CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 205

within a few of the larger universities accept some applied research as legitimate, and some
courses that are clearly within the domain of wildlife biology are taught. 21 A few units of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences also engage in applied wildlife research. 22 But as of 2005,
at only a single university in the entire country could a student study wildlife per se. This
not only tends to produce considerable academic “inbreeding” but also suggests that the
legitimacy for which wildlife scientists have struggled in the West over the first few decades
of the field's existence as an academic discipline has yet to occur in China.
Further, wildlife research, like any other scientific discipline, requires funding. In China,
most funding for field studies comes from the National Natural Science Foundation, 23 but
it is unclear how many adjudicators of these proposals understand the particular needs
and difficulties of wildlife work. Proposals for graduate-level research are more likely
to be funded if they promise groundbreaking results in very little time. Overly ambitious
proposals that attempt to describe the entire ecology of a species or determine its status
nationwide (as in the example used to begin this chapter) tend to attract funding, when an
objective appraisal would suggest that the objectives cannot possibly be met in the time
frame or within the allocated budget. 24 In contrast, a more modest proposal that aims to add
a useful, if partial, piece of a larger puzzle, is likely to be rejected as inconsequential.
Chinese academics (both graduate students and their professors) are also under unusu-
ally intense pressure to publish; failure to produce an accepted article often means failure
to graduate. While the underlying rationale is laudable, the strict publishing requirement
pushes students and their advising professors in the direction of trivial studies (in which
some statistical difference will likely be found) at the expense of studies with true con-
servation value (which may, because of their difficulty, fail to yield publishable data in
the limited field time students have available).
Perhaps even more fundamental is the fact that wildlife science will have difficulty
advancing as long as there is such a weak infrastructure for acting on wildlife knowledge.
The link between research and management in the North American wildlife establish-
ment, for example, is often frayed and not nearly as tight as we would like. But Chinese
wildlife research lives almost in an academic vacuum, bereft of a node to which it might
conceivably link. Much work done in universities or the Academy of Sciences serves
only to fill up journals and to pad resumes.
Without discounting the value of pure research, it often progresses best when respond-
ing to insufficiencies noted by applied biologists. Wildlife is, at its core, an applied sci-
ence that depends upon, but is not identical to, pure zoological research. In the absence
of management agencies calling upon the research community to assist them in solving
problems, scientists within academia naturally tend to address questions of interest to
other academics (or which easily lead to publications), rather than to focus on the ever-
pressing demands of on-the-ground conservation.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
So what? If, as I have argued, wildlife conservation is really a matter of allocating hu-
man resources, limiting human behavior, and understanding incentives for humans to
take various actions, does it matter if Chinese wildlife science is a bit behind the times?