In 2000, I sat down at a card table to interview Professor Wang in his apartment in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. To my left, a pair of finches sang within a bamboo cage, while to my right, a fluorescent light illuminated a large fish tank. Professor Wang, then in his eighties, was an early nature conservationist in Mao-era China. During the 1960s and 1970s, he suffered greatly for his convictions, sometimes at the hands of his colleagues, most of whom remained his neighbors. In the 1980s, however, his luck had turned.

At that time, Professor Wang had helped introduce Yunnan's tropical forests to the world of global conservation, in part through his engagement with two European princes. On the wall of his apartment hung a framed photograph of him and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. In 1961, Prince Bernhard became the first president of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) International. Twenty five years later, the next head of WWF, Prince Philip, came to Yunnan and met Professor Wang.

Prince Philip came to Yunnan to investigate the claim that China still had intact tropical rainforest of ecological importance. Many Western scientists were skeptical, thinking that there were no such forests that far north of the equator. The prince, in the older tradition of the gentleman-scientist, traveled to Yunnan on behalf of WWF to see for himself. Wang, because of his research experience in these tropical forests and his fluent English, was invited to be a part of Prince Philip's entourage.

As described by a Chinese journalist, Philip's trip was a momentous event, in the history of both Yunnan Province and the nation:

Prince Philip's tour of southern Yunnan's tropical Xishuangbanna Prefecture initiated new kinds of interactions with this region, especially in terms of global environmentalism. This trip precipitated the involvement of groups such as WWF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and a panoply of other organizations that were attracted to the tropical ecosystems found there.

The prince came to Xishuangbanna to determine whether it should occupy an important place on the new maps of global conservation that WWF and other powerful international conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were creating. That this question was raised as late as 1986 for Southwest China indicates the uneven nature of international conservation. By that time, the rainforests of South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa had been discussed for centuries (Anderson and Barbour Reference Anderson and Barbour2003; Raffles Reference Raffles2002), and international conservation efforts had started in some of these places more than a century earlier. During the nineteenth century, Westerners had traveled to Yunnan, drawn by exotic plants and animals. Northwest Yunnan, some several hundred miles north of Xishuangbanna, became botanically famous by the early 1900s as a major source of plants such as rhododendron and orchids for European homes, hothouses, and landscapes (Mueggler Reference Mueggler2005; Sutton Reference Sutton1974). The global conservation movement of the late twentieth century represented a very different understanding of the natural world than that held by earlier explorer-naturalists. Whereas the earlier projects had focused on finding new species, bringing back specimens for herbariums and for commercial interest, new projects focused on global conservation concerns and reforming rural lifestyles to be less environmentally damaging.

For Chinese botanists, the existence of these rainforests was hardly news, as they had studied them for decades. In the late 1950s, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden and the Tropical Crops Research Institute were set up to find important plants that could be used for medicines, fibers, and fuel, as well as to promote crops critical to domestic industries, such as rubber. With Prince Philip's visit, however, and the subsequent efforts of WWF, the work of Wang and other botanists was reevaluated by Chinese officials and appropriated by WWF staff, helping bring the region into an expanding international network of nature conservation efforts and a new set of institutional practices. Within three years of the prince's “discovery” of Xishuangbanna, WWF China sent a project proposal to the European Union (EU), describing their vision of a remnant section of rainforest and their plan to “save” it. During the early 1990s, WWF, in a series of shaky and shifting partnerships with Chinese government agencies, worked on several programs to address this problem, including ones that attempted to reform rural villagers, whom they blamed for destroying the rainforest through slash and burn agriculture.

WWF's efforts in the area would not have been possible if they had come a decade earlier. WWF arrived at a time when the Chinese government was beginning to change its own perspectives on appropriate land use. While state officials had previously lauded the labor of rural peasants who cleared the forest for more productive agriculture, in the late 1980s they began to see these practices as wasteful and antiquated. While WWF staff and Chinese officials had very different views on the historical situation and the current one, their shared concern about peasant agricultural practices provided a fleeting convergence and allowed for a fruitful collaboration.

