INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 15

important members of the world's ecological community.” 18 These authors thus legitimately
suggested that non-Asians should seek to better understand Asian attitudes, but then seemed
to propose that such efforts be made in order to show Asians the error of their ways.
Yet there is no inherent reason why utilitarianism cannot be consistent with at least some
definitions of conservation. 19 If society uses and values a renewable resource, it is logical
that it ought to strive to conserve it so as to be able to continue using it. Westerners may
argue that the utilitarian view of a species makes it more valuable dead than alive. But a
similar argument could be made about the wildlife conservation system for many species in
western North America, where the premise is largely that a broad constituency—much of
which values wildlife primarily for food or sport—provides the political muscle to conserve
that wildlife's natural habitat. Such a system has not resulted in, for example, deer being
worth more when dead than alive.
Most Chinese defend their traditional consumption of wildlife products, and I discern no
evidence of a sea-change in Chinese perceptions of nature or wildlife. 20 But, paradoxically,
Chinese policy alienates the vast majority of Chinese from any direct use of wildlife. By
enacting sweeping bans on hunting, the Chinese legal system puts itself squarely at odds
with the Chinese cultural desire to obtain the material goods that wild systems can produce.
In most of eastern China, such a collision of interests is made unavoidable by the simple
overlay of such a dense human population on such a limited geography. Species of consump-
tive interest are already far too rare, and the habitat needed to support them far too limited,
to conceive of satisfying the demand through regulated use of a common pool resource. But
in much of western China, where the facts on the ground are quite different, the potential
still exists to conserve wild places based, at least in part, on the energy created by the use of
wild products they are best situated to produce. In the Chinese west, the disconnect between
historical practice and contemporary prohibition, indeed the mixed messages sent by a gov-
ernment that sanctions medicinal use while proscribing the means to obtain the medicine,
stand out as worthy of serious question.
Second, although the Chinese nature reserve system has developed astoundingly quickly
and now occupies a respectable proportion of the country, it is still woefully inadequate
in both quantity and locational representativeness if its objective is to function as the sole
source of wildlife habitat. Equally importantly, there is little reason to think that Chinese
nature reserves, at least as currently conceived and managed, can succeed in this mission,
if for no other reason than that almost all were provided legal status only after people,
with their needs for obtaining their own resources from those habitats, had long been
established there. If this weren't enough, nature reserves as currently managed in China
are in fact a compromise between the goals of nature protection and the usual ones of
increasing living standards of people, both local and distant, because the most critical
decisions bearing on the health of wildlife habitat are made not by reserve managers but by
governments for whom nature conservation is more of an annoyance than a goal. Beyond
the borders of nature reserves, habitat for wildlife is simply not a consideration.
Third, captive breeding can produce wildlife products, but it can never produce wildlife.
Captive breeding adopts a technological attitude toward what is partly a spiritual problem,
circumventing the need to maintain wildness in order to produce wild products. It may