 222–223 saiga antelope, 283n13 trophy hunting, 170–172, 175–177, 198, 282n2 wild yak, 154 Hornbills, 6, 235 Horses. See Przewalski’s horse House mouse, 145, 234 House sparrows, 6, 235

334

INDEX

Hui Muslims, 25, 124, 125 Human activity in nature reserves, 112–115 Human population growth, Western Chinese, 10–12, 27–29, 28, 29, 30 Humans as wildlife protectors, 78–79 Hume’s ground jays, 107, 148, 235 Hummingbirds, 7, 235 Hunting, 139, 173 artificial selection and, 166, 175–177 Chinese argali hunting program, 139 conservation models for future, 211–213 as conservation tool, 133, 170, 171–173, 188, 197 “dynamic incentive structure,” 172, 178, 188, 248n81 Firearms Law, 1996, 100–101 foreign hunter fees paid, 183, 184 funding for, 181–186 land management and control, 186–187, 188–197 laws and regulations for, 16, 100, 102, 103, 112–113 musk deer, 123, 124 in nature reserves, 118, 139 “no-hunting” areas, 100 perception of wildlife and, 64–65 problems and systematic flaws, 188–191 reforms and changes needed, 188–191 See also Commercial harvesting Hunting, subsistence chiru, 144 as conservation theory, 213–217, 215 ibex, 213 potential for sustainability in, 215 Tibetan gazelle, 217 wild yak, 155 Hunting, trophy argali and, 133, 138–141 conservation models for future, 211–213 as conservation tool, 170, 171–173, 178, 187–188, 197, 211–213 defined, 170 demographic issue in, 171–175 foreign-based booking agents, 179, 181, 190 funding for, 181–186 horn harvesting, 170–172, 175–177, 198, 282n2 male animals, risks to, 172, 175–177 as means for kinship with wildlife, 171 natural selection interruption and, 175–177 prices charged to foreign hunters, 179 reproductive growth rate reduction, 172 risks and concerns, 172–173 Hunting areas Bu’erjin hunting area, 181, 185 Dulan hunting area, 178, 179, 180, 182–184 Gurengou hunting area, 181 Hashiha’er hunting area, 180 Kharteng International Hunting Area (KIHA), 179–180 Taoshan hunting area, 178

Hybridization, 80, 98 of wild camel, 157 of wild yak, 155 Ibex, 5, 10, 98, 233 conservation success of, 163–164 habitat, 134 hunting of, 140, 171, 181, 213 in nature reserves, 181 prices charged to foreign hunters for, 179, 284n31 subsistence hunting and, 213 Ibis. See Crested ibis IFAW. See International Fund for Animal Welfare Import/Export office, CITES, 14, 182 Incentives, hunting. See “Dynamic incentive structure” Indian rhinoceros. See Rhinoceros Inner Mongolia area and size of, 21 ethnicity and culture, 25 grassland degradation in, 38 population abundance and density, 27–29, 28, 29 population increase and migration, 129–130, 130 precipitation trends in, 32 Interethnic relations, 26 International Convention on Biological Diversity, 15 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), 14, 143 International hunting areas. See Hunting areas International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), 112, 260n34 Islam, 25, 75, 240n13 IUCN. See International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Jackson, John, 170 Jaguar, 5, 232 Jiang Zemin, 54, 254n55 Jiang Zhigang, 225–226 Jianshe Township, 136, 153, 179 grassland study in, 41, 44–47 Juniper trees, 33, 40, 42 Kalamaili Shan Nature Reserve, 118, 138 Kargyupa sect, 25, 40 Kazak people, 25, 26, 27, 180, 181 perception of wildlife, 75 Kekexili Nature Reserve, 61, 112, 118, 138 Kellert, Stephen, 60, 63 “Key species” defined in law, 84, 96–100, 103, 263n25 “Keystone species,” 149, 151, 277n89 Kham language, 40 Kharteng International Hunting Area (KIHA), 179–180, 187 argali in, 134, 136 Kiang. See Tibetan wild ass KIHA. See Kharteng International Hunting Area King cobra, 7, 236

