When a Billion Chinese Jump (13 page)

Many environmentalists—foreign and domestic—believe Chinese culture is skewed against the wild. There, nature has traditionally been valued for its utility and scope for consumption. It was something to tame and control. Harris noted the deserts and mountains of the far west are often described in official writing as
elie,
which could be translated as “vile” or “of low quality.” The word for wilderness,
huangdi,
also means “wasteland.” The nation’s scientists showed little interest in studying wildlife in the wild. Biology in China was traditionally taught in the laboratory rather than the field.
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Until the 1990s, the signs on cages in Beijing Zoo identified which parts of each animal could be eaten or used in Chinese traditional medicine. Among the very few wildlife books before then was
Economic Birds of Sichuan,
which listed species that were either medicinal or tasty.
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After that, attitudes started to change as the impact of development—and the overutilization it brings—became better known.

History helps to explain the divergent viewpoints. In the West, the systematic study of nature did not hit full stride until industrialization. Then too, utility was a major motivation. Many researchers looked to the wild for new dyes, ingredients, chemicals, and other resources. In China, the most influential study of natural resources came far earlier. Li Shizhen (1518–93) was the author of the premier pharmacopoeia for Chinese traditional medicine, the
Bencao Gangmu
, which listed more than 1,800 treatments. Along with other traditional medical guides, this led millions to believe that stewed turtle cures cancer, crocodile meat relieves asthma, pangolin scales regulate menstruation, and scorpion venom helps stroke victims.

More than four centuries after his death, Dr. Li’s remedies continue to have ever more serious consequences for wildlife. Though well intentioned and respected for his scholarship, Li wrote in an age of abundant natural resources and low population density. Applied in the modern age, his prescriptions have become death warrants for many of the species he
named. About 1,500 varieties of flora and fauna are close to being wiped out in the wild because of the demand for traditional medicine.
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Other populations have increased, but only in captivity. Mixed with modern free-market principles and animal husbandry techniques, Li’s teachings on traditional medicine have led to the establishment of commercial breeding centers for several rare animals. Though their owners often claim to be conservationists, most facilities are little more than battery farms.

“Our park is a salvation for wildlife,” said the guide at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village, in Guizhou Province, as he led me and the rest of the tour group around spacious pens and cages filled with tigers, lions, black swans, and black bears.

The more fortunate beasts shared a few football pitch–sized enclosures. Others provided entertainment for tourists. Inside the “Dream Theater”—an elevated gladiatorlike arena surrounded by nets—performers with whips and sticks prodded tigers to jump through flaming hoops and ride on the backs of horses. Outdoors, beasts paraded on a carnival float, along with monkeys riding camels and a bear cycling across a high wire without a safety net. One tiger was so placid—or doped—that he sat and posed for pictures beside tourists.

But the most compellingly gory spectacle was feeding time. From a viewing balcony, I watched alongside children, parents, and elderly tourists in fascinated horror as a water buffalo munched its last clumps of grass next to a pen in which a hungry tiger paced back and forth. As soon as the keepers lifted the gate, the predator bounded out and chased down its terrified prey. Within a minute, it sank its teeth and claws into the victim’s back, raking at the skin as the buffalo cried and defecated in pain and fear. The bovine shook the tiger off and galloped away, but the respite was only temporary. The hunter jumped again and again at its neck, biting deep into the flesh until its jowls were scarlet with blood.

Squeamishness was apparently inappropriate and misplaced. The guide told us the hunt was an important training exercise for animals that would one day be released into the wild. It did not look like that would happen any time soon. The predator was too domesticated to finish off its prey. After fifteen minutes watching the bloody mauling, the crowd began to lose interest and wander away. The keepers shooed the tiger back to its
cage, then dragged the wounded buffalo away on a cart for slaughter in the park’s abattoir.

The real reason for the bloodfest was economic. The park desperately needed to attract tourists because it was losing a fortune on its farming business.

