Harris, R.B. 1996 Introduction: perspectives on wildlife conservation in China and Taiwan., Chinese Environment and Development 6 (4):3-11.
(This introduction appeared prior to a series of translated articles in Chinese Environment and Development, volume 6, issue 4, 1996).
Of all the many great legacies that Chinese hope to provide their children, none is currently more threatened with destruction than China's unique and diverse wildlife. China's native fauna is among the richest in the world (Wang and Chen 1992), but, excepting only those species with the most tolerance to mankind, it is currently waging a losing battle against habitat loss and excessive exploitation. Chinese -- both on the mainland and in Taiwan -- are increasingly aware of this, yet the road toward successful wildlife conservation seems a tortuous one, obstructed by historical, cultural, economic, and even political factors. Given all the other demands on the limited resources available to address environmental and developmental problems, how can Chinese society adjust, so as to prevent a future in which China's unique fauna exists only in zoos, or perhaps only in memory?
This edition of Chinese Environment and Development addresses that question by featuring six papers, each with a different focus, and each with a different viewpoint on current problems and future prospects for China's wildlife. Four papers are from the People's Republic and two are from Taiwan, but all treat wildlife conservation issues that have generality, eschewing those that deal with specific research topics.
The search for such papers was not easy. Because most Chinese natural scientists are trained to work deeply but narrowly, few feel comfortable addressing the necessarily cross-disciplinary problems of wildlife conservation. (Indeed, only in recent years have western-trained biologists been willing to step away from the safe confines of their technical specialties in order to investigate the inextricable links between the policy sciences and biological conservation). And because the wildlife field remains a backwater within the context of overall Chinese academia, few social scientists -- who might otherwise bring a broader viewpoint to bear -- even consider the subject. Even within the selected papers presented here, the reader must be alert to the small hints of attitudes and policy suggestions contained within the rather more technical discussions of species, harvests, and conservation biology.
Dominant Themes
Wildlife Use in Chinese Society
Divergent as these papers are, a number of themes emerge as worthy of highlighting. By far the predominant among them is the pervasive view of wildlife as something to be used by mankind. This utilitarian (Kellert 1983) attitude is so entrenched that it is more easily recognized by Westerners than by Chinese themselves. While some Chinese scientists (and to a lesser degree, members of the general populace) are beginning to emphasize other values for wildlife, the utilitarian perspective remains strong today. Difficult as this is to accept for urban-based Westerners, it should be remembered that, on a global spatial scale and an historical temporal scale, it is the newer, more ecologically-based view of wildlife that is the exception, and the current Chinese utilitarian view that is the norm. These papers take note of this tradition, and some begin to question whether it might be one worth abandoning.
Probably the clearest view of wildlife as primarily an economic resource comes from Sheng's paper. He notes the high proportion of China's mammalian species in current use. Of interest as well is that, while he devotes some space to the problems of endangered species, he tends to view saving such species primarily as a mean by which use that is currently suspended may be resumed at some future date. Finally, while Sheng's paper admirably summarizes the status of many of China's most important mammalian resources, it is less informative on the issue of exactly how those resources might better be protected and managed. Scientific investigation is extolled, but how more knowledge gets translated into better conservation on-the-ground is a question Sheng doesn't ask, much less answer.
Liu Xiaoru's article includes a similarly detailed account of the history and culture of wildlife use in Taiwan. Here, the cultural background remains the same, but the economic foreground is quite different: a primarily modernized and urban population. Unlike Sheng, Liu has some stark contrasts to paint for us, including the differences in traditional use by aboriginal peoples from the currently fashionable practice of ordering up a feast of wild delicacies to impress friends or business associates.
Wang's paper too, although mostly concerned with the progress of restoring a once-abundant and now-endangered species to its native habitat, ends with the prospects for future use of the Formasan Sika deer (Cervus nippon taiouanus).
It is left for Zhao Qikun to question whether there may, ultimately, be choices to be made between persistence of currently endangered populations of wildlife and the high levels of use traditionally made of these species. Zhao takes on the notion that traditional medical use poses no particular conflict with wildlife conservation, challenging his readers to admit that their own cherished cultural traditions may be at the root of many of wildlife's problems in China.
The Role of the Legal System
A second theme emerging from these papers is the role of laws and regulations in contribution to wildlife conservation. Traditionally, Chinese use of the legal system differs considerably from the Western tradition, yet recently enacted wildlife laws appear to mimic (in spirit, if not in detail) Western progenitors. What are the implications of these differences and similarities for wildlife conservation?
