About the time we were working with Guangdong Enterprises, I found myself increasingly drawn into efforts to preserve one of the most singularly beautiful areas in the world: Yunnan Province in the southwest part of the country. China, frankly, was the last place I had expected to find a wilderness of such spectacular biodiversity. Everywhere I went in the late 1990s, I could see—and smell and taste, for that matter—the horrific cost of China’s economic miracle. Not only was rapid industrial development fouling the air and water and threatening the health of citizens, but the country’s natural wonders were ill cared for and poorly protected, overrun by rapacious developers and hordes of littering tourists.
It pained me to see this ecological disaster unfolding. I’ve had a deep and abiding interest in nature and wildlife, an affinity for unspoiled places, since my childhood on a farm in Barrington, Illinois. As a boy I raised pet crows and raccoons and dreamed of becoming a forest ranger. I devoured books on animals and plants. The highlight of my year came every July when my family canoed for two weeks in the pristine Boundary Waters on the U.S.-Canadian border. Catching bass and lake trout, picking blueberries, watching bears, beaver, and otters—that was heaven to me. After business school, when I worked in Washington, D.C., at the Pentagon and in the Nixon White House, I traveled with Wendy on October weekends to Assateague Island, which straddles Maryland and Virginia, to band peregrine falcons during their annual migration. Perched at the top of the food chain, raptors captivated me for their fierce beauty and for what they told us about our world: if they were healthy, the environment was healthy.
Wendy and I moved back to Barrington in 1974 and built a house on five acres that we bought from my parents. My wife, who loves wild, beautiful places as much as I do, began the hard work of restoring the native prairie grasses and forbs in the nature preserve bordering our home. I had just started at Goldman, and money was tight, so I was dumbstruck when she spent $500 to join the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving biodiversity. But as Wendy got more involved—first as a volunteer, then as chairman of TNC’s Illinois and New York chapters, and eventually as vice chairman of the national board—I began to appreciate the reach and effectiveness of its work.
As it happened, the Conservancy wanted to become more active in the Far East and China. But when I was asked to help jump-start the work of its Asia-Pacific Council, I was initially reluctant. Given the breakneck pace of development, I half joked that I doubted much would be left to preserve in the region before long. But I also questioned how effective TNC could be, considering the weak regulatory environment and the indifference that I had observed firsthand. Though Chinese friends, ever the polite hosts, frequently offered to arrange expeditions to remote areas when they heard of my interest in birding and the wilderness, I had yet to hear one express a personal interest in conservation. This was true of most officials I knew as well. Like the leaders of other developing nations I had known, their chief goals were to create jobs and reduce poverty. Dealing with pollution was a distant priority. One exception was Wang Qishan. During his stint in Guangdong, he spoke fervently of the need to clean up the province’s rivers, which festered with toxic waste and industrial pollutants.
Moreover, I like to be involved in projects where I can see tangible results. I join where I feel I can make a difference. In the late 1980s I got involved with the Peregrine Fund, which had a clearly defined mission, and demonstrated success, in saving birds of prey from extinction. I’d become chairman in 1996, and I wasn’t sure if TNC could hope to have such an immediate impact.
My skepticism faded as I listened to a remarkable woman named Carol Fox, the Hawaii-based director of program development for TNC’s Asia-Pacific programs, whose ambitious initiatives included protecting forests and reefs in Indonesia and Palau. Carol had learned Mandarin while living some years before in Taiwan and in Hong Kong and was keen to bring TNC’s expertise to the mainland. Carol described a project the Conservancy had been working on in northwestern Yunnan, in a remote area in the Himalayan foothills that many thought had inspired the mystical paradise of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon.
The project had begun in cooperation with a Thai businessman who had sought TNC’s help in developing for ecotourism the picturesque 800-year-old town of Lijiang and, towering above it, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain range, whose tallest peak reaches 18,360 feet. That plan had fallen through, but Carol was determined to involve TNC in protecting the area’s extraordinary cultural and ecological diversity.
One of the most spectacular and biologically rich ecosystems in the world, the mountainous area of northwest Yunnan is home to the higher-elevation watersheds of four of Asia’s largest rivers—the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, and the Yangtze. The last three of these run parallel from north to south, through spectacular gorges, some plunging nearly 2 miles from peak to valley. At their closest point the rivers are separated by fewer than 55 miles. Warming monsoon winds from neighboring Myanmar allow rhododendrons to bloom at 14,000 feet, while deep, fertile valleys help the region to shelter more than 20 percent of the country’s plant species and about one-third of its mammal and bird species, nearly a hundred of which, like the black-tufted, 2-foot-tall Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, are endangered. Many of the region’s plants and animals were left over from the last ice age, when species now unique to Yunnan survived in the temperate gorges.