Xiongsen’s animals were a commercial investment. The black bears were there for their bile, which was harvested through a hole punched into the side of their stomachs. The lions were raised so their meat and bones could be sold to restaurants and pharmacies. The black swans were an eco-stock holding. With only 300 left in the world, the guide told us each one was worth $20,000. But the most valuable of them all, the tiger, was proving a huge loss maker.

The park had staked its future on speed-breeding tigers, the most prized animal in Dr. Li’s ancient pharmacopoeia. In terms of production it was ruthlessly efficient. The single breeding center, which was no bigger than Regent’s Park, contained almost as many tigers as the entire wild population in India. Then, in 1993, the government banned the tiger trade. This was lauded by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species as an important step toward stabilizing the species. But for Xiongsen it proved a financial disaster.

Xiongsen’s cub nursery was the start of a production line that churned out hundreds of tigers each year. They were far too genetically intermixed and tame to survive outside the farm. Most spent their lives lying around listlessly or pacing back and forth between the wire and concrete of tiny cages. Wandering away from the tourist areas, I saw that most of the animals were crammed together in thirteen rows of a dozen small cages, each containing up to four tigers. With the market blocked by the government ban, these assets ended up frozen, both economically and literally.

A keeper still with blood on his hands from dragging the wounded water buffalo to the butcher told me Xiongsen was desperate for the government to lift the ban. “Every part of the animal is valuable, but we can’t sell them at the moment because it is forbidden by law. One or two tigers die every year. We put them in freezers, where they will stay until the government gives us permission to sell.”

He said he has not been paid for three months. The park had filed for bankruptcy. Every day it had to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan to feed the growing population of animals. But the owner, Zhou Weisen,
a former snake trapper, raised the stakes by accelerating the breeding of tigers. Conservationists accused him of using the animals to blackmail the government. “Either relax the ban or take responsibility for slaughtering more than a thousand tigers that no one can afford to feed” was the unspoken message.

Xiongsen was pushing at, and possibly beyond, the boundaries of the law. The park’s restaurant, which overlooked the biggest of the animal enclosures, offered a dish called “conquering king”—the classical term for tiger—for 500 yuan, along with lion, crocodile, peacock, snake, bear, and civet cat in equally thin disguises. “Everything comes from our park,” the waitress said proudly. “We don’t list the ingredients. You must use your imagination.”

Along with our food we got a full serving of the captive-breeding sales pitch. A poster next to the tables rhetorically asked: “Why does our country categorize the tiger as a class A protected species?” The answer it supplied had more to do with classical views of nature’s utility than modern fears about declining numbers. “Because if you look at the 5,000-year history of Chinese medicine, the famous doctor Li Shizhen noted that every part of the tiger’s body is a treasure.”

On the black market, a single animal could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bones, used in tonics, were the most valuable part: the 25 kilograms yielded by the average tiger can fetch 2.4 million yuan ($343,000), about ten times the price of a pelt.
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The park’s “museum” was a showroom containing the skeleton of a sixteen-year-old tiger and six huge clay urns each filled with 2,000 liters of “bone-strengthening wine.” Assistants encourage visitors to buy half-liter tiger-shaped bottles of the tonic for about $90. Each drop, they claimed, was distilled in vats containing the paws of tigers that died of natural causes.

They were either lying or lawbreaking. The State Forestry Administration allowed sales of the wine on condition that the only bones used in it were from lions. That was possible—Xiongsen has 200 captive-bred African lions—but in Chinese medicine these beasts were traditionally considered a poor substitute for tiger.

The park epitomized the utilitarian, nature-conquering approach to the environment and its consequences. At Xiongsen, the number of captive tigers had surged from twelve in 1992 to 1,300. But in the wild, the population had shrunk from several thousand in the 1950s to fewer than
fifty. The trend was clear: the fearsome jungle predator had been subdued into a caged farm animal. The government had taken half a step away from these traditions by putting a ban in place. But it had not halted the industrial production of tigers even when the ancient tonic for health had become a drag on the economy.

