INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 9

Figure 1.2 Approximate population of the area currently known as the People's Republic of
China, 400 B . C . E . to the present
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Year
the need for wildlife conservation. In the United States, the federal government first set
aside lands for nature protection in 1872 but by 1910 had established twelve national parks,
thirteen national monuments, as well as 150 national forests that themselves stretched
over about 730,000 square kilometers—almost 10 percent of the entire country at the
time. 8 China established its first nature reserve in 1956 and by 1980 had only a dozen or
so, constituting less than one-half percent of its territory.
One might plausibly argue that both countries got around to the task when they were
sufficiently mature and ready to do so. But the combination of China's population density
and the tardiness of any organized effort to conserve nature made its task quite different
from that facing North Americans, Europeans, or Africans. In 1910, as North American
conservation began maturing, the population density of the United States was about ten
people/km 2 ; Canada's population density was less than 0.8 people/km 2 . Even as recently
as 1999, human density in Botswana was about 3/km 2 , and in Namibia (as well as Aus-
tralia) only about 2/km 2 . In contrast, China's population density in 1980 was about 107
people/km 2 (and had risen to about 145/km 2 by 2005). At a time when nature reserves
were just becoming legally recognized and laws to prohibit widespread hunting just be-
ing discussed, humans had already set themselves down in virtually every conceivable
corner of China.
As a result, when Chinese finally started getting serious about nature conservation, they
had an enormous problem already facing them. North Americans living today have been
blessed by the foresight of those who, long since gone, established protected areas when
the Native American population had already been decimated but the European population