INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 1

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I NTRODUCTION
Through more than three thousand years, the Chinese refashioned China.
They cleared the forests and the original vegetation cover, terraced its hill-slopes,
and partitioned its valley floors into fields. They diked, dammed, and diverted its rivers
and lakes. They hunted or domesticated its animal and birds; or else destroyed their
habitats as a by-product of the pursuit of economic improvements. By late-imperial
times there was little that could be called 'natural' left untouched by
this process of exploitation and adaptation.
—Mark Elvin
Experience with game has shown . . . that a determination to conserve, even when
supported by public sentiment, protective legislation, and a few public reservations or
parks, is an insufficient conservation program. Notwithstanding these safeguards . . . wild
life is year by year being decimated in numbers and restricted in distribution
by the identical economic trends—such as clean farming, close grazing, and drainage—
which are decimating and restricting game. The fact that game is legally shot
while other wild life is only illegally shot in no way alters the deadly truth
of the principle that it cannot nest in a cornstalk.
—Aldo Leopold
Wildlife? Yes. China? Of course. But China and wildlife? Seems a strange match. In
most minds, I suspect there isn't much of a connection. Most Westerners who have vis-
ited China—indeed, I suspect most Chinese themselves—have never seen a wild animal
there beyond the common pigeons and sparrows that inhabit cities and farmyards, or
perhaps a few bats flitting about at dusk over irrigation canals. China's environmental
problems have recently loomed large, both within China and elsewhere, and nobody
seriously disputes that a stable future cannot be built on a deteriorating environment. As
is appropriate, most investigations into China's environmental problems have focused
on pollution, energy use, water, and land degradation; wildlife per se has generally been
an afterthought. 1 Does China have much interesting wildlife, and does its conservation
mean much for China or the world?
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