THE CHINESE PERCEPTION OF WILDLIFE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 57

gesture of you to help them out in this instance.” To this, the zoologist responded, “Oh, it
has nothing to do with helping the Tibetans. I'd kill a wolf anytime I had the opportunity.
Wolves are bad animals.”
Negative attitudes toward wolves are hardly noteworthy; indeed, they form the majority
opinion almost wherever and whenever wolves and humans interact. 1 Tolerant, much less
positive, attitudes toward wolves are recent, primarily Western phenomena. Yet finding the
notion of indigenous fauna categorized as “good” and “bad” in the year 1989, by an expe-
rienced and respected zoologist, one who had devoted over two decades to studying and
conserving the mammals of the region, who spoke English and had participated in training
sessions in the United States, in short, who—in Western culture—would likely be among
the most progressive in his attitudes toward nature, cast a bright light on the complex but
critical role played by attitudes and values in underpinning Chinese wildlife conservation. 2
In this little incident lay a lesson for those who would try to understand the complexities of
conservation in ever-contradictory China.
LANGUAGE
A good way to start is to look at the words used to describe or portray wildlife. Within
the Chinese language are suggestions that, traditionally, wildlife and wilderness have
been viewed negatively. The word yeshengdongwu, “wildlife,” currently carries no
great emotional baggage. However, it is suggestive that the adjective ye (“wild”) also
occurs in such derogatory terms as yexing (“unruliness”) and yexin (“ambition,” in the
sense of “overweening” rather than “noble ambition”). Similarly, the word used for
“wilderness,” huangdi, is equally accurately translated as “wasteland,” or “place of
desolation.” Of course, Chinese culture is hardly unique here. Environmental historian
Roderick Nash has discussed at length how the traditionally Western values of wildlife
and wilderness also were predominately negative. 3 He summarizes, “If paradise was
early [Western] man's greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode, was his greatest evil.” 4
Indeed, the Chinese language is considerably older and more resistant to change than
European languages, so one would not be surprised to find ancient concepts embodied
in current usage.
Still, the specific words used, both in formal documents and in local speech, often betray
deeper values, and to the extent that one can legitimately infer the latter from the former,
most of the contemporary Chinese lexicon continues to suggest a hostility to the wildness
inherent in wildlife and its natural habitat that is simply absent from modern English. While a
Westerner might punish a child for acting too “wild,” the word is not uniformly or inevitably
derogatory: the same parent, at least if raised during the 1960s or 1970s, might laughingly
describe a fascinating, perhaps unique, but generally enjoyable experience as “wild.” I know of
no context in which ye is used in Chinese in a remotely analogous way. And while a Westerner
might well characterize the natural environment of western China, with its scorched deserts
and towering mountains, as being “harsh” or even “unforgiving,” it is difficult to imagine
employing English vocabulary that casts these lands as somehow inherently unhealthy or
morally inferior. Yet an adjective used to describe northwestern China's natural environment