SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 137

are low, and few resources are spent on patrol or law enforcement. More critically, nature
reserve staff lack authority to prioritize nature conservation when competing economic
land uses are favored by county governments. Anti-poaching patrols might further reduce
illegal hunting within reserves, but mineral development and livestock grazing are not
effectively prohibited or even limited.
But large as nature reserves are, it is trophy hunting that commands the attention of
provincial wildlife officials, and it is the controversy over foreigners hunting Chinese
argali that has really put the animal on the international conservation map. Combine a
charismatic species, lots of money, and the suggestion of political intrigue in high places
and you've got a story that the popular media can really dig their teeth into. Such was the
case in March 1988 when four American hunters paid $25,000 each to kill argali sheep in
Subei County, Gansu, which had just opened its Hashiha'er International Hunting Area.
Chinese officials had authorized the hunt, unaware that taxonomic disputes, and indeed
differences over whether trophy hunting should even be supported by foreigners, would
soon create an international controversy that lasted many years and cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars' worth of time from attorneys and government officials.
The hunters involved were pioneers in the newly established Chinese argali-hunting pro-
gram. (Prior to this, only a single foreigner, Robert M. Lee, had obtained Chinese permission
to hunt argali since 1949, but his trophies were taken far from Gansu, in southwestern Xin-
jiang in 1980, and, for whatever reason, his hunt did not raise any legal issues. 53 ) The hunting
group included oil executive Clayton Williams, who later ran as the Republican candidate
for governor of Texas and who counted among his friends many influential U.S. politicians,
as well as Dr. Richard Mitchell, who at the time held an unusual joint appointment between
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS, which was charged with regulating American
hunting of possibly threatened foreign species) and the Smithsonian Institution (which was
often called upon to adjudicate scientific disputes regarding taxonomy). 54 When USFWS
enforcement agents apprehended the hunters' American-based agent carrying the trophies
upon arriving at the San Francisco airport on April 16, 1988, and confiscated the trophies,
a legal storm ensured, the consequences of which echo even today in Washington, D.C.,
Beijing, and the provincial capitals and county seats of western China where argali live. 55
At the time, U.S. law was silent on whether such importations were legal. But the Con-
vention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES),
to which both the United States and China were signatories, allowed imports of species
(and, importantly, subspecies) listed under its Appendix I only after having first received
an import permit, which the hunters did not have. In contrast, CITES allowed for import
of subspecies listed under Appendix II with only an export permit, which the Chinese had
provided for the hunters. Thus, the initial legal case centered on the taxonomic status of
the four trophies and their attendant legality under CITES. 56
Unfortunately, the taxonomic status of argali was a hornet's nest of conflicting opinion,
most of the existing literature being based on antiquated methods, small samples, and
reports published in the nineteenth century. 57 Thus, questions about which few had rea-
son to care—such as whether argali in a particular location within Gansu Province were
different from those elsewhere on the Tibetan Plateau—became central to larger ques-