INDEX

Kites, 5, 9, 235 Kobresia, 43, 45, 152 Kobresia pygmaea meadow, 43 Kokh’shun Tau Mountains, 181 Koko Nor. See Qinghai Lake Kunlun Shan hunting area, 187 Kunlun Mountains, 105 snow leopard in, 192 Kunlun Nature Reserve, 108–110 problems in managing, 115, 116–117 Kunlun Shan, 152, 180 Kunming Institute of Zoology, 75 Kyrgyz, 26 Lammergeyers, 6, 9, 98, 108, 234 Land conditions in Western regions, 27 Land Ethic (Leopold), 75 Land management and control in hunting areas, 178–179, 186–187, 188–189, 197 Language and perception of wildlife, 59–60 Languages, ethnicity and culture, 24–27 Langurs, 5, 231 Larks, 9, 235 Laws, Chinese aspirational nature of, 94–95, 99, 103, 114, 224 Chinese Grassland Law, 39, 51, 57, 249n91, 252n6 communism and, 93 Confucianism and, 93, 94 constitution and, 94 Firearms Law, 1996, 100–101 government structure and, 95 on “key species,” 84, 96–100, 103, 263n25 Nature Reserve Regulations, 1994, 112 nature reserve statistics and regulations, 111–115 protecting bears, 163 Rangeland Law, 94 reform ideas for improvement, 224–225 rural vs. urban environments, 92 saving face concept in, 93 state powers and, 94, 95 symbol laws, 94 tradition and, 92–93 on using tiger parts, 89, 141 vagueness of language in, 93, 94 See also Wildlife Protection Law, 1988 Leafbirds, 6, 235 Lee, Robert M., 139 Lenghu Lake, precipitation trends in, 24, 31, 32 Leopard. See Snow leopard Leopard cat, 5, 232 Leopold, Aldo, 3, 102 Land Ethic, 75 Sand County Almanac, A, 75 “split-rail” ethic, 211, 218 Leymus paboanus, 45

335

Lhasa, 24–25, 34 Li Dehao Economic Animals of Qinghai, 150 Li Minghua Return to the Wilderness, 75 Little owl, 9, 235 Liu Jianguo, 116 Liu Rongtong, 44 Livestock grazing, 131 argali and, 136, 137, 138, 140–141 grassland degradation and, 36–39, 47–52, 52, 149, 150 hunting areas and, 186–187 musk deer and, 125, 126 in nature reserves, 118 regulations for, 112, 113 “retire livestock, restore grasslands” programs, 56, 224 Lizards, 107 Local participation in wildlife management, 172–173 Lop Nor Nature Reserve. See Arjin Shan Nature Reserve Lynx, Eurasian, 107 Macaques, 5, 100 Management of wildlife government management of nature reserves, 114–116, 117 Management of wildlife, 13–16, 80, 209 community-based systems and management, 126, 172–173, 221, 228, 290n11 demand-side wildlife management, 172 lack of social institutions regulating, 13–15, 210 land management and control in hunting areas, 186–187, 188–197 supply-side wildlife management, 172 Mandarin Chinese language, 26, 27 “Mao Dafu” (Pu Songling), 66, 67 Maoism, 13, 169 Maps of China, x, xvii Marmots, 115, 162, 164, 234 Matthiessen, Peter Snow Leopard, The, 168 McBeath, Jerry, 95 Media influence on wildlife, 61, 78–79 Medicinal plant collection, 112 Medicinal use of wildlife bear gall harvesting, 62, 88–90, 221 musk deer, 88, 89, 90, 121, 122, 124, 126 tiger bones and parts, 89, 141 traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), 61, 76 See also Horn harvesting Mesic sedge meadows, 152, 153 Meterology, 30 See also Climate changes

