NATURE RESERVES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 112

strict protection suggested by the regulations was immediately out of touch with what
anybody—national, provincial, or county officials, not to mention local people—had in
mind. Almost all nature reserves already had people living in them (one calculation was
that as of 2004, between 1.25 and 2.85 million people resided within the core zones of
nature reserves nationwide; 19 needless to add, many more must have been living within
nature reserves but outside these core zones). These people were already exploiting the
natural resources in ways that were contrary to the intended management. As the number
of areas under nominal nature reserve protection rose, the discrepancies between what
was codified in official regulation and what was occurring on the ground—indeed, what
anybody believed could occur—became greater and greater. As the area to which the
regulations applied became larger and more complex, the regulations themselves became
increasingly irrelevant. It was left to individuals at various levels of government to make
personal decisions impacting land management because the rule of law had been rendered
moot by the utter remoteness of its text from reality. Thus, as with the 1988 Wildlife Pro-
tection Law that preceded them, the 1994 Nature Reserve Regulations were aspirational
in character, reflecting an ideal of biodiversity protection that no local administrator was
expected to fulfill.
The aspirational nature of the regulations—and indeed the key to understanding why
Chinese nature reserves in reality bear so little resemblance to the vision they describe—is
explained by the two critical elements they leave out. First, they do nothing to wrest
control of land management from whichever governmental level possesses it at the time
of reserve designation (typically township-level collectives) in order to transfer it to
whichever agency is accorded management responsibility (typically the provincial-level
forestry bureau, less frequently the provincial-level environmental protection bureau).
That is, the prohibitions contained in the regulations sit uncomfortably atop whatever
other activities are already legal and ongoing on the land at the time of designation, as
provided for by local, regional, or provincial economic imperatives. They in no way
countermand or supersede other authority; rather, they simply provide dual, conflicting,
and unresolved mandates. 20
Second, neither the 1994 regulations nor any subsequent documents provide a guar-
anteed funding source for administering the reserves. While administrative rules and
oversight are to come from Beijing, most funding for reserve management is to come
from lower-level governments. Even as further regulations from the State Forestry Ad-
ministration in Beijing have provided specific and detailed staffing standards (as well
as detailed standards for the number and size of guard stations, type of equipment to be
purchased, width of roads to be constructed, ad infinitum, all calculated based on the size
and type of the nature reserve 21 ), funds for those staff must be provided by county and
provincial governments. Even upon obtaining elevation to national-level status (among
other categorizations, all Chinese nature reserves are classified as county-, provincial-,
or national-level, the latter being reserved for the most important reserves, with elevation
requiring an acceptable management plan and lengthy application procedure), day-to-day
funding responsibility remains with provincial-, county-, and township-level governments.
Unsurprisingly, reserves are chronically underfunded and undermanaged. In accord with