This is the second installment of the author’s series on how China chew its way through the natural resources of its Asian neighbors. Check out the other stories in this series:
As Chinese companies make inroads into Bolivia for infrastructure and resource extraction, locals have found that they can earn up to $215 selling jaguar fangs to Chinese employees. This new demand has now inspired hunters to go into the Amazon jungle to hunt commercially. Sadly, that is part of a trail of blood spattered across the planet, taking the shape of Chinese characters for trinkets and various “traditional medicines” that spell out ivory, rhino horn, jaguar fangs, swim bladder, shark’s fin and a host of other ghastly products.
The color red signals danger in primates and in many human cultures, but in China it symbolizes good luck. The seas, forests, plains, and deserts of the world are now soaked in blood thanks to an ancient demand for wildlife parts to cure human maladies and to serve as status symbols that sadly have been found to have no medicinal value by scientific tests. That’s one narrative, but there is another, something more sinister than primitive superstition: eat it because it’s exotic. This is going on every day, all over the world.
Jaguar fangs in the end market in China are worth as much as their weight in cocaine. National Geographic recently published a stunning article about how the cats are “killed to order” in Suriname for the overseas Chinese market.
A scientist I know who works in the tropical forests of Guyana, far from Bolivia on the north coast of South America, says he has heard that local hunters are in touch with Chinese agents in country’s capital city of Georgetown to procure jaguars. If it’s happening in Bolivia and also in Suriname and Guyana it’s easily conceivable that jaguars are being hunted for their fangs everywhere in between across the Amazon basin. The King of the Amazon, it seems, is nothing more than a potential gaudy trinket for China’s nouveau riche to hideously flaunt.
In 2016, a staggering 8 million dead seahorses were intercepted in Peru bound for China. Farther down on the South American continent in Argentina a Chinese poaching vessel was caught (and later destroyed) carrying 180 tonnes of illegally caught squid in Argentinean waters. And Chinese appetite for South America’s wildlife is not limited to the surf and turf, but also the skies. In 2016 HK$2 million worth of wild and illegally-imported macaws were intercepted by marine police and customs officers before they could be offloaded in Shenzen.
In Mexico, the vaquita is down to perhaps just a dozen individuals, thanks to Chinese demand for its swim bladder, and there are no other known populations of this incredibly beautiful sea creature. Vaquita fish bladder can be sold to the Chinese for US$30,000 and is now considered “the cocaine of the sea.”
Farther out to the east in the Caribbean Sea, Chinese appetite for rare land turtles—as well as sea turtles—was documented in the late Archie Carr’s classic book The Windward Road. Carr followed up a report that a Chinese merchant in Trinidad was in possession of a rare yellow-footed tortoise(Carr classified it as Testudo denticulate at that time).
Carr finally located Mr. Yow: “He was the most outrageous-looking Chinese I ever saw, a character from a poor melodrama, a debauched Fu Manchu. He was short, fat, and unwashed, with spiky hair, mouth slacked open, and belly hanging free…Yow said that he had only two and that he kept them to eat, not sell.”
Carr was trying to save the tortoises by purchasing them, and his friend finally prevailed by reminding Yow that he had “done favors for him in the past.” Finally: “Yow looked at the tortoises for a moment with a rapt reverence and they stirred him so deeply he could not be silent.…His voice trailed off in a long moan of falsetto ecstasy.”
Carr eventually procured the tortoises. That was in Trinidad in the 1940s, and what it shows is that there is no place that is too far away or obscure for Chinese demand for wildlife, and there never has been.
Farther north in Canada, a bear poaching ring was recently broken up and the customers of these illicit Canadian gunslingers were those seeking bear gallbladders on the Asian market. South of the border, two Michigan men were arrested for poaching black bears to sell to the traditional Chinese medicine market. Even in North America, bears are not safe from Chinese demand for their gallbladders. Chinese mining companies threaten wildlife habitats as far afield as Greenland.
Exploitation of Africa has been well-documented, with elephant herds and rhinoceros populations plummeting in recent years thanks to Chinese as well as Vietnamese demand. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning some specific cases here. Gabon’s forest elephants are coming under major pressure for their ivory, which will be shipped to China if the great beasts are unfortunate enough to encounter a poacher, and the same goes for the elephants of Mozambique, Botswana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and every other African nation that has elephants, ditto for rhinoceros.