336

INDEX

Mining in nature reserves, 118 regulations for, 112 as result of development, 55 Minority ethnic groups, 24, 26 languages of, 26 perceptions of wildlife, 72–75 Mitchell, Richard, 139 Mole-rat. See Zokor Mongol people, 25, 26, 27 perception of wildlife, 72–75 religion and, 26 Mongolia, 25, 26 Mongolian gazelle, 5, 128, 130, 233, 273nn31–32 Mongolian jerboa, 107 Moose, 5, 6, 233, 258n22 Mountain cat, 149, 232 Mountain goat, 5, 234 Mountain lion, 5, 232 Mouse deer, 5, 233 Muntjaks, 5, 76, 100, 233 Musk deer, 5, 122–126, 233 behavior and characteristics of, 123, 125 breeding and reproduction, 125–126 in captivity, 87–91 commercial harvesting of, 220–221 conservation ideas for, 125–126 decline of, 122–123, 124, 125 economic value of musk pods, 123, 124, 126 extraction of musk, 125 habitats of, 123, 125 limiting harvests of, 125–126 medicinal use of body parts, 121 socioeconomic factors affecting, 124–125, 126 used for, 122 Wildlife Protection Law and, 123 Musk ox, 5, 122, 234 Muslims, 25 Nagle, J.C., 92 Nash, Roderick, 59, 66 Nathan, Andrew, 94 National parks. See Nature Reserves Natural selection compromised, 175–177 Natural vs. captive habitat studies, 193 Nature Reserve Regulations, 1994, 112–114, 117, 225 Nature reserves, 105–120 argali in, 138 biodiversity conservation and, 105 buffer zones in, 112, 113, 225 classification of, 114 conservation theories for future, 224–226 “constructing” by humans, 115 core zones in, 112–114, 225 development and growth of, 111–112 experimental zones in, 112, 113

Nature reserves (continued) funding for, 114–115, 117, 119, 226 government management of, 114–116, 117 as habitats, 16 hunting in, 118, 139 laws and regulations for, 97, 99, 112 livestock grazing in, 118 management of, 114–115 mining in, 118 Nature Reserve Regulations, 1994, 112 “paper” reserves, 119 poaching in, 116, 117, 118 problems found in, 17, 109, 115, 116–117 provincial authority and, 108, 114 purpose of, 112 regulations protecting, 112 socioeconomic factors affecting, 115 statistics and regulations, 111–115 Yeniugou, 105–110 zoning system in, 112–114 Nature reserves in Western China Annanba Wild Camel Nature Reserve, 118, 138, 157, 159 Arjin Shan Nature Reserve, 111, 117, 143, 159, 163 Kalamaili Shan Nature Reserve, 118, 138 Kekexili Nature Reserve, 112, 118, 138 Kunlun Nature Reserve, 108–110 Qiangtang Nature Reserve, 112, 118, 138, 144 Qilian Shan Nature Reserve, 111, 116–117, 138 Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve, 118 Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve, 112, 118 Taxkorgan Nature Reserve, 111 Wolong Nature Reserve, 116 Zhumiulangma Nature Reserve, 112 NGOs, 14, 75, 89, 119, 143–144, 227, 282 Ningxia ethnicity and culture in, 25 grassland degradation in, 38 population abundance and density, 27–29, 28, 29, 30 Przewalski’s gazelle in, 127 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 14, 75, 89, 119, 143–144, 227, 282 Nondomestic species in captivity, 82 Nutria, 234, 261n38 captive breeding of, 90 Nyingmapa sect, 25 “One-child policy,” 12 Ordos plateau, 127 Osprey, 5, 6, 234 Overgrazing grasslands, 36–39 See also Grassland degradation Owls, 9, 107, 149, 235 Oxytropis aciphylla, 45

