NATURE RESERVES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 114

ON-THE-GROUND REALITIES IN WESTERN CHINA
That Chinese nature reserves have not necessarily lived up to their expectations has now
been widely reported in both English and Chinese, but most case studies have come from
southeast of my artificial dividing line. 25 Arguably the most well publicized case study is
that of Sichuan's Wolong Nature Reserve, the first and largest protected area for the giant
panda. As Liu Jianguo and his colleagues have demonstrated, designation of Wolong as
a nature reserve not only failed to halt deforestation, but the rate of forest loss actually
increased after designation, to levels similar to those outside its boundaries. The root cause
of forest degradation was not, as might be assumed, traditional activity by local people
already living in the reserve but rather by an increase in their exposure to market forces
that occurred when tourists began arriving. 26 Additionally, artificially planted forests
from the 1960s and 1970s, although seemingly thriving, have not provided the necessary
preconditions for bamboo growth, and thus, although qualifying as reforestation, have
not functioned as new panda habitat. 27 A number of other case studies suggest that the
problems documented in Wolong are shared broadly. Continued poaching, pollution of
important waterways, inappropriate use of critical biological resources, poor or no man-
agement, and destructive attempts to raise funds—often by abusing the very resources
entrusted for protection—have been reported in most reserves studied. 28
Nature reserves in China's west have been the subject of fewer reliable reports about
the degree to which they fulfill their mandate of protecting biodiversity. This is in part
because their huge scale and forbidding terrain make travel and investigation quite dif-
ficult. What little information is available, however, paints a picture of reserves that exist
primarily on paper. Where reserves were designated to minimize or reverse some perceived
degradation of, or threat to, flora or fauna, they have generally not yet had a positive effect
on biodiversity. Where reserves were designated in areas still quite wild, native flora and
fauna have generally persisted, but even in the most wild and remote of western nature
reserves, serious losses have occurred despite their legal status. Examples from some of
the larger reserves in the west must suffice where a full analysis is impossible.
Among the largest of the early designations in the west was the Qilian Shan Nature
Reserve, straddling the mountains of the same name in Gansu. Formally established in
1987 and elevated to national level the next year, the reserve is said to cover an impressive
26,530 km 2 along the spine of one of the west's major mountain chains, protecting an array
of wildlife and their habitats from low to high elevations. 29 Habitats in the Qilian Shan are
predominately grasslands at lower elevations and alpine rock and fell-field at higher eleva-
tions (the range has extensive glaciers), but the Qilian Shan also contains pockets of naturally
occurring spruce forest that survived deforestation campaigns during the Great Leap For-
ward and play an important role in regulating water discharge into the heavily agricultural
Hexi Corridor to the north. In the field, however, the Qilian Shan Reserve is recognized as
existing only within these small and isolated forest tracts, where tree cutting is prohibited.
The reserve functions as a no-logging zone, but otherwise has no visible existence. None
of the staff (headquartered in the city of Zhangye) monitors or protects wildlife, which
is left to cope with whatever habitat influences the region's intensive livestock industry