Chinese demand and poaching are so rampant in Namibia that Namibian Chamber of Environment recently published a letter stating that the bush meat trade flourished anyplace that Chinese nationals were working on infrastructure projects, and in addition that Chinese citizens are involved in “illegal collection of shellfish on the Namibian coast Capturing and killing of Carmine Bee-eaters at their breeding colonies by means of nets; Importing Chinese monofilament nets via Zambia to the northeast of Namibia, which are destroying the fisheries of the Zambezi, Chobe, Kwando and Okavango Rivers.”
There is simply no end in sight. A stack of heavy books could be written on Chinese consumption of wildlife in South America, North America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and everywhere in between (even tiny Palau has the Herculean task of chasing away Chinese and Taiwanese fishing vessels). And when Chinese nationals are caught by local authorities for engaging in the wildlife trade, what happens?
It seems that if you throw a bunch of money their way, freedom is yours, as was the case in Suriname when Chinese nationals caught with jaguars were “fined” and then walked away. If this is how justice is carried out across the globe, and especially in the tropics, there won’t be much left of the world’s natural heritage in the not-too-distant future.
This is the first installment of the author’s series on how China chew its way through the natural resources of its Asian neighbors. Check out the other stories in this series:
There is a monster chewing its way through the wildlife of its smaller, weaker Southeast Asian neighbors. The monster can change forms—like a shape-shifter—but it goes by one name: China. The region’s wildlife is rapidly disappearing, being sucked into the vortex of the illegal wildlife trade that leads to China.
In the Burmese border town of Mong-La, everything from tree-dwelling civets to clouded leopards, from tiger claws to elephant skin, and from pangolin scales to bear gall bladder is on sale, with the vast majority of customers coming over the border from Yunnan. National Geographic just this month ran a stunning if disturbing article on the plight of the “dinosaur of the skies”—the majestic Helmeted Hornbill.
The Hornbills’ numbers are crashing and in a few short years have been downgraded from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered by the IUCN. The Chinese are after their heads, literally. Their solid red casques are considered “red ivory” They are actually made of keratin, the same stuff as your fingernails and, incidentally, rhino horn, and rhinoceros are another species which have been virtually wiped off the face of the Southeast Asian map thanks to a misplaced belief that ground rhino horn can cure cancer and a host of other human ailments.
So dire is the situation of the Helmeted Hornbill that governments in this species range (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, and Myanmar) have recently formed a joint management and conservation plan to attempt to ensure that this otherworldly bird has a future outside of China’s markets. Asia Sentinel also published a story specifically about the hornbill hunters of Sumatra last year, and how those hornbill heads are sold to Chinese middlemen in the city of Medan.
Mainland Chinese investors in Singapore and Chinese Singaporeans are buying—mostly illicitly—so much sand from Cambodia’s coastal Koh Kong province that irreparable environmental damage is now becoming manifest. A well-informed source told me that one sand barge was so enormous that it took eight tugboats to pull it to Singapore. Activists from the NGO Mother Nature were arrested after filming illegal sand barges in Cambodia, and some of this group’s members had to flee to Thailand. The removal of riverbed sand—which is prized construction material—annihilates the river’s ecology, decimating fish populations and the wildlife that depends on them, such as river dolphins, otters, and fishing cats. Chinese investors are also behind the recent clearing of mangrove forests in Koh Kong, another nefarious activity that will cause significant environmental degradation.
Chinese developers, backed by Beijing, have begun the initial stages of construction on a highly controversial hydroelectric dam in Sumatra’s Batang Toru forest, which is home to a Critically Endangered population of Sumatran Orangutan, as well as Sumatran tigers and Helmeted Hornbills—all listed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered, with the last two being Critically Endangered largely due to Chinese demand for their carcasses. Now they are all even more endangered as a result of this dam, which will flood prime forest habitat and put the 800 or so orangutans—as well as other species—at immediate risk of extinction (in the case of this sub-species orangutan, which is only found in Batang Toru) and local extinction (for tigers and helmeted hornbills).
Over in Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, China Power Investment, a hydroelectric company, is investing US$17 billion in a massive dam project on the Kayan River, a project which will flood primary forest in the Heart of Borneo and put a myriad of wildlife species at risk and will forever change the ecology of this region. Chinese companies are also connected with illegal logging in prime Bornean orangutan habitat in West Kalimantan’s Sungai Putri Landscape, a debacle which has been ongoing for over two years’ now.