INDEX

Palm civets, 9, 232, 257n19 Panda. See Giant panda; Red panda Pangolins, 5, 76, 82, 234 “Paper” nature reserves, 119 Parrotbills, 9, 235 Passerine birds, 107 Pastoral culture and ethnic groups, 25–27 Pastoralists/pastoral systems grassland degradation and, 47–54, 210 Great Opening of the West and, 54–57 Peacocks, 5, 82, 235 Pelts. See Chiru; Fur-bearing animal harvests People’s’ Liberation Army (PLA), 131 Perception of wildlife, 229 aesthetic view, 63–64, 76 baohu (protection) thinking and, 60, 76, 79, 251n2 Buddhism and, 72, 73–74 changes in, 75–77 communism and, 71, 286n2 Confucianism and, 68–72, 115, 203, 209, 254nn55–56 consumptive use and, 17, 77 Daoism and, 65–66, 109 dissenting views on, 65–68 domnionistic view, 63–64, 76 hunting and, 64–65 (See also hunting) language and, 59–60 laws and, 101, 102–103 media influence on, 61, 78–79 minority ethnic group views, 72–75 tuanjie (unity) and, 68, 71 utilitarian view, 60–65, 68, 75–77, 101, 209, 211, 229 Western influence on, 75 wolves as pests, 58–59, 66, 160 Pere David’s deer, 5, 82, 83, 84, 233 Peregrine falcon, 6, 234 Permafrost reduction, 34 Pika, 107, 110 burrow density impact on vegetation, 146, 146–147, 147, 277n92 classification of, 145 ecological significance of, 148–151 geographic distribution, 145 grassland degradation and, 146, 149, 151 management and integrated control of, 150 perception as pest, 121, 146–147, 150 poisoning of, 147 population density of, 148–151 Pittas, 6, 235 PLA. See People’s’ Liberation Army Plateau pika. See Pika Plateau zokor. See Zokor Poa, 43, 46 Poaching anti-poaching education efforts, 14, 142 chiru for shahtoosh, 108, 117, 118, 141, 142 in hunting areas, 187

337

Poaching (continued) increased by captive breeding policies, 87 laws effect on, 123 by locals, 181 musk deer and, 123, 124 in nature reserves, 116, 117, 118 Pocket gopher, 145, 234 Polar bear, 5, 6, 232 Policies, Chinese basis of wildlife policies, 209 “big iron rice bowl” mentality, 49 crop cultivation, 55, 56, 112, 132, 210, 224 on grasslands, 48, 49, 51, 53, 224, 248n81 on hunting, 210 ideas for reform, 209–211 land management and control in hunting areas, 186–187, 188–197 on logging, 210 on musk deer, 126 “one-child policy,” 12 “ranching” model for grasslands, 48–50 “retire cropland, restore grasslands” program, 55, 56, 132, 210, 224 “retire livestock, restore grasslands” programs, 56, 224 “set of four” policy for grasslands, 48, 53, 224, 248n81 simplistic nature of wildlife policies, 210 toward ethnic groups, 26 on traditional and medicinal uses of animals, 89 Politics and ethnicity, 25–26 Pollution, 3, 55, 60, 92, 116, 158 Population biology, 173–178 Population growth, 10–12, 27–29, 28, 29, 30 Population stabilization, 12 Potentilla bifurca, 43 Poverty in Western China, 21, 27, 48, 239n10 Precipitation trends, 23–24, 24, 31, 32, 33–36, 34–36, 36 See also Climate changes Predator control, 102 Pronghorn antelope, 5, 10, 132, 233 Propagation. See Captive breeding and propagation Protecting biodiversity. See laws, Chinese; Nature reserves; policies, Chinese Protection (baohu) view of wildlife, 60, 76, 79, 251n2 Provincially protected species, 100 Prudent-use philosophy, 225 Przewalski, Nikolai, 128 Przewalski’s gazelle, 5, 126–132, 233 agricultural projects affecting, 131 behavior and characteristics of, 272–273n28 captive breeding and, 84 classification of, 128 decline of, 121, 127, 130 geographic distribution of, 126–129, 129, 272n24 grassland and rangeland degradation and, 131, 132 habitat of, 126–129, 132, 133–135 human population and migration affecting, 129–130, 130

