A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 226

satisfactory viewing experience. An example that would seem to have potential in China
is the construction of canopy-level catwalks and lodges in Xishuangbanna (in southern
Yunnan), built over water bodies where wild elephants are known (and induced by the
addition of salt) to periodically congregate. (Even here, however, most viewers return
home without having seen elephants.) But such examples will be hard to find in western
China, where the terrain is forbidding, the elevations high, the travel times long, and the
wildlife widely scattered over enormous landscapes. 22
Elsewhere within eastern China, ecotourists, if managed well, can potentially make an
economic contribution that might plausibly be used to pay the opportunity costs of main-
taining wildlife habitat. But even in eastern China, it is far from clear that the economic
activity engendered from such tourism acts in any substantive way to protect habitat. It
has been widely documented that ecotourism rarely translates into sustained economic
development for local people. 23
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Wildlife in China's west has, with some exceptions, persisted through historical time
periods and still has the potential for a healthy future. It has been able to survive, largely
in the absence of purposeful and directed conservation, because humans have been so
limited in their ability to alter the landscape. Just as in other frontier regions of the world,
there was little need for conservation when human pressures remained modest.
That circumstance is now changing. The relatively undeveloped character of the
Chinese west is on the chopping block, but there is no indication that a corresponding
development and maturity of the region's wildlife conservation system is in sight. The
strict protectionism that China has embraced as an overall philosophy has begun to reap
some dividends, but these gains could be short-lived if wildlife management does not
advance as a discipline as the challenges to wild lands increase. Chinese leaders are
right to believe that adequate controls are needed to ensure that consumptive use does
not quickly become excessive (as it evidently has following the collapse of centralized
planning in neighboring Mongolia). But an excessively top-down, bureaucratically rigid,
and technology-focused management approach that fails to deal with either the desires or
capabilities of local pastoral communities is likely to fail. Instead, bureaus at national and
provincial levels should conceive of themselves as outreach agents engaged in helping
communities to develop monitoring and feedback mechanisms by which they can both
use wildlife and meet the general objectives set by national policy. Community-based
resource management remains embryonic and experimental in China, 24 but moving in this
direction—even if haltingly and uncertainly—seems more likely to lead to a sustainable
future than does the current approach.
Consumptive use and developing increased authority for local people and their repre-
sentatives on small scales are not without risk, 25 and cannot be done without some initial
monetary investments. Local, participatory institutions to manage harvest, curb individual
behavior in deference to the group, and defend against state or corporate interests from
outside have little history anywhere in China. Yet these must develop in parallel with any