In late February, a three-and-a-half-year-old cub clambered into a crate marked “Contents one panda” to begin a sixteen-hour, one-way flight to China. Bao Bao was born at the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., and this was her first trip overseas. Her parents have lived in the American capital since 2000, but they, like all giant pandas, remain the property of the Chinese state, which lends the animals to foreign zoos for around a million dollars per year. Any products of overseas panda unions also belong to the Chinese motherland.
Initially, Bao Bao had trouble adjusting to life in her ancestral homeland. The local dialect (Sichuanese) and diet (supplementary steamed buns, rather than biscuits) bedeviled her. Nevertheless, by the time the American-born panda ended her quarantine last month at the Dujiangyan Panda Base, in the hills of Sichuan province, she was, as David Wildt, a senior scientist and the head of the Center for Species Survival at the National Zoo, described to me, “doing really great.” Indeed, species-wide, giant-panda news is positive. China’s captive-breeding program, into which Bao Bao will be seconded once she reaches sexual maturity, has produced a bumper crop of piebald babies. More important, the giant panda was taken off the endangered-species list last September because China’s efforts to safeguard its mountainous habitat have allowed the population to grow. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (I.U.C.N.) now classifies the animal as merely “vulnerable.” In Beijing, considerable political will is dedicated to protecting the panda. After all, it would be awkward should China’s furry ambassador to foreign governments end up extinct.
The panda may be protected, but other animals are not so fortunate. China’s craving for bits of other beasts—elephant tusks, rhino horns, pangolin scales, bear bile, tiger bones, sea-horse skeletons, donkey hides—has decimated fauna populations worldwide. In addition to an ancient fascination with decorative ivory, Chinese demand is tied to traditional Chinese medicine, which has for centuries claimed efficacy in dubious ingredients. Rhino horn, to take one example, is considered helpful in treating blood disorders and even cancer, despite being largely composed of keratin, the ingestion of which is not much different from chewing one’s fingernails. As China’s middle class expands, millions of new consumers want to purchase ever stranger animal-based concoctions, like tiger-penis wine. (A single bottle can cost five hundred dollars.)
The result is devastating for animal populations that are already reduced by habitat destruction and climate change. The global wild-tiger population, for instance, was recorded in a 2016 census at three thousand eight hundred and ninety, significantly reduced from the five thousand to seven thousand tigers estimated in a 1998 survey. “The impact of poaching has been shocking,” Dr. John Goodrich, the senior director in the tiger program at Panthera, the global wild-cat-conservation organization, told me. “This is by far the most critical threat to tiger populations, and the demand is primarily from the Chinese.”
Man has long imperilled beast, as reflected by the extinction of the passenger pigeon, great auk, and Tasmanian tiger. American settlers migrating westward nearly wiped out the bison. In the nineteen-twenties, Teddy Roosevelt’s sons embarked on a trek in Western China and responded to their first encounter with a giant panda by shooting it. More recently, in the nineteen-eighties, Japanese demand for ivory hit African elephants hard. But China is so big and so hungry that its appetites could well doom numerous species at once, from the armored pangolin to the Knysna sea horse, a monogamous fish endemic to South African estuaries.
As China grows richer, the conservation movement has gained some local support. Saving the planet is chic among young, urban Chinese as a cause without the patina of danger that accompanies more political campaigns. In the big cities, celebrities such as the former basketball star Yao Ming and the actress Li Bingbing appear in billboards for WildAid, the international group dedicated to ending the illegal wildlife trade. A national anti-corruption campaign has also targeted the conspicuous consumption of exotic animalia at government banquets. China’s national air carrier has banned shark’s-fin soup in business class. “I was always amazed when I would go to conservation meetings in China and I would get served all these critters,” Wildt, who has spent decades travelling to China, said. “I don’t see shark’s-fin soup on the banquet table now. It’s changing.”
Late last year, China vowed to halt the domestic ivory trade entirely by the end of 2017, in an effort to stop the illegal killing of up to thirty thousand elephants a year. Supporters of the ban have noted that the price of legal ivory in China has already dropped by two-thirds from a peak in 2014, suggesting a drop in demand. When I visited Kenya last year, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of the conservation group Save the Elephants, told me that he was “very hopeful about a change in attitude among the Chinese.” (Yao Ming once travelled to Kenya on an environmental mission, and Douglas-Hamilton’s staff was put to work constructing a bed long enough to accommodate the athlete’s seven-foot-six-inch frame.) “Most Chinese consumers are law-abiding people, so they will not deliberately look for illegal products on the market,” Zhou Fei, the head of the China office for TRAFFIC, which monitors the global wildlife trade, said. “China’s domestic ivory ban is a milestone for the conservation of wild elephants in Africa.”
Nevertheless, if even a fraction of Chinese consumers want to collect ivory tchotchkes or grind up tiger bones for virility, global animal populations will continue to suffer. Today, most ivory traded in China is done so underground and online, meaning that the upcoming ban may have less of an impact than some conservationists hope. An I.U.C.N. status report on African elephants published last September estimated around a hundred and eleven thousand fewer elephants on the continent than existed in 2006, and largely blamed poaching for the decline. Last December, Shanghai customs officials seized more than three tons of pangolin scales smuggled into China with a shipment of African logs, equivalent to up to seventy-five hundred of the thorny anteaters. Three months earlier, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, to which China is a signatory, had outlawed all pangolin trade.
For all the positive steps that China’s government has taken, implementation lags behind policy. Commerce in rhino horn and tiger bone has been illegal in China since 1993. The Chinese-fuelled slaughter, however, has only worsened since then, and spread to other Asian countries such as Vietnam. Last year, China’s Wildlife Protection Law was revised, supposedly to give it more teeth. Yet loopholes still make the commercial breeding of endangered species legal. China has just twenty-seven Siberian tigers left in the wild, according to the last count. But more than six thousand tigers live on Chinese farms that often raise them in concrete pens solely for their parts. While such harvesting might seem as if it takes pressure off wild populations, tiger experts indicate the opposite. “Tiger farms actually legitimize the business,” Goodrich said. Moreover, he went on, “people always think wild is better than farmed, so they will just pay more for wild.”
Last year, as China was busy trying to expand the giant panda’s habitat, forestry officials began considering another conservation landmark: a vast sanctuary in the country’s northeast dedicated to Siberian tigers and Amur leopards. The planned reserve will be sixty per cent bigger than Yellowstone National Park. While China is famous, according to Goodrich, for “creating paper parks and then doing nothing to protect animals,” there’s no question that proper law enforcement could change the fate of the tiger in China. Still, TRAFFIC’s Zhou, who once worked in China’s Foreign Ministry, cautions against equating the conservation of domestic wildlife with a crackdown on the global illegal-wildlife trade. “Conservation is a Chinese government priority, so everyone feels comfortable working on it,” he said. “But illegal trade is a very sensitive issue. When we monitor the trade in China and write a nice, English-language report, the government is not happy, because they think we are putting pressure on them.” The Chinese political animal, by no means an endangered species, doesn’t take well to outside criticism.