CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 48

Given a new opportunity to spend his evenings comfortably watching satellite-fed and
solar-powered television, a pastoralist does not require greed or stupidity to overgraze
his lands in order to reap a short-term economic windfall. 86
The linkage between long-term grassland health and individual pastoralist income is
also strengthened to the degree that the pastoralist's land tenure is assured, and weakened
to the degree that his land tenure is uncertain. To be sure, legal documents presently give
pastoralists fifty-year contracts, 87 and there is currently little reason to suspect that all
lands will suddenly be yanked away from them in year fifty-one. The nationwide march
away from the communes and toward “market-based socialism” seems irreversible; pas-
toralists have some reason to look out upon their grazing allotments and consider them
their own.
But it seems far from certain that such a mindset truly holds sway in pastoral China.
In the “mostly market economy” of pastoral China, decisions about how many animals
to keep and how many to sell are the province of individual pastoralists. Few pastoralists
use computers to chart out their expected growth and yield, and most probably make de-
cisions based on their accumulated experience. Just as voters in a democracy often vote
against their own best interests, pastoralists may well decide how to manage their herds
based on an intangible sense of risk, so that the psychology of land tenure becomes more
important than its legalities. Most pastoralists are aware that their contracts run for fifty
years, but they may also place that awareness in the context of the past century's turbu-
lent history of governmental changes. Pastoralists are considered individual capitalists,
but they are cognizant that they do not own the land. They are individual entrepreneurs,
but often are bound by township- or county-level regulations on when they must move
among seasonal pastures, or when they must visit government-operated veterinary sta-
tions. They make their own decisions about herd size and composition, but are aware
that government programs initiated in Beijing usually have county-level quotas, and even
if programs are nominally voluntary, county-level staffs feel pressure to meet current
quotas. If an insufficient number of volunteers come forward, county-level staffs use
“education” or “persuasion” to enroll others. And with the recent push to expand nature
reserves (examined in more depth in Chapter 6), there lurks an ever-present potential that
one's long-term contract can be put at risk.
If Chinese policy errs in assuming that pastoralists can quickly adopt a household
ranch model without further degrading rangelands or incurring debt they cannot possibly
repay, some Western critics err in assuming that traditional pastoralists wish to retain the
rigors of a subsistence lifestyle. These critics have eulogized traditional herding systems,
encouraging their retention even in the face of increased human population size, a decrease
in absolute area available for pastoralism (due in part to conversion for crops), 88 and the
ever-increasing reach of the market economy. Incentives to limit livestock herd size that
work in the context of a subsistence economy may simply be ineffectual when pastoral-
ists are presented with other choices about how to store their wealth. The consequences
of naturally occurring regulating mechanisms such as blizzards and droughts may no
longer be acceptable to pastoralists who may wish to see their children educated, their
medical needs attended to, and greater creature comforts than a single solar-powered