When a Billion Chinese Jump (12 page)

Hubei and Guangxi

Although the cranes have wild instincts and are free to leave the
royal park, the king’s moral government makes them stay, their
captivity … being their reason for joy.

—Early Han dynasty poet
¹

I had never heard of the baiji before coming to China. Even then, I did not pay much attention at first. As far as I could tell, the Yangtze dolphin was just another item on the endangered species list. Little news there. So many creatures were at risk that I had grown almost numb to reports about the loss of the wild. But then I was assigned to cover an international search for the animal. No story has made more powerful impression on me.

It began with a shipful of high hopes and good intentions. The launch party in Hubei on the misty banks of the Yangtze gathered together the great and the good of the marine biology community.
²
On the deck of the
Kekao 1
survey ship, I clinked glasses with the world’s leading zoologists and sonar engineers. Local communist cadres chatted with executives from the American beer company that was cosponsoring the project. The Swiss philanthropist who helped to organize the mission was ebullient that, after years of preparation, something was finally being done. Alcohol foamed down a cascade of champagne glasses as the dignitaries posed for the cameras. The speeches mentioned unprecedented international cooperation, state-of-the-art equipment, and determination not to give up on the baiji. The dolphin was in danger, but if anyone could find and save the
animal, it was this group. I couldn’t help thinking this would make a great start for a feel-good Hollywood movie. Indeed, we seemed to be on the set of a film. Our ship, decked out in bright bunting, red-bannered slogans, and a display of corporate donor logos, was an incongruous sight amid the empty gray farm fields and swirling brown waters of the river. To any passing farmer we must have made a peculiar spectacle.

At least something was being done. The expedition was a last-gasp effort to save a remarkable creature.
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August Pfluger, the enthusiastic Swiss millionaire who helped to pull the team together, and Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London explained the animal’s significance and its decline as we embarked on our journey.

Between twenty and twenty-five million years ago, a pale, long-snouted dolphin left the Pacific Ocean and began navigating the muddy brown waters of the Yangtze. Over time, it became distinct from other cetaceans. Eyesight was of little use in the murky river and it became almost blind, developing instead a highly sophisticated sonar for navigation. With fish plentiful and predators few, the baiji flourished. Until a few thousand years ago they would have been a common sight, frolicking by sandbars as tapirs emerged from densely forested riverbanks to drink waters that sustained as rich a variety of life as the Amazon does today. In that golden age of ecological diversity elephants ranged from the Yangtze to Beijing, where they lived wild along with Bactrian camels and a cornucopia of other species in an area that was then densely forested.

Man was a latecomer. The earliest archaeological records of
Homo erectus
(upright man) date back about two million years to Africa. It was another million years before their descendants moved to Asia and probably several hundred thousand years more until they reached southern China. But certainly by 6500 bc our species—by then evolved to
Homo sapiens
(wise man)—had settled in the Yangtze delta and domesticated rice for the first time in human history.
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Early civilizations worshipped the baiji as a river goddess.
⁵
Capable of growing up to 2.5 meters in length, able to swim up to 60 kilometers per hour, and communicating in a series of clicks and whistles, the creature would have mystified our ancient ancestors. In one ancient romance, a baiji is transformed into a beautiful maiden who falls in love with a man.
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In other writings, the dolphin is adored as the “Goddess of the Yangtze.”

Over the years, the baiji has been known by many names, but the most
prescient was given by the first Westerner to record its existence:
Lipotes vexillifer,
which is Latin for “left-behind flag bearer.”
⁷
This proved appropriate, as the mammal, which preceded man in making a home in Asia by tens of millions of years, has effectively been abandoned for at least half a century. As humanity pressed into the Yangtze delta in ever-larger numbers, the dolphin was first neglected and then squeezed out of its habitat.

The Yangtze delta supports more than one in twenty of humanity and 40 percent of China’s economy. There is barely any room left for other species or activities. Elephants and tapirs have long since been driven away. Other fantastic creatures such as the Yangtze crocodile are now on the brink of extinction. The baiji may already be over the edge. Far more so than the giant panda, its demise illustrates the sacrifices that nature has been forced to make to support and enrich the world’s most populous country.

In the 1950s, there were 6,000 baiji in the Yangtze, their only home. From then on their numbers fell calamitously. By 1984, there were only 400 left, and since then their decline has followed an almost perfect inverse relationship to the nation’s economic rise.
⁸
The last confirmed sighting was in 2002.

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.
¹³
Half of the species in the northern hemisphere are found here. Sichuan alone contains a greater range of life than all of North America.
¹⁴
Nationwide, 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.
¹⁵
But 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

China came late to conservation. Although certain areas were nominally protected more than fifty years ago, it was only after the country opened up to the outside world in 1978 that any systematic attempt was
made to track the populations of species and support those most at risk of extinction. After that, the central and provincial governments set aside 2,531 nature reserves.
¹⁷
These actions may have been delayed too long. When the United States began protecting nature around the turn of the twentieth century, its population density was ten people to a square kilometer. When China started, its population was squeezed 145 to the same area. There was not much room left for other forms of life.