Tourism's Great Leap Forward: A Threat to Traditional Culture, Environment? - Part 2 of 2

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Mining or Heritage?

Talking just about environmental protection or culture, and not economic realities, will not launch local communities into development. Environmentalists are often accused of being “immoral”—hearing only the desperate cries of ecosystems and not seeing people’s daily struggles against poverty. But in China, environmentalists are usually the ones most sensitive to social poverty, a concern that catches their eyes and pricks their hearts well before serious disasters make the suffering more public. They are the ones thinking most about how to “develop” while protecting, and “protect” while developing. And they understand the importance of collaborating with local people.

Xiaoyi Liao, head of Global Village Environmental Education Center in Beijing, has noted that, “local culture, eco-wisdom, and traditional ways of maintaining health are three treasures in our Chinese culture.” Only by investing in local communities, she believes, can China retain these treasures and also preserve a healthy environment. But to do this, Liao says, the Chinese people need support from the government and from experts with deep insights into the current situation and an appropriate willingness for development. “If we could collaborate with them, our work in both cultural and environmental protection will become easier,” she notes. “We must be qualified to help local communities make their blueprints for development.”

On September 27, at the Green Olympic Ecotourism Forum in Beijing’s Miyun County, Xiaoxuan Yu, vice minister of the Chinese Olympic Committee’s Environment and Engineering Department, announced a new “Miyun Declaration” and “Ecotourism Guide.” The documents were jointly drafted and released by Liao’s group together with the Olympic Committee, the Beijing Environment Bureau, the Beijing Tourism Administration, the County of Miyun, and the nongovernmental group Green Tourism 21. 

For the first time in China, the ecotourism guide provides a reference list of operational details on ecotourism for developers, managers, and tourists. Liao engaged extensively in developing the guide and believes that, as a detailed regulation, it will play an active role in channeling China’s tourism. “Many local officials are either attracted by achievements in their political careers, or driven by the profits from different development projects, and therefore, they have designed many suicidal models for local development,” she explains. “These models are of no use to local sustainable wealth and societies, but rather, are disasters to their ecosystems and residents.” The new guide, Liao says, will help officials learn to respect local traditional cultures and natural environments, as well as understand the benefits to local communities.

Xiaoping Dong, a professor in the Department of History and Culture at Beijing Normal University, has shown great interest in participating in efforts to help local communities develop by uniting culture and environmental protection. “Areas of varied and fragile biological diversity are usually the same areas that have varied and fragile culture diversity,” she explains. “I will encourage my graduate students to develop their research on topics related to Guizhou’s protection.” Xiaojun Zhang, a professor of anthropology at Tsinghua University, has shown the same interest.

Mingming Hong, director of the Environmental Department at Kunming Technology Institute, recently gave a speech at Peking University raising concerns about the current development situation in Yunnan Province. “Many developers, officials and businessmen are looking only for mines in Yunnan, without paying attention to its natural and cultural heritage, to its living ecology and culture—which I am strongly against,” he said. “We have too many extreme developers but too few extreme environmentalists today.” Years ago, Hong directed a 3.1 billion yuan (US$393 million) program on biological resource development in Yunnan; since then, he noted, the region’s biodiversity has suffered greatly. “Now, when I visit there, I feel repentance to local orchids, which have almost become extinct because of the exploitation. Another precious medicinal herb in Yunnan called Sanqi (panax notoginseng) is facing the same fate.”

Hong told the story of a scientist at Kunming Institute of Botany who invented a technology to extract Paclitaxel from the skin of the Chinese Yew. This extractive process resulted in the stripping of the skins of almost every yew in Yunnan. “Under such situations, blind development is very destructive to local resources,” Hong explained. “Yunnan is best for its biodiversity, and it is clearly not wise to use the region as a stockhouse for mines, fibers (paper), and rubbers.” Hong noted that while tourism is considered to have the least ecological impact among a variety of development models and can be a very profitable industry, it too offers opportunities for exploitation. “Guizhou and many places in Yunnan are taking great leaps to attract tourists. However, when more tourists come, they eat a lot of local wild specialties, purchase local medicinal herbs, and even ‘steal’ local culture, raising new concerns.”

Conservation International’s China Program, directed by Professor Zhi Lu at Peking University’s Life Science School, recently surveyed a group of mid- and high-scale restaurants in the Jiuzhai and Huanglong areas of Sichuan Province. She found that almost all of the restaurants offered wild animals on their menus—including many species that are listed as endangered under China’s first and second grades of wildlife protection. Lu believes that such practices can be ended without also destroying tourism. “Regulating tourist behavior usually depends on the existence of restraints from regulators, and many tourists are willingly to enjoy tours even with such restraints,” she says. “Ecosystem and culture are interdependent. A developer without respect for the ecosystem will not respect culture. A tourist without respect for culture also will not be impressed by the beauty of nature. We must work out ways to intervene and guide them.”

Last summer, on the opening day of the new Qinghai-Tibet railway—the world’s highest—Lu’s group and others released a “green” travel guide for visitors to China’s Tibet region, titled “For Our Natural Splendor.” The guide offers a combination of tourist education and practical advice: the front shows a map of the railway, with each station marked with noteworthy local animals and plants, while the back lists recommended “green” rules. “We plan to give each passenger a copy, but are still waiting for permission from the government,” says Lu. Meanwhile, her organization has launched a new website for the guide and already received considerable support through the Internet.

Yongfeng Feng is an acclaimed editor and journalist who has worked at China Guangming Daily since 1995, reporting and writing on science and technology issues. He also works as a columnist at China Economic Times, and Shenzhen Economy Daily and has published a novel and several poems.

Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author, and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.