338

INDEX

Przewalski’s gazelle (continued) increase in human activity in natural habitat, 121, 132 livestock density and fencing affecting, 131, 132 population and migration, 132 research and study of, 127–128, 132 Przewalski’s horse, 5, 84, 98, 232 classification of, 278n104 in nature reserves, 118 reintroduction into the wild, 258n24 Ptarmigans, 5, 235 Pu Songling, 66, 67 “Mao Dafu,” 66, 67 Python, 7, 235 Qiang people, 25 Qiangtang Nature Reserve, 112, 118, 138, 144 Qilian Shan mountain range, 22 Qilian Shan Nature Reserve, 111, 116–117, 138 Qinghai climate warming in, 34 drying trends in, 34–35 economic statistics for, 21 elevation of, 23 ethnicity and culture in, 25 grassland degradation in, 38 hunted wildlife price chart, 179 hunting areas, 178, 179, 180, 182, 187 nature reserves in, 112, 118, 138 population abundance and density, 27–29, 28, 29 precipitation trends in, 23, 24, 36 Przewalski’s gazelle in, 127 Tibetans in, 25 trophy hunting programs in, 171 white-lipped deer in, 195–196 Qinghai Lake, 127 agricultural projects and expansion, 131 decline of, 35–36 Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve, 118 Quail, 5, 235 Raccoon, 6, 218, 232 Raccoon dog, 5, 86, 231 Ramsar convention, 15 “Ranching” model for grasslands, 48–50 Random sampling in wildlife science, 196 Rangeland degradation, 27, 37, 38–39, 51, 131 See also Grassland degradation Rangeland Law, 94 Raptor, 98, 107 Rattlesnake, 7, 235 Reaumauria soogorica, 45 Red deer hunting areas and, 180 price charged to foreign hunters, 179 Red fox, 83, 89, 90, 231 Red panda, 6, 87, 232

Red wolves, 5 Redstarts, 9, 235 Reiger, John, 218 Reintroduction into wild programs, 79, 83–87, 98, 258n24 Religion and ethnicity, 25, 26 Replicated experiments in wildlife science, 193 Reproductive biology disturbed by hunting, 175–177 Restoring ecological environments, programs for, 27 “Retire cropland, restore grasslands” program, 55, 56, 132, 210, 224 “Retire livestock, restore grasslands” programs, 56, 224 Retreat of the Elephants, The (Elvin), 156 Return to the Wilderness (Li), 75 Rhinoceros, 6, 152, 222, 233 Ring-necked pheasant, 6, 235 River pollution in Western regions, 27 Rodents. See Marmots; Nutria; Zokor Roe deer, 5, 100, 233 Rufous-necked snow finches, 107, 110 “Rule of law” vs. “rule of men,” 94, 95 Rural/urban divide, 21 Safari Club International, 170, 191 Sagarmatha National Park, 125 Saiga antelope, 5, 10, 83, 84, 141, 233, 283n13 horn, 283n13 reintroduction into the wild, 87 Saker falcon, 107, 149, 234 Sakya sect, 25 Salar agriculturalists musk deer snaring and, 125 124 Salar Muslims, 25 Sambar, 5, 233, 284n30 Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold), 75 Sandgrouses, 6, 9, 235 Sandhill cranes, 5, 6, 234 Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve, 112, 118 Saving face, 93 Schafer, Edward, 63 Schaller, George, 78, 121, 135, 145 Schei, Peter, 105 Science, Chinese wildlife authoritarianism effect on, 196, 286n2 bias and uncertainty in, 196–199 captive vs. natural habitat studies, 193 categorization systems in, 200–203 cognitive formalism, 286n2 communism and, 286n2 density estimates, 195 difficulties and challenges, 193–194, 207–209 distance sampling, 195 experiments and approaches, 193 funding of, 207 institutional challenges to, 206–207