Mong-La in Myanmar, Botun in Laos, Sihanoukville in Cambodia, and Medan in Sumatra all serve as major conduits—some might even say black holes—for the region’s wildlife into the great Chinese illegal wildlife market (vortex). The “sucking sound” is heard loudly in these places today, just as it always has in Bangkok’s Chinatown and continues to be heard there today.
Sea turtles, sea horses, sea cucumbers, shark fins, yellow-margined box turtles in Taiwan, tiger bones and furs and penis, pangolin scales, rhinoceros horn, elephant skin and ivory, clouded leopard pelts, helmeted hornbill casques, bear bile, deer antlers, red coral, rosewood trees, massive cave-riddled limestone outcrops (which are ancient coral reefs) ground up into construction powder, and even sand itself as mentioned at the beginning…are all being robotically sucked up in the most hideous vortex of greed and ignorance the world has ever known. If it moves, eat it; if it doesn’t move, build with it. That seems to be the Chinese mantra. Use, use, use, until there is nothing left to use anymore.
China is building so many dams on the Mekong River that this great river of the world will likely be rendered unrecognizable in the near future, and its plans for the Brahmaputra, which spills out of Tibet and into India and Bangladesh, and other Himalayan rivers, are just as scary. And it is worth noting that the Brahmaputra runs through India’s world class Kaziranga National Park, and a significant drop in the river levels there could imperil Asia’s largest population of rhinoceros, as well as further endanger tigers, elephants, leopards, and a host of other species that find refuge in Kaziranga.
The planet, apparently, is just a place to trash, with the skies a vast chimney and the oceans the toilet bowls. This is not, of course, an attitude unique to China (though the consumption of exotic wildlife is, with Vietnam in second place), but because of China’s size and rising wealth—and the accompanying desire for more consumer products and other forms of wealth like cars and additional homes—this country’s footprint on the Earth will be gargantuan, and most likely irreparable.
Are there any signs of hope? The Chinese appear to be walking away from a dreadful hydroelectric project in Nepal, and Malaysian PM Mahathir has shut down several key Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in his country that were part of the supposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), all of which would have caused environmental damage, would have threatened wildlife, and plunged the country deep into debt. Mahathir also recently made a statement casting doubt on whether “foreigners” (Chinese) would get visas to live in the massive Forest City project in Peninsular Malaysia. More Southeast Asian countries need to carefully scrutinize any BRI projects lest they become “debt traps.” From an environmental perspective, the BRI is just about the worst thing that could possibly happen.
China itself is moving to protect what remains of its intertidal mudflats on the coast of the Yellow Sea, which are vital stopover points for migratory shorebirds. However, in North Korea, which still has vast intact tidal mudflats, Chinese investment threatens—and already is—transforming these into places where migrating birds cannot stopover. The trashing of Tibet continues unabated.
And of course China’s trashing of the natural world isn’t limited to Asia. Jaguars are being slaughtered for their fangs, which are sold as trinkets to Chinese consumers, and this is putting pressure on the largest wild cat of South and Central America. The vaquita porpoise is down to a dozen individuals in Mexican waters, thanks to Chinese superstitious beliefs in the medicinal use of its swim bladder.
Nearly 100 African elephants were recently found slaughtered in Botswana with their tusks missing, which are probably already in China or Hong Kong, while fleets of government subsidized long-distance fishing vessels scour the Earth’s oceans, plundering the most remote corners and stealing from the exclusive zones of sovereign nations. I could go on, but that’s another article.
Some can argue that we need China’s cooperation, so perhaps it is better not to call the country out the way I have. Cooperation is needed, that’s true. But there is no guarantee that the world going to get it, or at least anywhere near in the amount that is needed, or get any meaningful cooperation at all, for that matter.
What will work? Economic sanctions? Good luck with that. Who has the guts to follow through with the tough sanctions that might force real, meaningful changes in China? Maybe all we can really do is be ecotourists and see what remains before it’s gone.
Nonetheless, fight the good fight. It’s worth fighting, even if the chances of success are slim.
Now I know why Vaquitas are, for all practical purposes, extinct There is absolutely nothing that can be done about the chinese plague of taking either……
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.
Jaguar fangs?????? Where will it end?
Reblogged this on Armory of the Revolution.
Now I know why Vaquitas are, for all practical purposes, extinct There is absolutely nothing that can be done about the chinese plague of taking either……