Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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49. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
50. Interview with Zhang Qingcong by the author, 18 April 2006.
51. Interview with Yu Zhiping by the author, 19 April 2006.
Chapter 14
Wild Pandas, Wild People
Two Views of Wilderness in Deng-Era China
Sigrid Schmalzer and E. Elena Songster
The fall of the Cultural Revolution radicals in 1976, followed by the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, produced fundamental changes throughout China’s political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. This chapter explores one specific aspect of this transformation: the dramatic shift in both official and popular Chinese understandings of nature. China had developed policies to address environmental issues as early as the 1950s, but during the Mao era the goal of conservation was to protect resources valuable to the state. The arrival of the post-Mao era saw a new understanding of nature as an endangered wilderness with inherent worth and in need of protection. While the concept of the endangered wilderness became widely accepted in the 1980s, it did not resolve into a single vision. Rather, two distinct views emerged that reflected two very different perspectives on the broad changes China was experiencing under Deng Xiaoping’s rule (1978–1997). One was the idea that a new state strengthened by scientific modernization and economic reforms could rescue the wilderness from crises brought on by nature’s intrinsic fragility. The other presented the wilderness as threatened, rather than protected, by state-supported modernization efforts.
In order to capture these two very different perspectives on the landscape of state-wilderness relations, we will ask you to imagine that you have in front of you two telescopes. The first directs our gaze onto efforts to save the giant panda from starvation. Through official, state-produced documents on panda preservation, we obtain the state’s view of the power of modernization to protect the wilderness. The second telescope focuses on the search for a legendary, Bigfoot-like creature called yeren. Through popular science writings, fiction, and poetry about yeren, we gain the perspective of critical intellectuals, who see the power of modernization to destroy the wilderness.
We use telescopes as a metaphor to make explicit the reflexivity of this volume’s approach. Like the people we study, modern historians inhabit a “visual culture.” Metaphors of visuality abound in our writings. We talk about people in history “constructing images,” “outlining visions,” and “sharing views” even when there is nothing literally to “see.” Historians also sometimes use such language to explore the way we go about the very act of studying the past. For example, we may talk about different “perspectives” on historical events or about using a small episode as a “window” onto larger historical changes. In adopting “telescopes,” we are raising specific questions about the powers and limits of historical sight. A telescope zooms in on an object in a circular field of vision while rendering the larger context invisible.1 Similarly, a specific body of historical sources may provide rich detail about one subject from one perspective while leaving out many related subjects and oppositional viewpoints. Thus, we will need to return in the conclusion to the question of what each telescope (panda rescues and yeren explorations) does and does not reveal about Deng-era China. To what extent does a focused examination of a specific case offer insight into an historical era? Are there limits to such visions, and if so, can we overcome them?
Telescope #1: Pandas in Crisis, Modernization to the Rescue
1976: A Crisis in Nature
In early 1976, local and provincial government agencies sent urgent reports to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Beijing that giant pandas were dying in abnormally high numbers.2 State officials had good reason for concern. Since the 1950s, pandas had been lovingly adopted as a national symbol, and during the early 1970s, they came to be called China’s “national treasure.” The Chinese government gave pandas as diplomatic gifts to cultivate good relations with other nations, an act that transformed pandas into international symbols of China’s value. “Panda diplomacy” became increasingly important when China joined the United Nations in 1971 and began the process of renewing relations with the United States. Early in the People’s Republic, newspaper descriptions of the “fat,” “comical” animals with “milk white fur” and “delicate little round ears,” together with photographs of the Beijing Zoo’s captive pandas, had won people’s hearts, and in 1976 this image of the giant panda was still embedded in people’s minds.3 Many Chinese companies had adopted this robust, round giant panda as their logo. Now government reports spoke of pandas that were thin and decrepit with lackluster coats indicative of some debilitating illness.
The pandas’ plight was hardly the biggest difficulty facing the government in 1976. Three top leaders died that year: Zhou Enlai on January 8, Zhu De on July 6, and Mao Zedong on September 9. The same year also saw what is still history’s most devastating earthquake: on July 28, more than 240,000 people perished in and around Tangshan. Despite the magnitude of these challenges, however, the national government responded with remarkable speed and resources to increasingly urgent reports of ailing and dying pandas.
Embracing the panda as a symbol of China brought with it the responsibility of keeping it alive. As a national symbol on the brink of disaster, the giant panda had the power to capture the attention of officials at every level of government. As a sickly wild animal, it conjured a new sense of the wilderness as vulnerable and in need of rescue. The process of mobilizing scientific, political, and economic resources to intervene in the crisis created a new state view of the wilderness not as daunting or exploitable but as vulnerable.