These efforts at collaboration, however, were not without difficulties. Some of the officials told me that they worked hard to allow WWF to maintain its activities in Yunnan. These officials worked against the resistance of their peers and superiors. Throughout the bureaucracy, resistance to WWF occurred for two main reasons. First, many officials were deeply concerned about China's sovereignty, and worked to constrain WWF's project. The state set up many barriers to the increase in NGO power, both domestic and international; for example, a decade ago, there was a rule that each province would only be allowed one NGO per topic (environment, social welfare, etc.). Second, Chinese concern with sovereignty was perhaps heightened because of the history of Cold War tensions; a number of the Chinese officials and American WWF staff were of the same generation, and had fought on opposing sides in Korea or Vietnam. At other times, sovereignty per se was not the main concern, and conflicts between government agencies and institutions were more about competition among themselves over which groups would gain access to international projects, funds, and opportunities to travel abroad.

This article offers an ethnographic examination of how WWF's Yunnan project was designed, justified, and later evaluated by looking at these interactions as a cultural encounter in transnational environmentalism. In this analysis, I draw on two literatures: the critical literature on development and the China studies literature. The critical literature on development builds on scholarship that deconstructed the discourse of development, such as Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development (Reference Escobar1994), and work by others (Crush Reference Crush1995; Mitchell Reference Mitchell and Crush1995). They provided critical insights into the role of language, and the ways in which particular development narratives, such as “modernization” or “environmental protection,” are used to justify certain interventions. Recent work examines the social reception or effect of such discourses, examining how these are taken up, challenged, and changed, as well as how development projects create unintended social effects.

This paper follows an ethnographic approach to development studies (Lewis and Mosse Reference Lewis and Mosse2007; Li Reference Li2007; Mosse and Lewis Reference Mosse and Lewis2005), showing how projects are made through global encounters between diverse groups. In turn, I do not regard such groups as having known and fixed interests, but theorize group identities, boundaries, and perspectives as created, in part, through these interactions (Crewe and Harrison Reference Crewe and Harrison1998; Tsing Reference Tsing2005). To understand these encounters, I employ the term “transnational work” to stress the labor necessary for development projects to gain traction in particular settings. I suggest that these projects were determined neither by asocial global flows, nor by WWF's capacity to impose itself on China. Rather, I show how these projects necessitated transnational work carried out by WWF employees, Chinese scientists, officials, and others. The paper reveals how even when such convergences are created, they can remain tenuous and fleeting, and can be quickly dissolved when one group or another changes its orientation.

This paper also builds on China studies' emerging interest in the environment. This new spate of work ranges widely, from China's environment over the longue durée (Elvin Reference Elvin2004), to contemporary accounts by anthropologists (Litzinger Reference Litzinger2004, Reference Litzinger2006; Weller Reference Weller2006; Williams Reference Williams2002), sociologists (Matsuzawa Reference Matsuzawa2007), and geographers (Blaikie and Muldavin Reference Blaikie and Muldavin2004; Coggins Reference Coggins2002; Sturgeon Reference Sturgeon2005; Yeh Reference Yeh2003). These new studies, buttressed by long-term fieldwork, supplement earlier studies that relied almost exclusively on Chinese sources, reports, statistics, or study trips (Richardson Reference Richardson1990; Smil Reference Smil1993). As China has become a global superpower, there has been a dramatic increase in popular and governmental interest in China's environment. Recent work by Judith Shapiro (Reference Shapiro2001) and Elizabeth C. Economy (Reference Economy2004) crosses disciplinary bounds and enters into the world of policy makers. Yet, with few exceptions, accounts of China's environment rarely engage with questions of transnationalism, and largely focus on the domestic realm. I suggest that this tendency forecloses an examination of how national policies and actions are linked to transnational institutions and discourses.

