A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 207

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A F UTURE FOR W ILDLIFE IN W ESTERN C HINA
The central problem in achieving conservation goals [is that] conservation goals refer
to long-term and communal interests . . . [that] conflict with the short-term individual
interests. . . . There are two main avenues towards resolution of these conflicts: one
involves bringing our ideals more closely into line with physical, biological or economic
realities, at the cost of compromising our conservation ideals; the other is to bring
physical, biological and economic events into line with our ideals with costs,
in terms of management, enforcement and public relations, corresponding
to the degree of the discrepancy between ideals and events.
—Richard H.V. Bell
It is time to recapitulate and move forward. Thus far, I have assessed (and often critiqued)
wildlife conservation—one might even say the lack of active wildlife conservation—in
China's west. But I have not yet put forward proposals of how things might be made bet-
ter, particularly given the unique and difficult situations facing those who would initiate
any changes. In this chapter I will attempt to remedy that.
Throughout this topic, I have argued that Chinese policy is based on the fundamental
premises that wildlife should be completely protected from direct human-caused mortal-
ity, that nature reserves should function as the primary lands on which wildlife habitat
merits priority, and that demands for traditional Chinese consumptive use of wildlife
are to be supplied by captive breeding. I have shown how current wildlife laws prohibit
essentially all local hunting and act to alienate people from wildlife. I have argued that
nature reserves posit an ideal of pristine nature entirely unaffected by human activity,
which—unsurprisingly, given the intense history of land use most everywhere—is gener-
ally honored in the breach. Outside of nature reserves, wildlife habitat has no voice. I have
argued that the emphasis on captive rearing flows from particularly Confucian notions,
not only of control and mastery of nature, but also of benevolent mankind, husbanding
animals in ways that are assumed to be superior to what nature itself can provide. Only
the third of these fundamental premises accords with the underlying tendency of most
Chinese to prioritize the utilitarian and practical values of wildlife over all others, but
although captive breeding strikes a resonant chord in China, it can only produce a pale
imitation of wildlife. I have argued that Chinese efforts to monitor and understand the
status of its wildlife have lagged well behind China's impressive scientific achievements
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