Both the PRC and Taiwan have been relatively late in enacting wildlife laws and establishing nature reserves. Yet, as Yan reminds us here, the last decade has seen a rapid increase in the number of reserves established, and the enactment of ever stricter wildlife protection legislation. Both China and Taiwan can now boast that they legally protect all of their endangered wildlife, and the PRC has one of the fastest growing nature reserve systems in the world. In Taiwan, the national park in which the work described by Wang takes place (Kenting) was gazetted only in 1982; yet today there are an additional 5 national parks in Taiwan.
Yet, laudable in spirit as these recent laws and regulatory actions are, they tend to exist in regulatory and institutional vacuums. For example, the 1988 National Wildlife Law of China (PRC 1988) declares it state policy to promote and perpetuate wildlife, yet does nothing to address habitat loss or degradation. It prohibits killing of endangered (and some non-endangered) wildlife, but fails to establish an infrastructure that can monitor or enforce these strictures. Moreover, it allows virtually no participation of local people in even limited taking of a great number of species that are numerous enough to be sustainably used. Thus, in some situations, it acts principally to alienate people from the wildlife they live alongside, providing them little benefit beyond the vague sense of helping to preserve national treasures. Such a blanket prohibition in the absence of accompanying incentive programs tends to encourage movement of existing use patterns out of the mainstream, and into the underground economy.
Liu similarly describes a situation in which what exists in law and what occurs on the ground are vastly different. A nationwide ban on hunting in Taiwan seems to have had little effect (a similar province-wide hunting ban in Yunnan province -- with similar effect -- was discussed by Ma et al. 1995).
Yan stresses the importance China places on its nature reserve system in conserving wildlife (there are no National Parks per se in the PRC). Yet one cannot avoid wondering: what is to be the future of wildlife in areas other than these nature reserves? While Yan clearly spells out the problems of China's reserve system from the perspective of conservation biology, he says less about how well the individual reserves succeed to begin with. Zhao gives us some hints, when he suggests that many Chinese reserves exist "on paper only".
Yet it would be a mistake to easily dismiss the importance and potential of the nature reserve system. And to add perspective to the difficulties such reserve managers face, recall that almost all these areas have been carved from areas currently occupied by people. While these areas all have outstanding natural qualities -- largely due to being blessed by much lower human density than is true for China as a whole -- those people living in or around these new reserves are still a force to be reckoned with. They often have traditional and customary use of the area for agriculture, gathering of forest or range products, and hunting. This contrasts with the West, where most large parks or wildlife preserves had been reserved from intensive human use well before human density reached its current levels (to say nothing of the current levels in Taiwan and the PRC).
Wildlife and Concepts of Property Rights
If legal mechanisms are not the only way to encourage wildlife conservation, might there be others? Liu's article touches briefly on concepts of property and land tenure as applied to wildlife in Chinese traditional thought. However, it is Ju and Jiang that deal more forthrightly with this issue.
The difficulty of asking possibly sensitive questions that bear on politics has constrained this debate in China, but Ju and Jiang take it on directly in their most thought-provoking article. Indeed, they question the prevailing paradigm of wildlife management in China, namely that wildlife is state-controlled property, and that all wildlife management therefore emanates from central authority, delegated downward only to the state's direct representatives (e.g., local governments). They broach the fundamental question, 'are our current theories, concepts, systems, institutions, and laws, capable of dealing with this new reality'? This approach contrasts with Yan, Sheng, and most other Chinese authors, who, while not painting a dishonest picture of the current situation, primarily stress strengthening existing "systems" -- albeit without realistic scenarios of how such might be achieved -- rather than suggesting that the system itself may require reform.
Ju and Jiang identify the major conceptual problems in achieving conservation in China as property rights issues, specifically, the open access nature of the current system, in which government ownership with insufficient government investment leads directly to "whoever hunts it, gets to keep it". Clearly, the failure to link rewards with investment has been a major stumbling block to encouraging investment in wildlife activities worldwide.
Their suggestion is essentially that the responsibility system currently in place in the agricultural sector (zerenzhi) be expanded to apply to wildlife management as well. Put simply, they propose that wildlife be managed within a market setting, and therefore that ownership rights typical of market systems be clarified. Such a system would attempt to solve the fundamental problem of open access by explicitly linking rewards to performance by clarifying rights to, and responsibilities for, wildlife.
Lacking, however, in their discussion is any recognition that, unlike agricultural land, wildlife is a "fugitive" resource (sensu Ciriacy-Wantrup 1985), i.e., cannot easily be owned or controlled by an individual or small group. Because most species have spatial requirements that easily exceed what can be easily controlled by a small group, and because animals are not fixed to specific plots of land, their management requires the cooperation (or at least acquiescence) of entire communities of people.