This focus on the domestic, in turn, reflects established patterns in China studies writ large, which views the nation as a self-contained entity, or has conceptualized China as merely reacting to foreign impacts rather than playing an active role in international affairs (Cohen Reference Cohen1984). More recently, historians have challenged this tendency and begun to theorize Chinese history within a transnational context (Duara Reference Duara1997; Hill Reference Hill1998; Karl Reference Karl1998; Kirby Reference Kirby2006; Manela Reference Manela2006; Perdue Reference Perdue2005; Waley-Cohen Reference Waley-Cohen2000; Wong Reference Wong1997; Yang Reference Yang2004; Zanasi Reference Zanasi2006).Footnote ¹ They show that Chinese agents did not merely respond to international actions, but engaged with and transformed international circulations. Anthropologists interested in transnational China have mostly conducted fieldwork in urban factories, studying the role of foreign capital, labor, and discipline (Ngai Reference Pun1999; Pun 2005; Rofel Reference Rofel1999; Smart Reference Smart1999; Zweig Reference Zweig1995), or focused on the Chinese diaspora (Chu Reference Chu2006; Duara Reference Duara1997; Louie Reference Louie2004; Ong and Nonini Reference Ong and Nonini1996; Pieke et al. Reference Pieke, Pál, Mette and Antonella2004). I suggest that China studies might benefit from a broader examination of the many transnational projects within China, and a more serious theoretical engagement with transnationalism in its various forms.

I have opted for the term “transnationalism” in lieu of “globalization” for several reasons. First, globalization has often been described in more abstract terms, as a general set of processes that are not rooted in any particular place or propelled by any particular human action. Studies guided by the concept of transnationalism, on the other hand, tend to be based in particular locations, studying concrete flows of people, objects, and ideas. Second, globalization often implies a notion of standardization, and it is often used almost synonymously with Westernization, modernization, capitalism, or its latest incarnation, neoliberalism. All of these terms, while useful in certain ways, imply a presumption of flattening power and homogeneity. Instead, I am particularly interested in the ways in which contemporary dynamics draw on, and are distinguished from, earlier assemblages. Thus, rather than portraying China's transnational connections as a totally new phenomenon, I bring attention to its changing configurations.

Both China and Xishuangbanna went through major transitions during the twentieth century, and Professor Wang's career reveals changing approaches and understandings of conservation in China. He grew up in urban eastern China before the Chinese Revolution and was sent to an English-speaking private school. Like many of his elite peers, Wang was convinced that China's success within the global ecumene would require a new cohort of Chinese scientific experts. As he described it, Shanghai and other port cities were part of bustling scientific networks and exciting exchanges. Japan's invasion in the late 1930s disrupted this, and Wang escaped to the interior. The beginning of communist China under Mao in 1949 brought many changes, including a shift away from certain strands of science labeled as “regressive” and “bourgeois” and toward a “Marxist science.” For many Chinese scientists, the Mao era from 1949 until the late 1970s meant that they were cut off from most of their exchanges with Western colleagues (Neushul and Wang Reference Neushul and Wang2000). At the same time, China gained new circuits of academic exchange, especially with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries (Schneider Reference Schneider2003).

During the Mao era, the Chinese state mainly supported soil and water conservation for agricultural purposes but, with several exceptions, was generally hostile to the notion of nature preservation. In the 1950s, Professor Wang joined a number of Chinese scientists who recommended that certain places, including some in Xishuangbanna, be designated as nature reserves (Wu Reference Wu1965). At first these reserves were protected, but over time, several of them were converted into rubber tree plantations. By the 1960s, some of these scientists regretted their recommendations, as they were persecuted by their students and peers for protecting the natural world at the expense of peasant livelihoods and national development. During periodic campaigns, a number of these scientists were labeled as elitist and, in the parlance of the time, “old stinking nines” (lao chou jiu), an epithet dating back to the Yuan dynasty to designate intellectuals. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the term lao chou jiu was one of the nine “black categories” of despised individuals, including landlords and “counter-revolutionaries.” As Wang said, “In Chairman Mao's time, it was dangerous to want to protect the environment. Grain was for people, not birds.”

In 1979, the Mao era officially ended and the reform era began; Chinese science and landscapes opened up in new ways. In the 1980s, China emerged as a major site of interest not only for international corporations, but also for NGOs. A number of environmental NGOs established footholds in China, a process often marked by great difficulty, red tape, and mutual suspicion (Schaller Reference Schaller1993). The World Wildlife Fund was the first environmental NGO to work in China, invited by the Chinese government to assist with panda conservation. Initially, WWF and other groups were mostly based in Hong Kong. After Hong Kong's return to China in 1997, many of these NGOs moved to Beijing, where China concentrated the majority of its resources and attracted Chinese scholars most likely to be connected with international discourses and policies.

