NATURE RESERVES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 111

“. . . people wishing to exploit natural resources . . .” or “. . . people unaffiliated with
nature reserve management . . .” just “people.” Unsurprisingly, the regulations immedi-
ately equivocate:
If it is necessary to enter a core zone for the purposes of scientific research, measure-
ment, 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 na-
ture 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 resi-
dence 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 re-
quired for people to make a living within them. In buffer zones, which presumably sur-
round 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 wel-
come respites from China's otherwise human-dominated landscapes.
And indeed, had Chinese nature reserves been limited to areas where such manage-
ment 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