INDEX

Science, Chinese wildlife (continued) lack of data and information in, 195–200 publications about, 204–205 published technical papers, histogram of, 205 quantification and abstraction, 199 random sampling, 196 skepticism in science, 192, 203–206 Second- vs. first-class animal distinctions, 97–98 Sedge meadows, 152, 153 SEPA. See State Environmental Protection Agency Serow, 5, 234 “Set of four” policy for grasslands, 48, 53, 224, 248n81 SFA. See State Forestry Administration Shahtoosh, 108, 141, 145 Shanghai, economic statistics for, 21 Sheep. See Argali; Blue sheep; North American bighorn sheep Shen Yuanyuan, 19, 94, 261n7 Shrikes, 9, 235 Sichuan Tibetans in, 25 white-lipped deer in, 196 Wildlife Protection Law and, 100 Sierra Nevada mountains, 22 Silkworms, 82 Skepticism in science, 192, 203–206 Smith, Joanna Handlin, 66 Snakes, 7, 235 Snares, 123, 124 Snow leopard, 5, 10, 73, 82, 107, 168, 232, 280n123, xii research and study of, 173, 192–193 Snow Leopard, The (Matthiessen), 168 Snow partridges, 5, 235 Snowfinches, 9, 107, 110, 235 Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association, 144 Socioeconomic factors affecting culture and tradition, 24 grassland degradation, 49–54, 52, 53 grassland health and degradation, 49–54, 52, 53 laws for wildlife, 104 musk deer, 124–125, 126 policy on trophy hunting, 171 trophy hunting, 172, 188 Socioeconomic statistics for Western China, 21 Species comparison: North America with China, 5 “Split-rail” ethic, 211, 218 “Sportsman-conservationist ideal,” 218 Squirrels. See Giant squirrel; Ground squirrel State Council Biodiversity Working Group of, 76 on grassland degradation, 38 nature reserves and, 112 Wildlife Protection Law and, 95, 99 State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), 14 on grassland degradation, 38

339

State Forestry Administration (SFA), 14, 178 captive breeding and propagation, 83–84 Conservation Department of, 7 fiscal allocations for wildlife and habitat protection, 85 nature reserves and, 114 Przewalski’s gazelle and, 132 Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Bureau of, 182 on wildlife science, 195 See also Forestry bureaus State Ministry of Agriculture, 150 Steppe polecat, 149, 232 Stipa, 42–46, 152, 167 S. purpurea, 43, 45 Subsistence hunting. See Hunting, subsistence Subsistence systems of consumptive use, 211 Sun bear, 5, 62, 88, 232 Sunbirds, 7, 235 Supply-side wildlife management, 172 Sustainable use of wildlife, 101, 172, 225 Swanson, Timothy, 172, 178 Symbol laws, 94 Sympegma regelii, 45 Tajik, 25 Takin, 5, 9, 98, 233, 284n30 Taming animals. See Captive breeding Taming wildlife. See Domesticating wildlife Taxkorgan Nature Reserve, 111 Taxonomy systems in science, 200–203 TCM. See Medicinal use of wildlife Temperature increases, 33–35 Thermopsis lanceolata, 46 Threatened animal lists. See Endangered animals lists Tianjin, economic statistics for, 21 Tibet climate warming in, 34 economic statistics for, 21 grassland degradation in, 38 hunting areas in, 178 languages in, 25 nature reserves in, 112 population abundance and density, 27–29, 28, 29 religion in, 25 Tibetans in, 25 white-lipped deer in, 196 Wildlife Protection Law and, 100 Tibetan antelope. See Chiru Tibetan fox, 5, 107, 110, 149, 232 Tibetan gazelle, 5, 98, 106, 233 behavior and characteristics of, 164–165 conservation success of, 122, 164–165 hunting areas and, 180, 183 hunting of, 171, 180 price charged to foreign hunters, 179 subsistence hunting and, 217