Nor had there been an attempt to change the traditions behind the demand for tiger. At a pharmacy outside, the displays were filled with desiccated sea horses for breast cancer, dog penises for virility, deer hooves for arthritis, baby snakes for sore throats, and ant lotions for beriberi. One rheumatism treatment had a picture of a tiger on the packet, but the only animal part listed among the ingredients was powdered leopard bone. Tibetan medicine, which was increasingly popular, placed just as much importance on acquiring ingredients from rare species, such as antelope horn, snake meat, and caterpillar fungus. Some potions proved useful, but there was not enough consideration of efficacy and rarity. In many cases endangered animals were being slaughtered for nothing. The saiga antelope, which once roamed the plains of China and Russia in huge herds, was hunted to the brink of extinction because its translucent pale pink horns were thought to have magical healing qualities in traditional medicine. Western science suggested, however, that consumers could get the same amount of nutrition by chewing their fingernails.
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The government protects China’s traditions better than it protects the country’s wildlife. Health ministry officials defend Dr. Li’s ancient prescriptions as part of an almost blanket endorsement of traditional medicine. Rare animals are protected only selectively and usually inadequately. The Wildlife Protection Law of 1988 epitomized the superficiality of much conservation work in China. On the surface, the law was progressive, prohibiting the killing of about 1,300 endangered species, encouraging forestry bureaus to set up nature reserves, and designating all wild animals as the property of the state. But it made only vague mention of habitat protection.
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Instead it established guidelines for the management of captive-breeding centers. In effect, the law encouraged the setting up of farms like Xiongsen that supplied restaurants and pharmacies.

In the decade that followed, 164 such centers were established. There are now farms of scorpions, salamanders, crocodiles, herons, musk deer, black bears, golden coin turtles, and cobras.
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Though many are nominally
listed as conservation centers, their true purpose is evident from their location. Half of the farms are sited not where the animals live in the wild but near the main two markets for traditional medicine and exotic food, Guangdong and Guangxi.

Wildlife has been caught in a pincer between traditional medicine and modern development. The government offers little protection from either. Bureaucratic efforts at conservation are stymied by weak laws, fragmented oversight, and the long-standing belief that nature needs to be managed.
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Few people seem to accept that the best way to let animal populations recover is to leave both them and their habitats alone.

I saw just how intrusive the alternatives could be at the most celebrated conservation park in China. The Wolong Nature Reserve was a four-hour drive from Chengdu, mostly through dense mountain forests.
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It was dark before I reached my hotel. On the approach I caught glimpses of steep river gorges and broad reservoirs in the moonlight, but it was only as I watched the sun rise the following morning that I appreciated the true beauty of the setting. It was early autumn, the hillsides were dappled with red and gold, and the crisp air was filled with birdsong.

The forests here extend hundreds of miles to the stunning opal rock-salt pools of Jiuzhaigou. In this beautiful, biorich area, the famous botanical explorer E. O. Wilson made seed collections between the wars that transformed British gardens with new varieties of azaleas, buddleia, peonies, hydrangea, magnolia, aster, and columbine. It is also home to black bear, takin, golden monkeys, musk deer, blood pheasants, minivets, rock squirrel, and black- and red-striped swallowtails.
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But by far its most famous resident is the giant panda. For most of the late twentieth century this epitome of bestial cuteness seemed doomed to extinction. Yet Wolong’s scientists were boasting that they had brought Old Black Eyes back from the brink. I met the man who claimed to have saved the world’s most famous endangered animal. It was a shocking introduction to the hard-core realities of modern animal husbandry.

Zhang Hemin was known as the “Father of Pandas,” a nickname that revealed more about his paternalistic relationship with the animals than his formal title, director of Wolong Nature Reserve Administration. Bespectacled, moon-faced, and engagingly enthusiastic, he gave me a warm welcome as soon as I arrived at the research center. Zhang told me he had good news: the panda was no longer in danger because he had mastered a
breeding technique with a near 100 percent success rate. As a result, the problem was no longer a shortage of pandas but of space.