Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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.
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What may be less well known is that, until roughly 1998, most pasto-
ralists in China, although doubtless lacking the proper paperwork, owned guns. Until the
late 1990s, legal or not,
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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 small-
caliber, 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.
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Taken together, these laws present a striking and unresolved irony. As I argued in Chap-
ter 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 reiter-
ated 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.
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In short, the 1988 Law “protects” wild animals from killing, yet does nothing to ad-
dress 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 spe-
cies 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.
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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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