Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

For many years, it was difficult for Chinese scientists to publicly acknowledge the damage done by economic development. Highlighting the decline of species was tantamount to criticizing government policy and causing a loss of national face. This began to change when the extent of the problems facing the baiji and other animals became more widely known.

Aboard the Kekao 1, Wang Ding, the country’s leading baiji expert, was more than willing to talk. Having studied the mammal for more than twenty years, he clearly cared deeply about its fate. With sadness and frustration, he spoke about the impact of development, river traffic, and recklessly indiscriminate fishing. 9

“The fishermen electrify large areas of water, then gather up all the dead fish. We haven’t seen those tactics in this area in the last couple of days, but it is still common elsewhere. At Dongting Lake it is very bad.”

I shook my head, but not in disbelief. I had seen small-scale electric fishing near Beijing, where workers from local restaurants wandered the streams and pools in rubber waders with giant batteries strapped to their backs connected to a pole in each hand that they dipped into the water, electrocuting everything in between. This was by no means the worst form of indiscriminate fishing in China. I had read and heard numerous reports of fishing with explosives. Not surprisingly, given such techniques, recorded catches on the Yangtze have halved over little more than a decade.

Wang tried to prevent the slaughter. As a senior government adviser, he recommended a complete halt to fishing on the Yangtze so stocks could recover. But the Yangtze Management Commission was reluctant to take a step that would hurt the livelihoods of millions of people. Instead it initiated a four-month halt during the spawning season in the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze. For the baiji, it was not enough.

“When we started monitoring twenty years ago, we could be certain of seeing baiji on every trip. It would be better if we had tried to conserve them then. But the problem at the time was that China was very poor. The government was focused only on economic development. People didn’t care about the environment at all. Now our country has more money and people are more aware. The baiji is a flagship. Its fate is connected to humanity’s. If the Yangtze cannot support them, it cannot support us. Perhaps it is too late, but we have to do something.”

China had implemented a capture-and-relocation scheme during much of the eighties and nineties. But it proved an expensive and difficult failure: just six animals were caught and taken to dolphinariums; all of them died, most after less than a year in captivity. Back then, China was too poor to organize such a complex conservation effort alone. Better facilities were needed, and more knowledgeable assistance from the international community.

Now, finally, everything seemed to be in place for a twenty-first-century rescue. Foreign conservationists and the Chinese authorities had agreed on a plan to capture the dolphins and start a breeding program. It was to be a major operation. To safely seize a single animal would require at least fifty fishermen, a kilometer-long net, a speedboat, a command ship, and two other vessels—at a cost in excess of 300 million yuan ($43 million). 10

Once caught, the animals were to be relocated into a haven where they could rebuild their population away from predators and pollution.

Our group was taken to visit a relocation site, the Baiji National Reserve in Tian-e-Zhou. Established in 1992, the 21-kilometer-long oxbow lake was one of three reserves set aside for the translocation of the baiji into a seminatural setting, protected from fishermen, factories, fertilizers, and river traffic. 11

The scene was idyllic. On the roadside, villagers combed through thick white clouds of newly harvested cotton. A wrinkled farmer in a straw hat led his ox along a path striped by shafts of sunlight and shadow. Herons flapped lazily along the lush green riverbank.

There were signs of hope. Yangtze finless porpoises, fondly known as river pigs, arced out of the water. The porpoises, only recently added to the endangered species list, had been successfully relocated to the haven. More encouraging still was a nearby wetland, where our group saw herds of magnificent large-antlered milu, or Père David’s deer. This animal, which was indigenous to China, showed how species could be pulled back from the brink of extinction. At the exhibition center artists’ illustrations showed how the animal had almost been wiped out. They were already at risk in the nineteenth century, when the French missionary Father Armand David became the first Westerner to record their existence. The last known herd was in the emperor’s hunting grounds. This stock was decimated by Western smugglers, who took the deer for exhibition to Europe, and by British and Japanese troops who ate most of the remaining animals around the time of the Boxer Rebellion. To save the species, the last eighteen specimens were taken to Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where they were successfully bred and reintroduced to China. There were now 3,000 of the deer worldwide, including about 500 at Tian-e-Zhou. Despite fears of inbreeding, biologists said there were no signs of genetic problems.

The park’s managers hoped the baiji could make a similar comeback. They showed us induction pens designed to hold the dolphins until they were proven healthy and ready for release into the lake. But the pens were empty. There were no dolphins. Not one. The alarming reality was that there were more baiji reserves than baiji. Until that changed, the park would serve as a monument to conservation failure.

Our expedition aimed to change that. But, I asked August, why wasn’t the plan put into place twenty or even ten years earlier, when baiji numbers were less precarious?

He sighed: “Over the past twenty years the baiji has been the victim of politics and scientific disputes. The view in the West was that more should be done to conserve the dolphin in the river, its natural habitat. The view in China was that it should be moved to the oxbow lake. In the end, they couldn’t decide, so the baiji is the victim.”

These opposing outlooks were at the heart of the dispute about environmental protection in China. Western scientists and conservationists wanted to leave vast tracts of the country as an unspoiled and wild sanctuary. The Chinese authorities counterargued that economic development was a greater priority. They accused the West of hypocrisy in calling for protection of forests and species in other nations. After all, industrialized nations had already decimated their own woodlands. Chinese authorities tended to argue that species were best protected by fencing them off, penning them up, and helping them breed with artificial techniques.

The philosophies were different. As the American zoologist Richard Harris noted: “The root of the problem lies in Chinese failure to value wildness for its own sake … China currently lacks effective wildlife conservation because it has yet to acknowledge what wildlife really is and what conservation really means.” 12

The stakes could not be much higher. One of the strongest arguments for a different approach in China is that it has so much more to lose. 13Half of the species in the northern hemisphere are found here. Sichuan alone contains a greater range of life than all of North America. 14Nationwide, China is a treasure trove of biodiversity and home to some of the world’s mightiest beasts, including the huge Himalayan griffin, wild yaks that weigh a ton and can outrun a jeep, and the world’s largest amphibian, the 40-kilogram giant salamander.

Most have retreated to the peripheries of Han civilization: the high peaks, barren plains, dense jungles, and deep waters. But as human activity spreads even to these remote areas, many mammals are threatened. Other less well-known reptiles, insects, and varieties of moss are dying off completely. It is a similar story worldwide. The rate of species extinction in the first decade of the twenty-first century is many orders of magnitude higher than at any time in the history of the planet. 15But the situation is particularly grim in China, where the die-off is reckoned to be taking place at twice the speed of the global average. According to the China Species Red List, it is accelerating. 16