The area’s diversity extends to its inhabitants. Some 90 percent of Chinese people belong to the Han ethnic group. They speak Mandarin or some variant of it and live in densely populated coastal or central regions. But the country claims 55 other ethnic groups, who live mainly in its vast and inhospitable border regions. Though the restive areas of Tibet and Xinjiang attract more international attention, Yunnan, with its mountainous terrain and porous borders, contains many minority groups that make up more than a third of its population. In the northwestern part of the province where TNC was working, nearly 20 of these groups live in close proximity. Among them, Buddhist Tibetans herd yaks and build monasteries high on exposed mountainsides; animist Naxi, centered in Lijiang, boast a rich musical tradition and communicate with one of the world’s last pictographic written languages; the Lisu, who live in the upper reaches of the Salween River valley, are more closely related to people across the border in Myanmar than they are to the Han.
Some of these areas had been set aside as nature reserves in the 1980s but suffered from weak protection and poor enforcement. There were few incentives to stop impoverished natives from eroding steep hillsides by chopping down trees for firewood and grazing their goats and yaks or to discourage local governments from allowing overdevelopment that would destroy what was meant to be saved. TNC’s long-term goal was to identify the highest-priority sites for conservation. These would be turned into national parks that would adhere to international standards, generate revenue for local governments, and help to alleviate poverty by putting some tourism profits into the hands of the region’s ethnic minorities so they could make a living from preserving nature, not exploiting it.
I agreed to co-chair TNC’s Asia-Pacific Council, and in November 1997 Wendy and I represented the Conservancy at one of the country’s first environmental conferences, in Beijing. Several hundred people attended, including representatives of large multinational corporations and international organizations like the United Nations. Yunnan vice governor Niu Shaoyao introduced what we called the Yunnan Great Rivers Project to the many Chinese government and business leaders present. I described how the Conservancy worked closely with the government and the private sector to solve problems through compromise and cooperation. TNC’s nonconfrontational, science-based approach was ideal for China, which bridled reflexively at the reproaches of outsiders. The last thing the Chinese wanted to hear was a lecture from foreign industrial powers that, it could be argued, had polluted their way to power and were now proffering advice that might put obstacles in the path of China’s own progress.
I acknowledged that China’s headlong growth demanded that tough choices be made, but that a healthy economy did not have to be at odds with a healthy environment. Protecting the environment was good business. It was cheaper to prevent damage than to clean it up afterward. I noted, too, that according to one study I had seen, U.S. states that took environmental protection seriously outperformed other states in every economic category, from overall growth to nonfarm employment to construction.
I witnessed firsthand how difficult these choices could sometimes be when, along with a small group from the conference, I met with Premier Li Peng in the Great Hall of the People. Going back to the days of our stumble on the Shandong power plant venture, I had not seen eye to eye with him on much, including his reluctance to embrace reform. Li began by saying that rich Western nations should help pay for China’s environmental cleanup as the price for having polluted during our own industrial development. He assured us that his country was doing its part, citing the work that had begun three years earlier on the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Li was an engineer, and the controversial dam was his baby; he was proud of all the clean energy it would soon produce. I was concerned that the dam would also displace hundreds of thousands of people, submerge hundreds of historic sites, and disrupt the great river’s flow, destroying natural wetlands that filtered out pollutants, reduced the impact of storm flooding, and provided habitat for rare species.
Li Peng’s approach didn’t jibe with mine at the time. I saw the benefit of clean, renewable hydropower compared with coal-fired electrical power plants, but I questioned a project that was so big and complex and involved so much environmental risk and social disruption. Nonetheless, I came away from the Beijing conference encouraged by China’s growing commitment to conservation, having met any number of officials determined to tackle the country’s considerable challenges.
Fundraising posed a challenge. I knew that it would be difficult to solicit money in the U.S. if I couldn’t show that wealthy Chinese were also prepared to give. But philanthropy in China at the time generally took the form of patronage to a hometown as a way of honoring ancestors, or “donations” made to local officials to curry favor. Bringing together like-minded people to raise money for a cause like biodiversity? That was a tough job, made harder by the Asian financial crisis then raging.
