CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 206

What justifies an entire chapter on the deficiencies of Chinese science? If the issue were
simply one of not necessarily being up to date in the latest thinking in some facet of
evolutionary biology, or reinventing a wheel already produced elsewhere, faulty science
would be unfortunate but not damaging. But when large programs are being envisaged,
such as forced movements of people from their ancestral homelands or widescale poison-
ing that are unprecedented in scope since the ill-fated experiments of the late 1950s, and
these programs are justified in part on a threat to wildlife or ecosystem stability, these
threats require reliable documentation. Even if designed with the most honorable of mo-
tives (i.e., benefiting ecological integrity), there may be high prices paid, both in terms
of money and, more importantly, disruption to people's livelihoods, lifestyles, cultures,
and personal happiness.
When county leaders ask the administrators of international hunting areas if they can
accommodate twice or even ten times the number of hunters (and thus increase their
revenues), being unable to respond (or worse yet, responding in ignorance) can cause
damage both to wildlife and to the economy. When provincial leaders propose reduc-
ing the abundance of Tibetan wild ass while promising not to compromise ecological
integrity, how can they know how to proceed when so little is known about either? How
do officials know whether to encourage or discourage farming of black bears when we
know neither how well the populations are faring nor how the existence of farmed bears
is affecting them? How do we know if it is advisable to accept the risks inherent in releas-
ing captive pandas back into the wild if we don't know how critically they are needed by
that wild population? In short, how can China know how to (or even whether to) reform
its conservation system if the answers to the most basic questions regarding its current
successes and failures remain a mystery?