Governance of Biodiversity Conservation in China And Taiwan

2. North China: plains and low hills (with deciduous forests) of the heavily
   populated regions north of the Yangtze River.


3. Inner Mongolia-Xinjiang: the northern third of China, including steppes
   and deserts north of the Tibetan Plateau and also the Tianshan and Altai
   mountain systems.


4. The Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan highlands.


5. Southwest China: transitional mountains from the eastern Himalayas to
   the Sichuan and Yunnan plateaus, including deep river gorges that impede
   movement of species.


6. Central China: divided into the Guizhou plateau, the Sichuan basin, and
   southeastern provinces.


7. Tropical South China: including the South China rain forest, Hainan
   Island, and Taiwan.

Mackinnon et al. remark that China’s size (the world’s third largest country)
and diversity make it difficult to collect accurate information:

‘[T]he sheer size of the country ensures that no single person has a complete first

hand view of conditions. Data from different regions is very variable in terms of

reliability, completeness and contemporaneity, and such data is scattered between

many regional or organizational bodies rather than brought together in any single

repository.’^2

A second factor impeding data gathering is insufficient education and training
of the collectors. At the national level, knowledge of individual species and
ecosystems is limited. The biological sciences are at an early stage of
evolution in China, and taxonomy is particularly underdeveloped. This
adversely affects the development of comprehensive data bases on
biodiversity.^3 Ecology as a discipline is barely two decades old. Although
China has benefited from foreign expertise, this tends to be localized to
specific regions and species.
Commentators often speak of the ‘ten lost years’ of higher education due to
the Cultural Revolution, which had an extremely deleterious effect on the
natural sciences. Even after the onset of reforms in the late 1970s, professors,
curricula, and textbooks remained out-of-date. One of our respondents,
reflecting on his undergraduate education in the early 1980s, recalled that a
highly respected professor assigned works published in 1951 as the most
current texts; his graduate school professors in the mid-1980s lacked
doctorates and had not studied abroad.^4 He thought that the first Chinese PhD
in zoology had not been awarded until the mid-1990s.
Insufficient education and training of scientific personnel is a problem in
most developing nations. The third condition, bureaucratic insularity, is an
obstacle to the collection of accurate environmental data in most countries,
both developing and developed. Mackinnon et al. remark:

40 Governance of biodiversity conservation in China and Taiwan