that played almost daily in the national
press. The hunting techniques of early 20th
century Westerners like Harry Caldwell were
a catalyst for more systematic extirpation
campaigns against tigers. If Fujian natives
were awed by Caldwell’s impressive firepow-
er in the 1920s, they proved that they could
achieve the same results on their own after
“liberation.” But in contrast to Caldwell’s
intense fascination with the natural history
of the tiger, a love he expressed in the
peculiar idiom of scientific interest mated to
religious fundamentalism and tempered by
“sportsmanship,” the Chinese government
was singularly committed to the permanent
removal of the tiger from the stage of
human progress. Wild animals became tar-
gets in a Maoist ideological war on nature.
Peasants became crusaders in countless
“battles” against the wild, the uncultivated,
and the unsettled. To
make the best use of
wildlife, which was being
killed off at unprecedented
rates, due in part to a
massive increase in mili-
tary weaponry among the
peasantry, the government
set up a system of Foreign
Trade Stations
(Waimaozhan). The trade
in furs and skins (as well
as wild and cultivated
plant products) was
fuelled by international
demand. Government data collected from
eight provinces in central and southern
China between 1951 and 1981 show how
an estimated population of 4,000 tigers was
rapidly decimated. From 1951 to 1955,
there was an official average annual produc-
tion of 400 tiger pelts. From 1961 to 1965,
this figure decreased to 152 per year, and
there were an estimated 1,000 tigers left in
the wild. As tigers became scarce in the
early 1970’s production dropped to 1-2 in
most provinces and to 5 in Henan and
Hunan (Lu and Sheng 1986).^12The death of Mao in 1976 and the rise of
Deng Xiaoping shortly thereafter led to the
dismantling of the commune system and a
series of major economic reforms by the
end of the decade. “Socialism with Chinese
characteristics” was the slogan for a transi-
tion to a market economy. Under the
Individual Responsibility System” farm
households could produce and market what-
ever they liked as long as they met annual
grain quotas. Urban and rural entrepre-
neurialism, joint ventures with foreign com-
panies, a growing infusion of foreign invest-
ment, and burgeoning free trade have given
China the greatest sustained economic
growth for any region of comparable size in
world history. Economic liberalisation has
also marked a dramatic decline in the provi-
sion of social services; central government
subsidies for education, health care, agricul-
ture, women’s organisations, transportation,
and the like have been dismantled or
severely weakened.Local tax rates have risen sharply, and
millions of rural people have migrated to
the cities in search of work to make ends
meet. During this period of rapid globali-
sation and radical social change, the
Chinese government has made a “great
leap forward” in nature conservation,
establishing over 1,500 nature reserves in
twenty years (by 2001 there were 1,757
reserves covering 13.2% of the country).
This abrupt change in official policy
toward nature marks a turn toward con-
temporary international political norms,
and yet popular appreciation of distinctive
fauna and flora is predominantly
expressed through traditional cultural
practices involving ornamental horticul-
ture, consumption of medicinal plants and
animal parts, and the (now burgeoning)
consumption of wild game as haute cui-
sine. In this context, an unprecedented
level of official policy formulation in regard
to the South China tiger is a subject ofConservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
During tthe 11950 s,
predator ccontrol wwas
patriotic aand rrevolu-
tionary. TTeams oof
peasants aand ssol-
diers eencircled ttigers
in ttheir mmountain
lairs, aan aancient
technique, bbut nnow
the wweapons oof cchoice
were ggrenades aand
machine gguns.