CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 19

IS “WESTERN CHINA” REALLY PART OF CHINA?
Residents of the United States or Canada are undoubtedly familiar with differences be-
tween their western and its eastern halves. On a superficial level, the differences between
western and eastern China are comfortingly similar. In both cases, the east is where
the people and the power are. Eastern sections are more densely populated, wealthier,
more urban, and capture the lion's share of attention from outsiders. China's west, like
western North America, is larger geographically, more mountainous, more arid, and its
people tend to be poorer. But to stop at that parallel would miss the mark, not because
it is incorrect but because it doesn't go far enough. The differences between eastern and
western China—rich vs. poor, rural vs. pastoral, educated vs. uneducated, powerful vs.
weak, tame vs. wild—are so much more pronounced than the parallel differences in the
United States and Canada as to make these North American countries appear homogenous
by comparison.
The first thing that most Chinese will tell you about their western region is that it is
poor. Of course it wasn't long ago that poverty accurately characterized all of China, but
the west certainly has largely been left behind in the Chinese economic miracle that began
in the 1980s. As of the year 2002, mean GDP per capita in Tianjin was $2,484/year, in
Beijing $2,753/year, and in Shanghai had reached $4,059. That same year it was $786/year
in Qinghai, $737 in Tibet, and only $546 in Gansu. 1 Much of this gulf reflects the huge
urban/rural divide that exists throughout China, regardless of region. But even when the
effect of urbanization is minimized, the wealth disparity between east and west remains. 2
Predominately rural provinces such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Liaoning in China's east
have mean per capita wealth two to three times that of China's west. The five provinces of
Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia are lightweights within the Chinese
economy, accounting for less than 5 percent of total national production while account-
ing for about 6 percent of China's population and 55 percent of its area. Numerous other
socioeconomic indicators tell a similar story. The number of people per doctor in 1990
was about 134 in Beijing, 215 in Heilongjiang, and 288 in Shandong; in the west, paral-
lel figures were 347 in Qinghai, 478 in Tibet, and 676 in Gansu. In 1990, life expectancy
for males at birth was 73.7 years in Shanghai, 73.0 in Beijing, and 68.4 in Heilongjiang.
By contrast, it was 66.3 in Gansu, 59.3 in Qinghai, and 57.6 in Tibet. Enrollment rates
in secondary and higher educational institutions were five to ten times higher in urban,
eastern areas than among the western provinces.
Chinese might next point out how vast an area its western regions occupy. One need
only look at a map to see this: Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia
alone (encompassing 5.25 million km 2 ) would, were they a separate country, rank as
the world's seventh largest (sixth if the rest of China were considered in their absence).
If overlaid on a map of Europe, this “country” would blot out all twenty-five European
Union countries, plus the candidate countries of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Turkey, and
the former Yugoslavia (as well as Norway, Switzerland, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, thrown
in for good measure).
But all these statistics fail to capture the essence of the difference. What Chinese