Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 cap-
tive 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 exhor-
tation,
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 conserva-
tion, 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 speci-
fying 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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