340

INDEX

Tibetan highlands temperature increases in, 33 Tibetan people, 25–27, 40 perception of wildlife, 72–75 Tibetan Plateau chiru in, 142 drying trends in, 34–35 elevation of, 23 grassland degradation in, 131 nature reserves in, 111, 118 warming and vegetation growth in, 34 wild yak in, 152 Tibetan wild ass, 5, 117, 233 behavior and characteristics of, 165–166 classification of, 166 conservation success of, 122 geographic distribution of, 166 hunting of, 166 in nature reserves, 282nn148–149 overabundance of, 167–168 population density of, 166 as protected species, 98 reducing abundance of, 208 subsistence hunting of, 213, 217 Tibetan wooly hare, 107, 163, 234 Tiger, 98 bones used for medicinal purposes, 89, 141 decline of, 159 reintroduction into the wild, 87 Timber harvesting musk deer and, 126 regulations for, 112, 113 See also Deforestation Taoshan hunting area, 178 Tourism ecotourism, nonconsumptive, 227–228 effect on wildlife, 108, 109 in nature reserves, 113, 116, 118 Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), 61, 76 See also Medicinal use of wildlife TRAFFIC, 143 Tree shrew, 6 Trophy hunting. See Hunting, trophy Tufted deer, 5, 100, 233 Tuigeng huancao. See “Retire cropland, restore grasslands” program Tuimu huancao. See “Retire livestock, restore grasslands” program Turkic-speaking pastoralists, 26 Turkeys, 5, 235 United Nations, 13, 15 Upland buzzards, 107, 149, 235 Upper Yangtze Conservation and Development Organization, 144 Urban/rural divide, 21

Ursodeoxycholic acid, 88 Ursus (journal), 204 U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA), 97, 144 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 139, 144 USFWS. See U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Utilitarian view of wildlife, 60–65, 68, 75–77, 101, 209, 229 Uygur people and language, 25–26, 26 Vegetation growth and climate changes, 33–34 Vicuña, 141, 233, 270n21 Waddell, L.A., 73 Wagtails, 9, 235 Wallcreepers, 6, 235 Wang Song, 105 Wang Xiuhong, 34 Wapiti. See American elk Warming trends, 33–35 See also Climate changes Water buffalo, 233, 278n104 Water deer, 5, 233, 269n8 Wealth disparities, 21, 27, 48, 239n10 Weasel. See Altai weasel Weather data, 30, 30–31 See also Climate changes Wen Huanran, 20, 156 Wen Jiabao, 55 Western China aridity in, 23–24, 29–30 Chinese perception of, 20 conservation models for future goals, 209–211 development of, 54–57, 210 elevation of, 23 ethnicity and culture in, 24–27 environmental changes in, 27 fauna, native, 4–10, 5 maps of, x, xvii moisture gradients, 23–24 population, 22 poverty in, 21, 27, 48, 239n10 size of, 21, 22–23, 23 socioeconomic statistics, 21 wildness/remoteness of, 22 Western China vs. eastern China, 7–9, 8 Western vs. Chinese ideas and perceptions. See Chinese vs. Western ideas/perceptions Wetter climates, 30 White-eared pheasant, 9, 235 White-lipped deer, 5, 106, 110, 233 conservation success of, 163–164, 281n137 economic value of, 179 hunting of, 171, 178, 180 research and study of, 195–196 White-tailed deer, 5, 80, 233, 258n22 White-winged snow finches, 107