By allowing non-local people the authority to "manage" wildlife, Ju and Jiang ignore the critical issue of habitat management, and thus may fall victim to the very "mortality-focused" thinking they criticize. Contractors from outside the local area, or who lack any connection with other government systems, would be powerless to protect existing wildlife habitats or restore degraded ones. It may be an overly optimistic view of market systems to assume that they are so responsive and flexible as to allow such outside "investors" to effectively shoulder these burdens.
Thus, while the contract system proposed by Ju and Jiang moves along a radically different trajectory than does current management, it retains the latter's characteristic of ignoring the crucial role of the local community in acting as the "contractor". Because it explicitly allows contractors to be government units, collectives, or even individuals, and includes no mandate that these in some way represent the interests of the local community that must bear the opportunity costs of maintaining wildlife, it runs the risk of failing the test it sets up for itself, namely, the linking of benefits with interests. Rather, it risks allowing wildlife to be rented or purchased by those with no ability to actually protect it, and no long-term stake (other than simply financial) in land management decisions implied by the desire to increase wildlife production.
By contrast, the system achieves much more feasibility (to say nothing of justice) if "contractors" are equated with agents of local communities, responsible to some expression of the latter's collective will. This, then, begins to look more like cooperative management, with the state still able to provide general goals and policies, but implementation and capture of benefits left to the local level. But it also implies a more complex system in which rights, responsibilities, and benefits must be allocated and shared among a possibly diverse (albeit local) group, and thus requires a more sophisticated mechanism of determining goals and resolving disputes than presently exists in most of China.
Conflicts of Values: Han and other ethnic groups
A fourth theme emerges is the fact that both Taiwan and the PRC contain minority, ethnic cultures with differing histories and value systems than the majority Han. While these ethnic groups are unimportant numerically, they have a disproportionate influence on wildlife conservation, largely because they tend to be distributed where wildlife habitat remains. In fact, it may be more accurate to reverse that logic, by stating that wildlife communities and habitats are generally healthier and more intact in areas of predominately ethnic-minority occupance than in ethnic-Han areas.
Both Liu (in Taiwan) and Zhao (in Yunnan) make reference to the fact that indigenous wildlife conservation systems have tended to suffer with increasing exposure to other cultures (including Han). Interestingly, neither offers any optimism that such cultures may provide the basis for conservation systems separate from those in Han-dominated regions. Yet, the mere presence of otherwise rare species in minority areas suggests that some cultural patterns may allow for conservation in unorthodox ways (i.e., through taboos, religious beliefs, or technological limitations).
Questions for the future
Wildlife conservation systems in both the PRC and Taiwan appear to be systems in transition. Despite the obvious differences in economics and political systems, the problems facing wildlife in the PRC and Taiwan are remarkably similar. In both places, conservation systems remain embryonic and ill-funded, modern inventions thrust upon cultures in which the "wild" is something to be tamed more than admired, forced to cope not only with a tradition of heavy utilization, but increasing pressures of modernization and development. In both areas, a legal framework for wildlife conservation has been developed, but it is less clear that these alone will suffice to modify human activities that are increasingly putting the very existence of native faunas into jeopardy. And in both areas, new concepts are now emerging. Questions are being asked about the appropriateness of traditional use patterns; skepticism is being expressed that emulating recent Western conservation strategies is the most useful tact; aboriginal traditions are being treated with a new respect. Such discussion and ferment is welcome: the task is difficult and time is growing short. All ideas of how to most effectively conserve wildlife in the PRC and Taiwan deserve thorough consideration.
To the authors of all 6 papers, I express my gratitude and congratulations. I also thank Liu Yongsheng for assisting in the selection and translation of these articles, to Kok-Chiang Tan for advice and patience, and to Doug Merwin for suggesting the project.
References
Ciriacy-Wantrup, S.V. 1985. Natural resource economics: selected papers. Bishop, R.C. and S. O. Anderson, eds., Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 321 pp.
Kellert, S.R. 1983. Affective, cognitive, and evaluative perceptions of animals". In Alterman, I., and J.F. Wohlwill (eds.), Behavior and the Natural Environment, Vol. 6, Human Behavior and Environment. Plenum Publishers, N.Y.
Ma, S. L., L. X. Han, D. Y. Lan, W. Z. Ji, and R. B. Harris. 1995. Faunal resources of the Gaoligongshan region of Yunnan, China: Diverse and threatened. Environmental Conservation 22:250-258.
PRC (People's Republic of China) 1988. National Wildlife Law (Yesheng dongwu baohu fa). Forestry Press (Zhongguo linye chubanshe), Beijing (in Chinese).
Wang, S., and L.Z. Chen, eds., 1992. Biodiversity in China: Status and Conservation Needs. Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Science Press, Beijing. 22 pp.