Yet, in Yunnan, a place often seen by Beijing experts and officials as a backward zone of little intellectual and institutional merit, there was a growing group of bilingual academics quite familiar with international discourses and protocols, including Professor Wang. They were especially important in carrying out transnational work. Starting in the 1980s, they became a major force in putting Southwest China on the maps used by international conservation organizations. These academics carried out a wide range of work, including the fieldwork necessary to make species lists, convert such lists into important facts such as “biodiversity indexes,” and embed these facts within conservation narratives that resonated with international expectations and interests.

During the 1990s, in part because of this work, Southwest China attracted major flows of international funds, people, and attention. As one biologist from Yunnan quipped, “Here, in Yunnan, we have always said ‘The mountains are high, and the emperor is far’ [Shan gao, huang di yuan]. We were too far from Beijing. But now, we are China's new capital of nature.” Some of the major organizations coming to China's “capital of nature” included the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and bilateral groups from Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Such international organizations came to Yunnan and funded dozens of projects and numerous conferences. Chinese natural and social scientists were key players in these projects, especially as the expatriate project staff rarely spoke Chinese or understood how politics or power operated in China. In turn, Chinese scholars found that their contacts with international NGOs and scholars helped them in a number of ways, including new opportunities to study abroad, publish collaboratively, and develop networks outside of China.

Long before the arrival of World Bank officials and even before the consolidation of China as a nation-state, southern Yunnan was part of long-distance exchanges of goods and people—what we might anachronistically call “transnational flows.” The area borders present-day Vietnam and Myanmar, and is known as Xishuangbanna, a sinification of the Dai-language term sipsongpanna, or place of twelve panna, a panna referring to “ten thousand rice paddies.” Historically, Xishuangbanna was much like other places in upland Southeast Asia, and was not merely part of one sovereign territory (Winichakul Reference Winichakul1997). Rather, Xishuangbanna was tied to multiple allegiances, within the sphere of influence of Chinese and Burmese centers, and paying tribute to both. Even during the late 1800s, its ambivalent status remained, as French from Indochina and British from Burma hoped to gain control of the region as a middle ground between themselves and China. Many trade goods, including cloth, elephant ivory, salt, and opium were made in or passed through Xishuangbanna (Atwill Reference Atwill2005; Hill Reference Hill1998). Perhaps most importantly, the region became a major site for tea production, which was processed and shipped by mule caravan into Tibet and India.

Ironically, Xishuangbanna's incorporation into the Chinese state in the early 1950s began a process that made it appear to be a relatively neglected and isolated corner of China, rather than a transnational hub of upland Southeast Asia. This was accomplished in two ways. First, its overland connections with Burma and Indochina were discouraged and policed. Second, its links to China were greatly facilitated in 1952 when soldiers from the People's Liberation Army completed a dirt road for motor vehicles between the regional capital of Jinghong and Yunnan's provincial capital of Kunming. This road was eventually paved, and by the mid-1960s, the region was firmly rooted in national, not international, webs of trade, politics, and control.

In 1995, I first traveled on this road when I began to investigate global environmental interest in Yunnan. For one year, I lived and worked at a college in Kunming, creating close relationships with many Chinese scholars and practitioners who worked on international conservation projects. I was fascinated with the changing developments, especially the conflicting and transforming notions of nature and the effects of human actions, such as farming or herding, on the environment. In 2000–2002, I returned for eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, examining projects carried out by two large international conservation NGOs, the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy. I divided my time between two different villages, one in the World Wildlife Fund project site just mentioned, the other in a site of The Nature Conservancy on Yunnan's Tibetan Plateau. I will discuss the former in this paper.

Between my first visit in 1995 and my fieldwork in 2002, the connections between Jinghong and elsewhere had changed significantly. In 1995, the trip from Kunming to Jinghong took more than twenty-four hours by bus, traveling on curvy roads alongside rivers. By 2002, the trip was reduced to twelve hours due to a new road built in part by World Bank funds. This road was designed with a radically different approach to the landscape, as it virtually eliminated steep switchbacks and blasted new passageways through hills. In 1998, an airport was built in Jinghong, with fifty-minute flights to Kunming, and daily direct flights to and from Beijing and Shanghai. After air connections to Thailand were established, a number of Thai monks, tourists, entrepreneurs, and pop singers visited, particularly to meet with their ethnic Dai neighbors (Davis Reference Davis, Horstmann and Wadley2006; Hyde Reference Hyde2007). Ethnic Thai and Dai were often surprised that they spoke mutually intelligible languages and pleased that they practiced familiar forms of Buddhism. One elder Dai man praised the airport, saying that Jinghong was now more like the “old days,” with Thai people in the city again. His comment expressed the view that Xishuangbanna was not becoming transnational for the first time, but had long been a part of transnational circuits.