I decided to start in Hong Kong, whose business leaders rose to the occasion. In June 1998, we arranged a dinner for the Nature Conservancy’s Asia-Pacific Council, a group of leading government and business figures committed to working to preserve biodiversity in the region. Hosted by shipping tycoon C. C. Tung, the brother of Hong Kong chief executive C. H. Tung, the event was held at Hong Kong’s private Island Club and raised $1 million. Just as important, we made progress in increasing awareness among potential donors. Mainland Chinese would also prove generous with their money and time once they understood the cause. Indeed, I was to discover over time that there were plenty of Chinese people who cared deeply about clean air and clean water and who were unhappy with the environmental damage that was accompanying the country’s growth. There were others, including political leaders, who took great pride in the wild and beautiful places that still existed in China and wanted to preserve their natural heritage.
After the dinner I had to cancel plans to fly to Yunnan and returned home because of pressing business at Goldman Sachs. I had been named co-CEO in the run-up to our scheduled September IPO, which ended up being postponed because of poor market conditions. Wendy and our daughter, Amanda, along with some TNC members and staff spent several days hiking, camping, and meeting with government officials in the areas TNC sought to protect. But it would be more than four years before I would make it to Yunnan myself.
There were encouraging developments. The Yunnan provincial government signed an agreement with TNC to start the Great Rivers Project, and more broadly, Beijing began to pay greater attention to environmental issues. In 1998 it created the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) from the existing environmental agency, upgraded it to a ministry, and strengthened regulation and enforcement. Meantime, massive floods along parts of the Yangtze that summer left more than 4,000 dead and 15 million homeless and brought home the dangers of rampant deforestation in the upper reaches of the river caused by overdevelopment and large-scale commercial logging.
The Yunnan project leadership team began to take shape. Carol had earlier recruited Rose Niu, a Lijiang-born Naxi, to lead efforts on the ground. After working for the government’s Quarantine Service in Yunnan for nearly a decade, Rose had earned a master’s degree at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand. Her thesis, “Nature Tourism and Environmental Protection: A Strategic Analysis for an Ethnic Minority Region, Southwest China,” could not have been more perfectly suited to TNC’s mission. Rose had moved to New Zealand with her husband, but Carol persuaded her to return home. In early 1999 Edward Norton, a co-founder of the Grand Canyon Trust and an expert on America’s national parks (and father of the American actor), joined the team, moving with his wife, Ann McBride, to the provincial capital of Kunming. McBride, a former head of Common Cause, the U.S. citizens’ advocacy group, would establish an innovative program in which local villagers were given cameras and encouraged to photograph special places and describe what these places meant to them.
All conservation, like politics, is local. If local people don’t buy into a project, it won’t be successful. In the field TNC staff used a comprehensive approach called Conservation by Design that brought together all stakeholders—state agency administrators, provincial and municipal officials, community members, and conservation interest groups like TNC—to hash out the issues and develop a plan. The approach fit with the Chinese tradition of consensus decision making. Conservation by Design was used to identify sites for preservation and to develop strategies to reduce the threats to their biodiversity. Working with Chinese scientists and officials, and gathering input from skilled American biologists and conservation experts, TNC staffers spent a year and a half collecting data on the region’s animals, plants, and geographic features, as well as on social and economic conditions, in order to target specific areas for action. Along the way, they trained their Chinese counterparts in environmental management and data collection.
With the help of Hong Kong–based Tim Dattels, who headed Goldman Sachs’ department for managing investment banking relationships in Asia, I sought out business and government leaders from the region to build a strong board of trustees to support these efforts. Most crucially, I was able to recruit as my co-chair of the Asia-Pacific Council Lee Kuan Yew, the Republic of Singapore’s founding father and its prime minister for more than three decades until 1990. Lee’s involvement instantly raised the Conservancy’s profile and gave it much higher status in China, where he was widely admired for having overseen the pint-size city-state’s extraordinary economic success as a leading center of trade, finance, and innovation.
At the start few of the board members were ardent environmentalists; an exception was Edward Tian, a native of Liaoning Province, who had co-founded AsiaInfo, a provider of software and infrastructure solutions for the Internet that would become the first Chinese company to list on Nasdaq. Edward, a born entrepreneur who would become the number two man at China Netcom Group Corporation (Hong Kong), was a trained biologist like both of his parents and had studied North American rangeland while working for his Ph.D. at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Over time, however, thanks to their work with the Council, a number of other businessmen, like Victor Fung, chairman of Li & Fung in Hong Kong, and Douglas Tong Hsu, chairman of Taiwan’s Far Eastern Group, also became committed conservationists. And Wang Qishan still thanks me for the environmental training he received in the early days as a member of TNC’s advisory council.
