CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 53

preference to fazhan, the standard translation for “develop” when referring to countries
that have done it (or are still trying). 103
No government-issued documents on the GOW are complete without reference to ei-
ther “environmental stability” or “ecological construction.” 104 If only by their words (and
perhaps by a great deal more), Chinese leaders have clearly awakened to the interest in
matters environmental. Whereas environmental initiatives in the eastern, more populous
parts of the country focus on preventing or cleaning up pollution, the major government-
sponsored environmental initiatives in the west have dealt directly with land use, and thus
are relevant to our concern about wildlife.
The contest over terminology has also been played out in the variety of seemingly
conflicting objectives for the GOW: developing yet conserving, exploiting yet protecting,
enriching while paying heed to natural constraints, concern for the well-being of west-
ern environment via prioritizing the downstream (or downwind) effects of environment
degradation for the developed east. Clearly, appropriation of mineral resources has been
a high priority 105 and the most obvious manifestation of the policy thus far—improved
transportation infrastructure—appears designed to facilitate more efficient mining. At
the same time, proclamations about the GOW are full of statements about the need to
safeguard and even “improve” the region's fragile environment.
Up until about 2003, such initiatives were limited to active environmental remediation
via planting trees on steep slopes that had at one time been forested but more recently
ploughed and converted to croplands (“croplands to forests”), and grass where native
rangelands had been converted to crops (“croplands to grasslands”). These twin tuigeng
initiatives 106 were designed to take advantage of China's relatively plush budget at the
time (allowing the central government to provide direct subsidies to farmers who retired
cultivated land and thus lost that income-earning potential) and grain surplus 107 (allowing
in-kind subsidy of grain to farmers who would otherwise subsist on grain produced from
fallowed land). In replacing agricultural crops with grasses, the “croplands to grasslands”
tenet is to admit that it was never appropriate to attempt Han-style agriculture in the thin
soils, arid climates, and high elevations of the west. It tacitly provides preeminence to
pastoralism and admonishes those who, with Mao or even before him, asserted that natu-
ral limits could always be overcome. In political and economic terms, it forms a kind of
income transfer, taking advantage of available funds and surplus grain from the east to
compensate western farmers now asked to grow a plant they cannot eat.
As of 2006, questions remained about the future of the twin programs designed to
restore cultivated lands to less destructive uses. 108 Nationally, reductions in agricultural
lands were expected to reduce grain production by only about 2 to 3 percent, but because
of transportation inequities, individual counties were expected to have difficulty remaining
self-sufficient in grain. 109 Rumors swirled that the grain surplus that formed part of the
subsidy had already been exhausted (or perhaps had never even existed to begin with).
Others claimed that with the retirement of former premier Zhu Rongji, enthusiasm for the
program at top levels in Beijing had waned, and that the government led by Hu Jintao and
Wen Jiabao was simply less interested. In any case, both of the tuigeng programs had, by
2004, been cut back to about one-fourth of their originally intended scales.