One of the earliest signs of a panda crisis described in these government documents occurred in Pingwu County, in northern Sichuan province, when a man brought a “weak and disoriented” panda to the county forestry bureau. The county then delivered it to a zoo for recovery.4 During the course of their work in the mountain forests, lumber workers, local villagers, and forestry officials soon began encountering panda corpses.5 Typically, they spotted dead pandas lying on their sides in the grass or slouched in the snow, emaciated and with fur that was unusually coarse and dull.6
These disturbing images prompted county governments to organize search teams to determine the scale of the crisis. One such group led by a local resident in Gansu encountered an adult panda that “could still move, but did not flee when they neared. The local guide approached it and even pinched its ear, but the giant panda had neither the strength nor the will to resist.” Autopsies gave local and national officials a more detailed picture of what ailed the pandas—starvation. Experts discovered that the pandas’ “stomachs were empty or without food, there was no fat, the livers had assumed a grassy quality, not even a centimeter thick, and the abdomen was full of water.”7 Other pandas, not yet dead, seemed to be feeble or oddly tame—walking unsteadily, appearing out in the open, sometimes approaching villages. Each report contributed to a new perception of China’s “national treasure”—a suffering, weak creature that had lost many of the characteristics of a wild animal, including the ability to fear and dissuade human approach.
Concern quickly traveled from local officials up the political ladder to Beijing. The central office of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry called on a large number of political and scientific bodies to form a “United Survey Team,” which proceeded to collect extensive data on each death and the surrounding ecology. Even more remarkable was the monetary investment and sacrifice to which the local and national governments were willing to commit. In addition to caring for pandas—and reimbursing and rewarding local residents for their efforts—the government actually halted all lumber activity in the area, at a cost of millions of yuan.8
The state’s response to the crisis was to bring science and political authority together in an effort to manage nature. National and local government agencies used legal measures to restrict activities thought to be harmful or disruptive to the pandas. T
hese included bans on hunting (except of potential panda predators), the use of hunting dogs in the wild, the skinning of or tampering with panda corpses, and any activity that might result in habitat destruction.9 The state intervened also by removing pandas from the wild in order to rehabilitate them in captivity.10
The sheer scale and intensity of the United Survey Team’s investigations was another way in which the state demonstrated its power to cope with a crisis of nature. In keeping with the “high modernist” character of the Chinese state in this period, officials and scientists sought to render nature “legible” to science through extensive and detailed data collection.11 Survey participants meticulously recorded all relevant data in order to offer more scientific, or at least more systematic solutions. Biologists and botanists who were recruited to participate in the surveys instructed other surveyors to register all pandas with a number, the commune area in which it was found, a detailed description of its immediate location, the time, the general environment, and the panda’s sex, size, and apparent reason for death.12 The combined efforts of the national United Survey Team and the provincial and local rescue and investigation operations determined that a mass bamboo die-off in the region lay behind the deaths of the pandas, which were dependent on bamboo as their dominant source of food.13
In its response to the panda crisis, the Chinese government entered into a new relationship with nature, becoming an intermediary in the workings of the wilderness. Past efforts to manipulate, improve, or even conquer nature addressed the intersection between human society and nature, altering nature for the convenience of humans (Figure 14.1, see website). Projects such as digging canals to ease transportation, diverting rivers to maintain a village, and filling in lakes to grow crops all centered on the human community.14 But now the Chinese government and local residents were attempting to improve the relationship between the wilderness and wildlife. Nature was failing, and Chinese officials considered it their duty to step in, figure out where nature was going wrong, and fix the problem.
1983: A Crisis in the New Economy
When in 1983 another panda crisis emerged, the Chinese state was in a still better position to demonstrate its ability to intervene and assist nature, and certain state agencies were even able to capitalize on their newfound economic power. Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiaoping had prioritized economic development, a distinct break with the Mao era’s emphasis on political movements. Deng took as his platform the “Four Modernizations,” a commitment to developing agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense. Under Deng, the government also encouraged small-scale entrepreneurial ventures, first in the countryside and later in the urban areas, and transformed the economy along the lines of “market socialism.”
In 1983, reports of dying bamboo surfaced in another mountain range, the Qionglai Mountains of southern Sichuan Province. That year, the concern about starving pandas did not compete with other monumental events and human catastrophes for attention. This favorable timing, combined with a growing economy, set the stage for a much bigger campaign to save the pandas. No longer just a problem for the modern state to address, the giant pandas became a national cause. Flush with its new economic power, the state mobilized still greater resources to research the situation (Figure 14.2), mitigate a flawed nature, and rescue this precious wild species. At the same time, the new spirit of entrepreneurial economics encouraged a frenzy of fund-raising that did little for pandas but greatly profited government agencies.
The Ministry of Forestry used every form of media in a public appeal for financial contributions to prevent a panda starvation catastrophe. This strategy was entirely different from anything the state attempted in 1976. Despite the death of more than one hundred pandas, the 1976 bamboo die-off did not appear once in People’s Daily (Renmin ribao). In contrast, more than thirty articles on bamboo die-off and panda rescue efforts appeared in this same paper between 1983 and 1984.15 Front-page articles celebrated “scientific” rescue techniques despite the lack of a single actual rescue to report.16 Popular magazines and books also depicted the crisis pandas faced and rescue efforts by heroic common people (Figures 14.3 and 14.4, see website). A peasant brought a panda that had wandered into his house to a government holding station. Another peasant reported that a panda killed his goat, yet he restrained his dogs and did not harass it.17 Some stories made international news, such as the group of neighbors who encountered a sickly panda that had fallen off a cliff and who then “went on a nineteen-hour trek carrying the panda on a light tractor to the county seat fifty miles away.”18 These stories helped those who could merely send funds envision more clearly the plight of the panda and the stalwart efforts their compatriots were contributing to the same cause. Citizens responded from all over China with letters of concern and monetary contributions.