We gathered for the first time in August 2000, in Singapore, at a meeting chaired by Lee Kuan Yew. TNC soon brought in millions of dollars to support our projects. But all the money in the world wouldn’t help if the Conservancy couldn’t operate effectively on the ground in China, and there were challenges to overcome.
Though the Yunnan provincial and local government leaders had backed our project from the beginning, TNC had to contend with rivalries and weak coordination among central government agencies. In the 1980s China had created two kinds of protected spaces with national significance. “Scenic areas,” ranging from sections of the Great Wall to Tibetan villages in Sichuan, were developed for tourism and run, oddly enough, by the Ministry of Construction, whose idea of a park was, all too often, a patch of open land on which impressive buildings could be built. “Nature reserves,” by contrast, were administered by the State Forestry Administration, which kept a tighter rein on commercial activity. These restrictions were often brushed aside: local officials pushed for development, while poor, indigenous people who lived in or near designated reserves routinely ignored regulations as they struggled to make ends meet—cutting down trees for firewood or wildcatting small mines.
TNC’s approach—protecting natural and cultural treasures while generating income for locals through sustainable ecotourism—split the difference between the two models but stoked bureaucratic friction. Some officials in the Ministry of Construction and the State Forestry Administration, otherwise an ally, worried that the Great Rivers approach would undermine the system administered by their agencies. The State Environmental Protection Agency was more accommodating, seeing a chance to expand its own authority.
One conflict concerned the very terminology we used. At one point a Ministry of Construction official rather imperiously told Carol and her colleagues that they had no right to call the areas we were trying to protect national parks. Why? National parks, this official said, fell under the Ministry of Construction, and since the ministry was not involved, TNC could not use the term.
As Carol replied, it didn’t matter to us what the Chinese called the areas we identified for conservation as long as they were protected. But beyond setting up Yunnan’s pilot parks, we wanted to create an appropriate model for the rest of China. Great Rivers was a classic Chinese test case for conservation, much like the Shenzhen special economic zone had been for economic reform.
Fortunately, the Conservancy was able to gain the support of the powerful State Development and Planning Commission. How that came about illustrates the importance of touching base with all possible constituencies. As part of its effort to educate officials, the Conservancy sponsored study trips for local and national officials to visit the national parks of other countries. These trips made a big impression on the delegations, one of which included Madame Hao Jianxiu, an SDPC vice minister. The final report from her delegation’s visit to the U.S., which included stops at the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, strongly recommended that China move forward with our proposed Yunnan Great Rivers Project.
SDPC had no mandate for action in this area, but it played a crucial role in putting together China’s five-year plans for economic growth and wielded plenty of clout. Madame Hao was a force in her own right. A textile mill worker by trade, she was just 16 in 1951 when she devised a method to reduce waste while spinning thread and catapulted to national fame as a “star model worker.” She rose to become one of China’s highest-ranking women, serving on the Party’s elite Central Committee.
In the spring of 1999, she helped convene a workshop in Lijiang co-hosted by the Conservancy and Yunnan’s provincial government that brought together officials from numerous agencies, including the State Environmental Protection Administration and the Ministry of Construction, to discuss the future of northwest Yunnan. TNC and Yunnan provincial officials subsequently drew up a blueprint that, among other things, called for setting aside a large swath of land for new nature reserves and national parks. It gave targets for alternative energy use by local communities; proposed replacing small mines with bigger, more cost-efficient ones employing better technology and pollution controls; and recommended a halt to tilling fields steeper than 25 degrees and the introduction of terracing for other sloped fields. The provincial government adopted the proposals, which were incorporated into Yunnan’s part of China’s tenth five-year plan (2001–2005). In the end the government would set aside nearly 26,000 square miles—an area just larger than West Virginia, or twice the size of Taiwan—for the Yunnan Great Rivers Project.
This success still left TNC operating in a gray area—since we had yet to get official approval from Beijing. As always in China that could be good or bad. On the one hand, TNC had freedom to experiment. On the other hand, the project could be shut down at any point. Beijing distrusted nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Few were sanctioned in China at the time, and TNC was active in a highly sensitive area on the border of Tibet that was home to many ethnic Tibetans. Anything concerning Tibet had the potential to be a problem for China’s leaders.
