• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission Giant Pandas, Bengal Tigers, and Snow Leopards: China and India - Conservation Science and the State Michael Lewis and Elena Songster Science and technology have been crucial tools in the legitimization of newly independent post-colonial states during a period of development policies, and this was equally true in India and China –seen from the start in India (as Nehru spoke of dams as the equivalent of modern temples), and in Maoist China’s attempts to juxtapose modern scientific ways of thinking with previous traditions and superstitions. Conservation biology was useful, from the 1960s on, as a means of state legitimization and a means of exerting control over otherwise uncontrolled landscapes. Links between conservation biology and the nationalist state were nowhere more apparent than in India’s much touted and government-run Project Tiger, formally inaugurated in 1973, and China’s equally famous and equally centralized efforts to preserve the giant panda, begun in the 1960s. The potency of charismatic megafauna as nationalist symbols has been clearly articulated in a number of different case studies from around the world. However, from its start conservation biology also provided a potential source of critique for state policies, particularly state development policies and the exploitation of state resources in the interest of global commodity flows. Even more, conservation science on species such as snow leopards, and contentious landscapes such as the Himalayas, questioned the national security agenda and priorities of the state in precisely the location where the state perceived itself as most vulnerable, promoting a more internationalist and transboundary vision for the region. This was a global conservation agenda, rather than a nationalist one, and it sometimes placed the goals of scientists at odds with those of the state. Thus, consideration of the history of the science and conservation of pandas, tigers, and snow leopards makes for a particularly potent locus for the study of the complex linkages between the history of conservation biology and the state in China and India. Neither country has made the snow leopard a national symbol, on the model of the tiger or panda, but both are cautiously pushing for greater conservation of the species (though the biggest push is coming from scientists and NGOs, not from the government). The governments of both China and India are nervous about snow leopard science along their borders – China restricts it in huge regions, including much of Tibet and Xinjiang, and India has a number of restrictions on research near its borders. Snow leopard science does not appear to be a tool of the state – but it is clear that in other cases (tiger and panda) conservation biology has been used by the state to guide national efforts to preserve or restore species or ecosystems. The state has a variety of reasons it might pursue such objectives: to garner international or national prestige for its enlightened policies; to deflect international or national attention from other policies; because its people demand it based on their own conservation ethic; because government leaders demand it based on their own conservation ethic; because the government perceives the preservation of nature as vital to the preservation of crucial state resources (clean water, etc.); because it is able to turn the species saved into a national(ist) symbol (a) unifying the nation and creating a national identity, or (b) as a symbol of 1 Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission governmental power and benevolence, or (c) as part of a larger effort to focus national discourse away from other state policies; because the state perceives preserved nature (or species) as a component of a profitable eco-tourism scheme; as a politically palatable mechanism for controlling landscapes and people on those landscapes. All of these benefits, at one time or another, were seen with panda and tiger conservation in China and India. But the risks of snow leopard conservation projects seem to over-ride these potential benefits, and it has been much less successful than earlier tiger and panda conservation and science. When science suggests that conservation requires particular policies that challenge or work against state interests, the science is discarded, discredited as western-driven, or simply ignored. This case study, then, highlights the limits of conservation science in shaping state actions and policies, particularly when pitted against perceived national security and development interests. And the key to this case study is the snow leopard’s status as a species of the borderlands– a place that arouses such anxiety on the part of the state. Nationalist Science: Pandas and Tigers There is a growing literature within environmental history focused upon human representations of and understandings of animals. Historians have written about animals as resources, animals as technologies (both as means of production of goods, and as creations of particular technologies), animals as stand-ins for how people think about other people or landscapes (in the sense that the symbol (animal) becomes a denatured repository of meaning), animals as nationalist symbols, animals as symbols of vanishing wilderness, and animals as objects of scientific study within the context of conservation debates.1 For the purposes of this paper, we are focusing upon the three examples of what are sometimes referred to as “charismatic megafauna,” particularly appealing large animals, in other words, and the ways in which scientists, conservationists, and the governments of China and India have attempted to understand and conserve those species. This highlights the interplay between conservation science of these species and the process of state building. Within seven years of the inception of the People’s Republic of China, the Giant Panda had begun to serve as a symbol of scientific thought – a 1956 article in the People’s Daily suggested that the mysteries of panda evolution and behavior showed the necessity of scientific thinking versus “backwards” or “feudalistic” behavior. Panda science served no obvious economic application – the sudden emergence of state supported scientific research on the panda, so soon after independence and in the context of many other pressing issues, “illustrates that the Communist party recognized the giant panda as relevant to the Chinese state. This interest in the scientific study of the giant panda at the time indicated that the government expected panda science to benefit the nation.”2 Today, the panda is widely recognized as a global symbol of China – this was not always the case. Pandas only began appearing in “traditional” Chinese art in the 1950s and 60s, around the same time as the European-based World Wildlife Fund created their ubiquitous panda logo – a logo with nearly as long a history as any Chinese representations of 2 Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission pandas. There is a striking and near total absence of the giant panda in any artistic or historical records, in the long reach of recorded Chinese history, as compared to other creatures such as dragons, tigers, and crickets. This strange absence meant that the panda did not carry any of the burdens of (imperialist or dynastic) history for the modern revolutionary communist state; “the giant panda achieved its position of national icon as a product of China’s Mao-Era efforts to redefine itself through revolutionary principles that guided its engagement with science, its people, and its interactions with the international community.”3 The Panda was still linked to history, however, as scientists uncovered fossil remains of the panda that both established Chinese priority for the species (it was always here, and here first, scientists and government officials claimed, even to the extent of discrediting other potential panda fossils found in other places), and showed the species had at one-time a wider range within China itself, even extending into Myanmar and Southeast Asia. This made it possible to claim the giant panda for all of China – not just one region. One of the tensions of many modern nationalist symbols is that of tying the “modern nation to the past, without compromising its identity as a modern country.” The panda did this brilliantly – it could simultaneously be used to make statements about the long tenure of the Chinese people on the Chinese land, while also, as a subject of modern science, serve to engage with other nations in the most modern of discourses – that of science.4 This map from WWF shows less range in Myanmar and Vietnam than many others, acting as if the historic panda stopped at the border of contemporary China.5 Initially, panda science was focused upon evolutionary studies, and captive breeding. The first successful captive birth, in Beijing in 1963, was used to demonstrate the scientific superiority of Chinese biologists. Subsequently, a reserve was established in Wanglang, created in part for the purpose of providing a site for scientific research on the giant panda. Between 1967-69, the world’s first species- specific giant panda survey was conducted in Wanglang. This survey was primarily focused upon ascertaining numbers and status, and again, allowed China to focus upon the quality of its scientific work. “To the extent that the government paid attention to panda preservation from the founding of the Wanglang reserve during 3 Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission the mid-1960s through the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the government bore the responsibility for protecting the giant panda and its habitat.”6 Although initial work on the giant panda was conducted by Chinese scholars only, Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” policy in 1978 helped to bring foreign scientists into China, to collaborate with Chinese scientists on panda research.

Load more

  22

Copy Link