During the mid-1990s, Jinghong's physical and social landscape changed on a massive scale, in part as a result of capital investment from Thailand. Virtually overnight, six-story luxury hotels rose out of the vast fields of rice paddy that ringed the small city, punctuated by tight clusters of Dai villages with bamboo houses on stilts. By this time, Jinghong was no longer described as “sleepy” in the foreign guidebooks. Over the last twenty years, tourism, once nearly nonexistent, became a booming business, with more than 1 million tourists, almost 98 percent of whom were Chinese, visiting Xishuangbanna annually in the mid-1990s (Evans, Hutton, and Eng Reference Evans, Hutton and Eng2000). By the late 1990s, however, local entrepreneurs' previously heady optimism about the tourism boom was coming to an end. Yunnan's new center of tourism shifted to the northwest, and Xishuangbanna's tourism declined. Many newer or more recent luxury hotels were never completed; their concrete skeletons, referred to by some Xishuangbanna residents as “ghost hotels” (gui bingguan), were a source of embarrassment to local officials.

In dramatic contrast to the surrounding region's decline of fortunes, the relative wealth and power of the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve Bureau increased substantially between 1995 and 2000. In that time, the reserve gained standing as a national-level reserve. This meant that the nature reserve manager gained equal political rank with the prefectural governor of Xishuangbanna, a position of much power. Such gains were made manifest by the new reserve's headquarters, built on a hilltop with a well-furnished office building, numerous other buildings, and, most significantly, a grid work of personal houses, each with a private walled courtyard. At the time, a national trend meant that monetary and political support for most state-sponsored work units (danwei) was notably reduced, and hence most danwei could only provide staff with small apartments. In this context, the new fancy houses for reserve staff were a notable coup. Outside the high walls that surrounded the danwei, the reserve had just built a hotel, one of their expanding side businesses now that tourists were showing a greater interest in nature.

During a trip to the nature reserve offices in 2000, I was visiting this hotel and saw Chen Lin, whom I had met in 1995. Chen, a reserve manager rising in the ranks, was adding rooms onto his house for his father, a member of Mao's army in the Long March. Chen was in the midst of hosting a number of village representatives who were staying at the nature reserve's hotel as part of a World Bank–funded “ecotourism study trip.” I remarked on the changes that had occurred over the last five years. Chen said that in the 1980s, he and his peers barely eked out a living at the reserve, and felt little support for their conservation mandate: “At that point almost no one wanted to work here. We weren't environmentalists. We just had a state job. It wasn't our choice—we had to do this work.” By the 1990s, however, the Nature Reserve Bureau became an increasingly influential political actor in the region, attracting much international interest and capital. Yet, there was fear that the new economy of nature might diminish as tourism had. As Chen said, “Things are much improved now. I know that you know people in WWF. Please tell them we want them to come back and do another project.”

WWF was the first major environmental NGO to work in Xishuangbanna, and by the time I arrived, their project was over. WWF had not started a new project in the area, but instead initiated ones in northwest Yunnan, the same area that had begun to attract tourists away from Xishuangbanna. Through archival research and many discussions with staff from WWF, the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve Bureau, and others, I began to examine the history of the project, and how this space of collaboration was initiated, crafted, and then left behind.

