NATURE RESERVES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 109

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, plan-
ners 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 prov-
inces 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 competi-
tion to designate as much area as nature reserves as possible, as though a prize would be