CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 22

Figure 2.2 Mean annual precipitation at selected weather stations in western China.
Note that although all amounts are low, precipitation declines as one travels
north and west.
To see just how dry, it is useful to compare mean annual precipitation at some towns in
western China with the arid southwest of the United States.
Xining, the booming capital city of Qinghai, gets only slightly more precipitation
annually than does Salt Lake City. Tuole, a tiny hamlet situated amid seemingly verdant
grasslands south of the Qilian Mountains, gets 286 mm/yr, about the same as Tucson. The
small town of Dulan, although situated at a cool 3,185 m (10,448 ft.) and able to support
irrigated agriculture, gets only as much precipitation as Phoenix. The town of Needles,
California (abode of the imaginary Spike, brother of the cartoon character Snoopy and
always depicted in Peanuts as consisting of nothing but cactus and sand) receives about
108 mm/yr in precipitation, but that is considerably more moisture than any of the cit-
ies in the western part of the Gansu corridor receive. Even Death Valley gets 40 percent
more precipitation than Dunhuang, and the aptly named Lenghu (“Cold Lake”) near the
Qinghai-Xinjiang border gets 50 percent less precipitation than Dunhuang.
ETHNICITY AND CULTURE
In western China, particularly in those areas where wildlife populations still survive and
have the opportunity to persist, what Chinese refer to as minority ethnic groups ( shaoshu
minzu ) are a critical component of the socioeconomic fabric dictating the future of wild-
life. Ethnic Han, who make up 93 percent of China's population overall, are minorities in
most counties in western China. Except for irrigated areas, land use—and by extension,
wildlife habitat—is dominated by people other than Han. (More than a few Chinese with
knowledge of wildlife have remarked that its condition tends to be a negative function of
the proportion of the human population made up by Han Chinese.) Although Lhasa has