It made sense to get a sign-off from the highest levels of the state. That meant arranging a meeting with President Jiang Zemin. The question was how to do that. The days when any group of foreigners working on a project or deal could meet with China’s president were long over. An added complication was that I hoped to discuss another issue with the president—the continued reform of the country’s capital markets. Goldman had long wanted to set up a fully owned and operated securities business in the country but was restricted to joint ventures. Keeping out the world’s best banks was self-defeating and limited China’s own development potential, I believed. A number of Chinese reformers agreed with me, but there was resistance in top state bodies to opening the markets further. Some of this came from ideological intransigence, some from the domestic securities industry, which had a vested interest in limiting competition, and some, I think, came from an understandable case of the jitters. Global markets were rocky—the Nasdaq Composite Index had collapsed in March 2000 after the dot-com bubble blew up, then U.S. energy highflier Enron Corporation imploded in late fall 2001. And Chinese markets were notoriously volatile.
Although meetings with senior officials had to be sponsored by a state host, no government agency in the financial sector would have helped us. If Goldman were seen to have secured a meeting with Jiang, every major financial services company in the world would have demanded their own one-on-one, and there was no way the Chinese could or would accommodate that. But there weren’t a lot of environmentally focused NGOs operating in China asking for meetings with Jiang Zemin. So we decided to go through the State Environmental Protection Administration.
To be clear: we were not trying to pull a bait and switch by asking to talk about the environment only to start discussing finance. Far from it. The Chinese were eager to discuss both topics—securities regulator Zhou Xiaochuan was planning to attend and helped facilitate the meeting. But it was important that our approach conform to the established process, so that we could discuss environmental and financial matters without opening the floodgates to every importuning bank in the world.
The wrinkle was that the environmental agency was not very powerful and lacked easy access to Jiang Zemin. Officials at the agency felt they would be putting an awful lot on the line to request a meeting with the president on our behalf and did not want to appear to overreach. So, working through Ziwang Xu, Goldman’s head of China, we approached Jiang’s eldest son, Dr. Jiang Mianheng, who had a strong interest in the environment, to secure the president’s informal acceptance of a meeting. Once we had done that, we had to convince SEPA officials that we had learned through our own back channels that they could get the meeting if they asked. It’s a measure of just how cautiously Chinese officials operated that it would take three months and multiple trips by TNC staffers to Beijing before SEPA finally felt confident enough to ask to see the president.
We met with Jiang Zemin at Zhongnanhai in the first week of February 2002. All around us the capital was busily preparing for Chinese New Year festivities, with its noisy fireworks and train stations jammed with travelers heading home. But inside the leadership compound’s thick walls all was as serene and orderly as ever. At 4:00 p.m. we were ushered into an ornate meeting room and seated in a horseshoe of plush armchairs beneath an enormous ink landscape painting. I had brought along Carol Fox, Ed Norton, and Rose Niu, as well as Goldman chief of staff John Rogers, Ziwang Xu, and Hsueh-ming Wang.
Among the Chinese attendees was State Environmental Protection Administration chief Xie Zhenhua, a Tsinghua-trained engineer who’d spent much of his career in the thankless work of fighting for China’s environment while serving in the haphazard bureaucracy that predated SEPA. (In 2006 Xie was appointed to serve as China’s chief climate change negotiator.) Also attending were Yunnan governor Xu Rongkai and Zhou Xiaochuan.
President Jiang looked as relaxed and friendly as ever, sporting a well-cut dark suit and his trademark square black-rimmed glasses. He got right to the point. “China needs to learn more about stock markets and global economic policies,” he told us. “I’d like to start off talking about those issues.”
Jiang quizzed me about financial topics, particularly the importance of equity markets to economic development. In his typically wry way, he quoted Sir Isaac Newton’s famous remark that he could grasp the movements of objects and celestial bodies but not those of stocks. Jiang said he had been puzzled to see the collapse of the Nasdaq index, down more than 60 percent from its peak. I understood his concern might be closer to heart: the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index had fallen by one-third since mid-2001. Jiang acknowledged the advantages of having a stock market in China, but expressed concern about his countrymen’s proclivity to speculate.