Global Interest in the Rainforests

One of WWF's main goals in Xishuangbanna was to help protect the rainforest, a new priority of many conservation groups in the global North during the 1980s. During this time, popular conceptions shifted away from disparaging notions of “jungle,” toward a view of “tropical rainforests” as valuable and vulnerable (Slater Reference Slater2003). Rainforests were frequently in the news, and quickly became emblematic of a widespread fascination with and concern about the environment. David Sobel describes the emerging sensibility that pervaded this time, and how concern for the tropical rainforests became a part of everyday childhood education in the United States:

During this time, dominant ecological theories supported the idea that rainforests were incredibly fragile and particularly susceptible to human disturbance. In fact, many biologists conceived of rainforests as a “counterfeit paradise” whereby an apparently robust fecundity masks a true vulnerability (Meggers Reference Meggers1971). The rainforest was constantly in threat because there was only a thin layer of soil supporting the vegetation. If this layer of soil was removed, the rainforest might never recover, turning instead into wastelands. Wastelands, as understood by rainforest biologists, were permanently damaged lands that would neither return to their “original” condition nor be agriculturally productive. The fear of spreading wastelands in the rainforest animated many international projects, including the ones by WWF in China. At the time, scientists viewed “slash and burn” agriculture as the major cause behind increasing wastelands, and therefore as a key threat to rainforests. In turn, WWF's own stance against this form of agriculture resonated with sentiments held by the vast majority of Xishuangbanna's prefectural officials, whose support was necessary to endorse the project. Without these kinds of convergence and forms of support, the space of collaboration could not have emerged. The mere overlap of belief was not enough, however; it took concerted work to create compelling arguments and enlist networks of support.

Depicting Tropical Natures

One of WWF's first priorities, and their first examples of transnational work, was to obtain funding from the EU and permission from a range of Chinese officials to carry out their project. Specifically, their effort to frame and legitimize their mission in Xishuangbanna rested on three major claims about the role of “overpopulation,” “land degradation,” and “slash and burn farming.” These claims had enough correspondence with Chinese notions that they could easily gain some initial traction and support, but further developing these connections required transnational work by individuals with differently situated plans, intentions, and goals. Because of the relatively open nature of the WWF archives (and the relatively closed archives of the reserve offices) and the rapid turnover among reserve staff, the following story privileges the work of two WWF staff members, John MacKinnon and Jack Bentley.

Dr. John MacKinnon came to Xishuangbanna after having worked on WWF's panda project in Sichuan Province, a project that revealed some of the underlying tensions between expatriate conservationists and Chinese government officials (Schaller Reference Schaller1993). MacKinnon had researched orangutans and other mammals in Southeast Asia. A British biologist trained at Oxford, MacKinnon was a prolific writer on Asian natural history, a professional photographer, and a committed environmentalist. He worked as a senior advisor for WWF's panda bear projects. Often unafraid of controversy, he became well known for criticizing a request by the Chinese government for $100 million in foreign funds for panda conservation, saying, “It's a hostage situation. The Chinese are pointing a gun to the head of the panda and saying, ‘If you want to keep it [from going extinct], fund it. Otherwise we're going to let it go’” (Sun Reference Sun1993). Thus, by the time MacKinnon began work on WWF's project proposal for Xishuangbanna, he was already known by a number of Chinese officials as confrontational and “troublesome.”

MacKinnon's report on Xishuangbanna, like many environmental documents, characterized the landscape as both ecologically rich and “under threat” (Mackinnon et al. Reference MacKinnon, Sha, Cheung, Carey, Xiang and Melville1996). In his view, the greatest threats were the twin forces of population pressure and land degradation. In turn, these threats were made manifest through slash and burn farming. Some of his colleagues referred to these farmers as “arsonists of the world's heritage.” At the time, satellite images of fires burning in other tropical forests were becoming increasingly available to conservationists and the public, contributing to a Malthusian fear of exponentially increasing peasant populations, who would destroy majestic forests to produce their corn, rice, and cattle.

Population Pressure

MacKinnon claimed that “population pressure” was the key explanation for land degradation (Mackinnon et al. Reference MacKinnon, Sha, Cheung, Carey, Xiang and Melville1996). This claim required almost no work to legitimize in the eyes of WWF's international funders such as the EU or Chinese officials. The idea that global overpopulation was a growing environmental problem was already considered established fact. China, in particular, continues to be one of the most frequently used examples of the detrimental ecological and social effects of population pressure. As Susan Greenhalgh points out, views of China as overpopulated are almost never questioned in the academic or popular press (Reference Greenhalgh2003). In fact, arguing the opposite, that population pressure in China is not the major factor in land degradation, would likely face widespread opposition.Footnote ²

Although international agencies and Chinese officials were likely to agree with MacKinnon's assertions about the problem of population pressure, his rationale would have difficulty gaining support within China. Conservationists often explained high birth rates as a logical, yet detrimental, choice to reduce the labor burden of individual family members. Yet, in China, explanations for higher birth rates did not rest on a similar frame of logic. The state's insistence that families should only rationally desire one child, or at most two, was quite hegemonic. In China, there was little official sense that rural families' desire for more children was logical; rather, it was seen as representing a feudal consciousness that should be changed through reeducation or penalties.