In state-sponsored media accounts, popular fund-raising for the panda reflected the entrepreneurial genius of China’s young schoolchildren and the generous hearts of China’s poor. The Number Ten Middle School in Beijing recruited 530,000 students to pledge one fen (one penny) for each day of their winter holiday to the cause of saving the “national treasure.” Each student wrote her or his name in a pledge book to be sent with the money collected.19 Endearing photographs of children collecting and donating money for the treasured pandas, as seen in Figure 14.5, often accompanied these stories and inspired similar efforts in other parts of the country. The power of such newspaper images, both textual and photographic, lay in the apparently spontaneous actions of the figures depicted, who were expressing potent feelings of compassion and self-sacrifice. In Figure 14.5, the schoolchildren also seem to be innocently employing creative marketing strategy and an entrepreneurial spirit in keeping with China’s new economic ethos.
Figure 14.2 Scientists place a radio collar on a giant panda in the mountains of Sichuan in 1982 as part of a five-year behavioral study on wild pandas. The image appeared on the cover of China Pictorial 1982 (no. 1), a state-produced magazine published in Chinese and many other languages; it provided the voice of the Chinese state with a colorful, appealing face for popular audiences. Media attention like this helped prepare the public for the state’s massive campaign to mobilize resources to save the panda.
Figure 14.5 This photograph of school children raising money to save giant pandas appeared in People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), China’s most important state-sponsored newspaper, on 9 May 1984.
Funds always seemed to flow for the panda—a testament to nationalistic sentiment. Teenage railroad workers appealed to their coworkers to contribute to the cause with the slogan, “Love your nation, love the national treasure, save the giant panda.”20 Dong Zhiyong, the vice-chair of the Ministry of Forestry, reported that he was particularly moved when all of the inmates at a labor camp in Jiangsu province in southeast China dipped into their meager stashes and collected 180 yuan (about US$90) to donate to the cause of saving the giant panda. The money was enclosed in a letter that read, “We offer this donation to help the giant panda and as an expression of our deep love for our nation. With this concrete action we are correcting our mistakes and walking in a new direction.”21 Although it is difficult to confirm the authenticity of all of the stories of model citizens rising to the cause, many such instances certainly occurred.22 And regardless of the literal truth of each account, the stories worked to support the state’s effort to promote an image of widespread popular response to panda starvation.
While media images portrayed needy and suffering pandas alongside valiant and generous citizens, the fund-raising itself quickly turned into a fiasco. State agencies no longer pursued the scientific approach to fixing nature (however problematic it may have been) but focused instead on promoting a popular cause that proved unexpectedly profitable. Some scientists questioned the logic behind rescue efforts or criticized the ongoing fund-raising as unnecessary, but to no avail.23 Peking University biology professor Pan Wenshi was an early and persistent critic, but his complaints fell
on deaf ears.24 Some concern rose from the public about how the funds were being spent, but state agencies quickly consoled the critics and solicited still more funds.
In response to growing popular interest in the amount and allocation of donations, officials from the Chinese Wild Animal Protection Association, a subsidiary organization under the Ministry of Forestry, asserted that while they were unable to account for funds that went directly to the Ministry of Forestry or straight to local governments in panda territory, they planned to set up a trust fund for donations “for the next generation,” presumably of pandas.25 Critics to this day continue to raise doubts about where the funds went.26 But tracing the funds and determining responsibility has proven difficult. References to placing donations in trust accounts belied the notion that the pandas faced a crisis and urgently needed the funds. A few years later, articles in scientific journals and other publications demonstrated that the 1983 panda starvation crisis ultimately had been no more than a threat. But by that time, the government had quietly closed the case as a successful effort to rescue the starving pandas that the generosity and patriotism of China’s citizens made possible.
Deng’s market reforms enabled broad segments of society to have money to give, and the entrepreneurial ethos encouraged such fund-raising efforts. But this new system had no checks to prevent corruption. The 1983 campaign to save the pandas was at base a demonstration of the state’s ability to summon nationalistic fervor, channel such fervor through the new economic culture, and then bolster its own power by enriching government agencies. The sources explored here also include critical voices that call attention to the state’s failure to manage nature and protect wild animals. These critics accepted the idea that a strong, modern nation should be able to care for the wilderness, but they questioned whether the state had fulfilled this responsibility. Turning to the second case study, we will discover a very different kind of challenge—one that rejects entirely the notion that modernization is beneficial to the wilderness.