INDEX

Whooping cranes, 5, 6, 234 Wild ass, 106. See Tibetan wild ass Wild boar, 60, 76, 100, 278n104 Wild camel, 87, 98, 121, 138 Annanba Wild Camel Nature Reserve, 118, 138, 157, 159 behavior and characteristics of, 158 conservation efforts, 159 decline of, 157 geographic distribution of, 156–157, 157 hybridization and breeding, 157–158 threats to, 158 Wild cat, 82, 232, 276n86 Wild Fauna and Flora Protection Bureau of SFA, 182 Wild vs. domestic animals, 79–82 Wild/wildlife defined in Chinese language, 59–60 Wild yak, 5, 106, 110, 117, 121, 151, 233 behavior and characteristics of, 152 classification of, 152 decline of, 155–156 domestication of, 153–154, 155 geographic distribution of, 152–153 habitat of, 152–153 horn, 154 hunting areas and, 180, 187 hybridization and breeding, 155 mesic sedge meadows and, 152, 153 subsistence hunting and, 155 temperament of, 154–155 Wild Yak Brigade, 61, 144 Wildlife Conservation Society, 143 Wildlife institutions, 14–16 Wildlife Protection Law, 1988, 92–104, 95–102, 101, 114 argali and, 137, 139–140 captive breeding and, 100 as conservation system, 104 evolution of, 102–103 first- vs. second-class animal distinctions, 97–98 habitat degradation, 99, 101 hunting and, 102, 103, 178, 180, 187 “key species” in wildlife law, 97, 100, 103 lack of enforcement of, 97–99, 123 musk deer, 123 nature reserves and, 99 provincial government offices and, 99 provincially protected species, 100 revisions and reforms to, 103 shortcomings of, 97–100, 101, 104 See also Laws, Chinese Wildlife species comparison: North America with China, 5 Williams, Clayton, 139 Wolverine, 6, 232 Wolves, 107, 117, 121

Wolves (continued) geographic distribution of, 159–160 perception of, 58–59, 66, 160 poisoning and killing of, 160–161 predation on livestock, 159–161 Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), 7, 14 WWF. See Worldwide Fund for Nature Xie Yan, 105 Xining, precipitation trends in, 23, 24, 36 Xinjiang ethnicity and culture in, 25 grassland degradation in, 38 hunted wildlife price chart, 179 hunting areas in, 178, 181, 185 nature reserves in, 111, 112, 117, 118, 138 population abundance and density, 27–29, 28, 29 trophy hunting programs in, 171 Yaks. See Domestic yak; Wild yak Yanchiwan Township, 180 nature reserves in, 118 Yangtze river alligator, 78–79, 84 protection in the wild, 78–79 reintroduction into the wild, 87 Yangtze river dolphin, 98, 232 Yao Chi, the Jade Fairy Pond, 108 Yao language, 27 Yeniugou, 110 argali loss, 108 chiru poaching, 108 grassland study in, 41, 43–44 Kunlun Nature Reserve, 108–110 livestock effects on, 108 wild yak in, 152–153 Yugur pastoralists, 25, 26 Zebra, 154, 233 Zhu Rongji, 54, 55 Zhuang language, 27 Zhumiulangma Nature Reserve, 112 Zokor, 121, 145 behavior and characteristics of, 145 burrow density impact on vegetation, 146–147 ecological significance of, 148–151 grassland degradation and, 146, 148, 149 perception as pest, 146–147, 150 population density, 148, 148 Zoning systems, nature reserve, 112–114 Zoos, 63, 64, 75, 84, 87, 132 captive breeding and, 87 natural zoos, concept of, 63, 75 rationale for keeping animals in, 84 See also Nature reserves

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CHAPTER 3

Rich Harris completed an M.S. in wildlife biology and a Ph.D. in wildlife management at the University of Montana, where he is now a researcher affiliated with the wildlife biology program in the College of Forestry and Conservation. He is editor-in-chief of Ursus, the international scientific journal of bear biology and management. Harris began his career as a classically trained musician, then became a computer modeler for wildlife populations, and a caribou biologist in the Alaskan arctic, before getting involved with wildlife conservation in China’s west. He and his wife adopted a baby girl from China in 1991; all three live in Missoula, Montana.