INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 12

Nationally, the primary office dealing with wildlife is the Department of Fauna and
Flora Conservation ( Yesheng Dongzhiwu Baohu Si) , which is one of twelve departments
of the State Forestry Administration (SFA). 11 Under this are offices of Wildlife Man-
agement, Nature Reserves, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) Import/Export, Wetland Protection, and, as mentioned earlier, a special office
just for giant pandas. All of these offices are primarily administrative in function, ap-
proving or denying permits and plans. All are based in Beijing and are relatively small,
and none has any research function. Although its name would suggest a minor function
dealing only with a single international treaty, the CITES import/export office is actually
the largest, because it is responsible for overseeing all international trade, both for listed
and unlisted species. 12
Also at the national level is the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), a
hybrid organization that really deserves the moniker GONGO (government-operated non-
governmental organization). 13 For many years, China confused foreigners by insisting that
CWCA was truly independent of the government; only in the 1990s, when NGOs such as
WWF, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and Conservation International
(CI) began operating in China did the language used to describe CWCA become more
accurate. In fact, CWCA is nongovernmental only in the sense that it does not participate
directly in permitting or management decisions. It is housed within SFA and all of its
employees are paid by the government. CWCA's best-known program domestically is
the annual “Love Bird Week,” a largely educational and exhortatory event occurring in
the spring of each year. CWCA also gets involved with anti-poaching educational efforts,
and some international cooperation. Since the establishment of international hunting areas
in the mid-1980s, CWCA has functioned as one of the primary domestic commercial
agents, selling hunts to foreigners and acting as a liaison to provincial hunting companies
and/or provincial wildlife authorities. 14 Also at the national level, the State Environmental
Protection Administration (SEPA) has nominal oversight of SFA's management of nature
reserves. SEPA itself manages about 19 percent of China's nature reserves. 15
At provincial levels, wildlife management offices are housed under the forestry bureaus
of their respective provinces. These provincial offices serve two masters simultaneously:
they are formally part of their provinces' forestry bureau, yet unable to act independent
of direction provided by the national-level Department of Fauna and Flora Conservation.
In China's west, these offices are even smaller than in Beijing, and appear to be woefully
underfunded and -equipped. In Qinghai, for example, there was a single trained wildlife
biologist as of 2005; Gansu had three for the entire province. Much of the oversight and
permitting done by both national and provincial-level wildlife staff is devoted to com-
mercial game farming operations; minor tasks include overseeing transfer of live animals
(e.g., to zoos) and permitting foreign trophy hunting. Wildlife offices also oversee most of
their province's nature reserves (those at both the national and provincial levels), as well
as certain aspects of zoological gardens. Again, these offices serve primarily to oversee
paperwork; they do very little field work. The CITES import/export offices also maintain
provincial stations in most, albeit not all, provinces.
So far so good, if this means that the bulk of wildlife work is carried out at the prefec-