I explained that stock markets provided a means to invest China’s rapidly growing capital in the nation’s economic activity rather than leaving it in banks. I emphasized, too, how important it was to have excellent managers running the companies that people were investing their money in. During our colloquy I tried to shift the topic toward Yunnan and conservation, pointing out how a healthy economy and a healthy environment depended on each other, but Jiang kept his attention focused on capital markets for longer than I expected.
When I was done, Jiang asked me if I could expand my thoughts in a report and send it to him.
“Don’t charge any fee,” he said, adding wryly, “of course, I could always ask J.P. Morgan instead.”
The president then gestured to the Chinese side of the horseshoe and told me we had better start talking about the environment, or SEPA administrator Xie and Governor Xu would become angry with him.
So I spoke very briefly about the Nature Conservancy, which I called “the best conservation organization in the world,” and then I introduced Rose Niu, suggesting that she explain the Yunnan Great Rivers Project.
“I’m a simple Naxi girl from Lijiang,” Rose began, addressing Jiang directly, “and I was very nervous about my assignment of reporting our work in Yunnan to you. Then I heard you speak. Your hometown is right across the river from my husband’s, and I thought, gosh, you talk just like my father-in-law.”
It was a masterful opening, completely disarming, and from that moment, the diminutive Naxi woman, sitting on the edge of a big red chair, her feet barely touching the ground, was in absolute command of the room. Speaking without notes for perhaps 20 minutes, she gave an incisive, nuanced presentation, explaining what TNC was doing in Yunnan and the importance of the Great Rivers Project, not just for the province but for China as a whole.
The president was riveted, listening intently, and leaning in close, the better to see and hear Rose, who was seated to my right. I almost felt I should offer him my chair.
He interrupted her at one point to ask how to pronounce a particular term of art in English, and then repeated aloud after her: “Conservation by Design, a very systematic and science-based approach.”
Jiang, being an engineer, liked systematic things.
When Rose was done, Jiang praised her effusively, commending the clarity and precision of her report. He asked her where she had learned her English and said he knew the Asian Institute of Technology, where she had studied. Then he turned again to his side of the room and declared: “All Chinese government officials concerned should work together with TNC to make this project a success and take this model to all China.”
It was exactly what we were hoping to hear.
Afterward, flashbulbs popped and TV cameramen jostled for an angle as they squeezed together to document the first meeting between representatives of a foreign environmental NGO and the president of China. After the meeting, Jiang wrote me a letter endorsing TNC’s Yunnan program as a model for environmental protection efforts in other areas of China. The same day the Conservancy also signed an agreement to cooperate with SEPA. TNC had been active in Yunnan for years; now Jiang Zemin had provided the official blessing, opening doors to Chinese government agencies at all levels. No one could question whether a foreign NGO like TNC should be so active in China—even on the borders of Tibet.
Rose framed Jiang’s letter and took it to meetings with any officials who were giving her a hard time. TNC established a Beijing office that October and not long after was invited by SEPA to develop a scientific ecoregional plan to identify China’s conservation priorities, which led to the creation of the country’s first centralized biodiversity database. The resulting blueprint was incorporated into the government’s National Biodiversity Conservation Strategy and Action Plan, which was approved by Premier Wen Jiabao and released in 2012. The plan called for strengthening nature reserves to protect 90 percent of China’s endangered species and important ecosystems; conducting complete biodiversity surveys by 2015 in priority areas; and stopping the loss of biodiversity in China by 2020.
In 2003 a significant part of the Yunnan project area was designated a World Natural Heritage Site. Known as the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, the site is one of the largest recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco). In June 2007 China’s first pilot national park opened in northwest Yunnan under provincial supervision. The 500-square-mile Pudacuo was designed to encompass Tibetan villages, soaring peaks and alpine lakes, forests, and meadows and to adhere to strict international standards for environmental protection, biodiversity conservation, and ecotourism. In total, the Yunnan provincial government has approved plans for a dozen pilot national parks to be built by 2020.
After the meeting with President Jiang, Yunnan governor Xu invited the Asia-Pacific Council to hold its next board meeting in his province, so the members could see the place they were working to protect. We accepted, and in late October 2002 Wendy, Amanda, and I flew out early to explore the area before attending the meeting in Lijiang.
This being China, we couldn’t just sneak in. We were met at Kunming airport by Governor Xu, who had stayed there overnight so as not to miss our early morning arrival. After a ceremonial breakfast Wendy, Amanda, and I set out with TNC science director Bob Moseley, Ed Norton, and a few local Chinese staff for Meili Snow Mountain. We took a short flight up to the newly christened town of Shangri-La. In a marketing coup to attract tourists, the Zhongdian town and the surrounding county had beaten out other local jurisdictions to win approval from the State Council the year before to officially change their names to Shangri-La.
