THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 245

profits. Yet the government failed to fully investigate and, instead, punished the activists
demanding an accounting.
By way of comparison, the government and conservationists moved swiftly to save pan-
das from the rubble of the enormous earthquake. In a video called Out of the Rock Comes
Life , the pandas caught in the earthquake are shown being transferred to new temporary
homes, where two cubs named Ping-Ping and An-An are born, grow up, play with the
workers and are then returned to their homes in the wilder reserves. Four months after the
earthquake panda tourism was back at near-peak numbers in the least-affected areas. And
on the first-year anniversary of the quake, the province handed out to tourists $1.9 million
of special “panda cards” for discounts and free entry to attractions.
Conservationists have been equally adroit at using the panda in their Sisyphean struggle
to protect and expand China's wild habitat. In the name of saving the endangered panda,
Chinese conservationists have convinced the government to set aside hundreds of thou-
sands of acres of land, closing them off to logging and development to make safe homes
for monkeys, wild goats like the golden Takin goat-antelope and thousands of bird species.
They reverted back to their wilderness state in the mountainous regions of Sichuan, even
in areas that had been heavily logged. In a few years clean water was running through the
valleys, flowering plants and shrubs grew back, and the air was fresh. The forests began to
resemble the exotic woods described by Marco Polo centuries ago with their golden pheas-
ants. Part of the unspoken bargain for creating and keeping these reserves was opening up
areas for tourism.
Just before I left Beijing to join Bill in Shanghai, I attended a panda photo exhibit with
Zhang Mei. Her WildChina company has several tours into panda reserves and contrib-
utes to their preservation—part of her sustainable-tourism program. Xiang Ding Qian, a
park ranger at the Changqing Nature Reserve in Shaanxi, spent seven years taking color
photographs of the wild, shy bears, capturing them swinging through trees in the snow and
waddling through bamboo forests in the summer. A visit to the Chengdu panda reserve
has become an essential part of most foreigners' tours of China.
Nana was our tour guide in Chengdu. A moon-faced young woman in her early twen-
ties living with her mother, Nana said she had no interest in politics. She loves movies and
considers Denzel Washington the world's best actor. She said she loved fashion and wore
a pink leatherlike jacket with form-fitting gray pants and an organza gray scarf with pink
polka dots. She had no real memory of Deng Xiaoping and knew little of the Cultural Re-
volution. She was the exact opposite of Lin Xi.
Yet Nana, too, introduced herself to us by telling us her life story, which took no time at
all. Then she went straight to a business proposition. “You are going to the Panda Reserve
tomorrow. For one hundred seventy dollars you can hold a baby panda. Cash only in
American dollars, no Chinese yuan, no credit cards.”