CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 52

programs, many of which undercut the tenure and assurance needed for a long-term view
of grassland health, the government undermines the constancy and assurance underlying
the responsibility system despite its purported efforts to support it.
THE GREAT OPENING OF CHINA'S WEST
As dramatic as changes in western China have been since 1949, the immediate future
promises yet more transformation. When Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms
in the late 1970s that were to unleash the fastest sustained rate of economic growth the
modern world had ever witnessed, 96 he was clear that coastal, eastern regions of the coun-
try would reap the benefits first, and that only later would attention be turned to China's
remote regions. 97 From the uniformly modest developmental levels of the 1970s, China
had, within less than two decades, morphed into a country of contrasts, with developed
eastern regions increasingly distancing themselves from the generally-still-poverty-
stricken west. By the late 1990s, China's leadership had decided it was time to redirect
a portion of national resources into equitability, even if it cost some resources that might
otherwise be poured into the furiously growing coastal areas.
Following various speeches and pronouncements emphasizing the importance of
developing China's western regions by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu
Rongji, the Great Opening of the West was formally announced in September of 1999 at
the Fourth Plenum of the Fifteenth Central Committee Meeting of the Chinese Communist
Party. Aimed at variously defined provinces and autonomous regions of the “west,” 98 its
announced goals were to equalize economic inequities between west and east by focus-
ing investment and infrastructure development in the west, to enhance national defense
(presumably by extending more stable control to the western border regions of the
country), and to “safeguard ethnic unity” by lifting up the economic level of the west's
minorities 99 (or, as critics would interpret it, by extending Han control of minority areas
and furthering assimilation of ethnic cultures 100 ). In April of 2000, the State Development
Planning Commission announced that ten “large projects” would herald the beginning of
the Great Opening of the West, of which nine were largely infrastructure development
and one largely environmental remediation. 101
The Great Opening of the West (GOW hereafter) has been translated from its official
Chinese terminology ( xibu da kaifa ) a number of ways, the chosen language usually
reflecting the translator's underlying attitude toward the policy. Press releases in English
for Xinhua and articles appearing in China Daily invariably use either “Western Develop-
ment Strategy” or “Western Region Development,” but foreign observers have dubbed it
the “Open Up the West Campaign,” the “Go West Campaign,” or even the “Great Leap
West.” 102 If the last of these is unfairly derogatory in its obvious allusion to the Great
Leap Forward, the official Chinese name renders this comparison apropos by specifically
including the adjective “great” ( da ), which inevitably harkens back to both the Great
Leap and Great Cultural Revolution. And if the term “Open Up” conjures a different
image than does “Development,” again Chinese officials have had a role: the word kaifa
implies exploiting and opening, and somewhere a decision was clearly made to use it in