That night we stayed in the small city of Deqin, and in the morning we visited a school the Nature Conservancy had provided with rooftop solar water heaters, clean-burning biogas stoves fueled by methane from pig waste, and greenhouses that provided fresh vegetables for the students and staff. Though these improvements were not conservation work per se, they helped to engage local families happy to see their children enjoy better conditions in the mostly residential schools. Many villagers nearby were motivated to install ultra-efficient, wood-burning stoves in their homes, as well.
Over the next four days, we explored a part of Yunnan that was even lusher and more jaw-droppingly beautiful than we had been led to expect. Leaving Deqin we traveled by four-wheel drive to a trailhead that led to the tiny village of Yubeng, which we reached on foot. From there we made arduous climbs and descents through old-growth hardwoods, cautiously navigated narrow traverses that overlooked dizzying, thousand-foot drop-offs, crossed alpine meadows where a few late gentians were still in flower, and followed the Yubeng River down to the Mekong, through villages with clusters of whitewashed houses whose roofs were covered with corn spread out to dry.
Because it was October, few of the area’s spectacular wildflowers were in bloom, but the monsoon season had long gone, leaving behind high crystalline skies against which the soaring peaks of the Meili range stood out in stark, almost surreal relief. Looking at the vistas—the peaks, waterfalls, and valleys—it was easy to understand why the area was considered sacred by locals, most of whom are Tibetan Buddhists. I remember in particular one hike up a steep grade to a waterfall above the timberline. We stopped for a lunch of instant noodles and baba, a traditional Naxi bread. Wendy and I wedged ourselves between some boulders and, with the waterfall behind us, watched in wonder as the mountain sun glinted off the ethereally white wings of a flock of Himalayan snow pigeons.
As Bob Moseley explained, Yubeng, where we stayed two nights, lay within a complex, religion-based zoning system that was maintained by villagers and supported by religious leaders from nearby monasteries. I wasn’t surprised to learn this, having seen throughout the day prayer flags flapping in the stiff upland breezes. In Yubeng there were zones open to all extractive uses, including timber harvest and hunting. There were other zones where hunting was prohibited but yak grazing and the collection of medicinal plants and mushrooms were allowed. Some areas, where certain deities were believed to reside, were off-limits to humans. Punishments for breaching the rules were enforced. This sacred zoning system was not something Western-trained conservation planners (or even most Chinese natural scientists) would have thought to include in the design of a protected area at Meili. Luckily, Bob Moseley helped us recognize and catalog this otherwise unseen world. Working with this centuries-old system gave our team a much better chance of protecting biodiversity in the area. It was a clear reminder to me that as much as successful conservation requires building relationships at the top, it demands that we work hard and take the time to understand the needs of local people as well.
Sometimes China can move very fast; other times the pace of change can be maddeningly slow. It pays to have patience—never my strong suit—persistence, and a little ingenuity. Conservation in China was never going to offer a simple, quick fix. Given the country’s huge population and limited remaining natural areas, it is simply impossible to set aside very large portions of its territory for strict protection. With roughly the same landmass as the U.S. (and nearly one-third less arable land), China must support a population more than four times that of America’s. And as with any country, numerous stakeholders make competing claims on the land and its resources, from indigenous populations trying to maintain a traditional way of life, to local officials eager to boost revenues through land sales, to the country’s power producers looking to build dams in pristine gorges to meet the country’s surging electricity needs, to mining interests eager to exploit the abundant mineral resources, and on and on.
The tension between development and conservation is particularly high in this resource-rich region. Many dams and mines have been built and many more proposed. TNC has worked to help minimize ecological damage, bringing in experts, for example, to advise on the location and construction of dams. But in some cases, such as a recent proposal to build a series of 13 big dams on the upper reaches of the Salween River, TNC has joined other Chinese and international conservation organizations in opposition.
To its credit, as our efforts at the Nature Conservancy showed, the Chinese government was open to new ideas and willing to experiment as it sought solutions to address the unprecedented challenges of protecting its environment while balancing the needs of nature and people. If the pilot national parks in Yunnan prove successful, the concept will be embraced by other provinces. When that happens, China will have gone some ways toward securing part of its threatened natural and cultural heritage.