INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 14

there has been absolute prohibition. There are places where, supposedly, humans are not
even allowed to enter (core regions within nature reserves), and there are places where
wildlife habitat does not even merit a passing thought (almost everywhere outside of
nature reserves). But there are almost no places where wildlife can negotiate for partial
privileges, where it can pay for a recognized right for some, albeit not all, of the earth's
mineral and energy flows.
A PERSPECTIVE
In my view, China has a wildlife conservation system based, largely, on the following
three precepts:
1. Most wildlife should be completely protected from direct exploitation by people,
that is, through legal bans on hunting, such that wildlife is very deliberately and
very clearly set apart from humankind.
2. Nature reserves function as the preeminent (perhaps even the sole) lands on which
wildlife habitat merits any priority. Outside of nature reserves, wildlife habitat is
simply not a consideration.
3. The traditional Chinese consumptive use of wildlife is to be supported, but the
raw materials for it are to be supplied by captive rearing rather than by prudent
and sustainable use of truly wild species.
I would not argue that this system was designed following any particular theoretical
construct, or, in fact, that it was designed at all. Instead, it has come about organically as
a result of Chinese culture, history, and recent state policy. But rather than being any kind
of “wildlife conservation system with Chinese characteristics,” it seems to have few if any
Chinese characteristics. Excepting perhaps the third, these pillars of the current system
are paradoxically opposed, not only to what appears to be practical in the current Chinese
context, but even to prevailing Chinese mores and conceptions of nature. And rather than
result in the conservation of wildlife, this system seems likely to result in protecting pretty
scenery and producing anthropogenic animals. These two results are not the same.
Here are the root problems of each precept. First, both Han and most rural and pastoral
non-Han peoples in western China have traditionally (including up until quite recently)
consumed wildlife and their products. Underlying attitudes toward wildlife may differ
among individuals, but the notion of complete protection of wildlife appears not to have
arisen naturally from any native source. Some critics of recent Chinese wildlife conserva-
tion efforts have suggested that Chinese simply alter their way of valuing wildlife as a first
step toward better results. For example, Shen and colleagues 17 wrote that “The single most
important factor hampering wildlife conservation in China is the traditional use of wild ani-
mals for medicinal purposes, meat and skins.” A report commissioned by a prominent nature
conservation organization, referring specifically to bears, concluded that “No campaign to
slow or stop the bear trade will ever succeed without understanding Asian attitudes ,” but later
recommended that “educational efforts should promote the value of bears as wild animals and