While Bentley and MacKinnon decried that high birth rates remained in rural Xishuangbanna, Chinese officials would not verify this situation. The officials feared persecution from higher levels of government for failing to enforce birth quotas. In other words, while population pressure was a suitable explanation to discuss environmental problems at the national level, local officials were defensive against accusations that they allowed higher family populations at the local level. Thus, MacKinnon's claims were supported and resisted by differently located officials. Most, however, publically ignored his claims about local overpopulation.

MacKinnon's statements deviated from the commonly held position that population pressure results from a mathematical logic: a given number of people in a specific area create a particular amount of “pressure” on the surroundings through their use of natural resources. As Malthus argued, populations grow at a faster rate than food supply. In principle, his theory applies universally, regardless of particular peoples or places.

MacKinnon's version of population pressure, however, was not strictly mathematical. Rather, he singled out ethnic minorities as a particularly threatening group. He argued that they had high birth rates and threatening lifestyle habits. MacKinnon was one of many conservationists at the time who lauded China's strict birth control policy as a necessary step for reducing pressure on the environment. According to MacKinnon, the ethnic minorities' burgeoning population was attributable to officials' reticence to strictly police the minorities, as well as minorities' lack of foresight and ability to voluntarily limit their own births. He also declared that ethnic minority “habits” such as hunting must be stopped (MacKinnon et al. 1996). His perceptions and language, in fact, closely echo biases inherent in many Han majority descriptions of ethnic minority groups (Gladney Reference Gladney1994; Litzinger Reference Litzinger2000; Schein Reference Schein2000). It is very likely that MacKinnon heard such biases from his Chinese peers, as well as in English translations of Chinese texts. Regardless of whether MacKinnon's views on ethnic minorities in China were directly borrowed from Han Chinese notions, his perceptions fit smoothly within existing ethnic hierarchies in China.

It is important to recognize that, overall, MacKinnon's views were more conventional than idiosyncratic. At the time, his views largely coincided with dominant conservation ideologies elsewhere (Igoe Reference Igoe2004; Schroeder Reference Schroeder1999). MacKinnon argued that the role of the state should be strengthened, birth control stringently enforced, natural resource laws implemented, and rural groups permanently removed from areas that were critical for conservation. It was hard for MacKinnon or his fellow biologists to conceive of local people's interactions with the environment in neutral, much less positive, terms. For MacKinnon and Bentley, there was no possibility that Xishuangbanna's ethnic minority groups might count as “indigenous peoples,” with special knowledge and rights, as that concept was not yet available in China.Footnote ³ Instead, in this vision, local people were always a threat to be controlled. Peasants were trapped in a vicious cycle of ecological destruction, fueled by their ignorance and inability to understand the damage they caused. Problems lay almost entirely with the peasants themselves, and the solution lay with outsiders who could instruct peasants in rational and scientific methods of family planning and farming. Such views were inflected by the urgent, alarmist tone of much of the environmental writing at the time. Fears of imminent ecological collapse were seen as demanding immediate intervention to forestall disaster.

Writing about the Dangers of Slash and Burn

After WWF's initial project proposal had solicited funds from the EU, the more detailed plan of action was devised by Jack Bentley, WWF's principal field consultant, and Wang Yunbing, the main Chinese coordinator. Bentley was an American with development experience in the Philippines. In 1987, he met MacKinnon during a bird-watching trip in Xishuangbanna. Several years later, MacKinnon hired Bentley and Wang to carry out the project. Bentley wrote most of the reports and carried out trainings. Wang coordinated a vast number of logistical and bureaucratic details (most of which Bentley was never aware of), drove the WWF vehicle, and translated between English and Chinese. Wang and Bentley's perceptions differed, and, as the men were located in quite different institutional networks, they engaged with differing audiences and issues.Footnote ⁴ Together, they wrote a report, authored by Bentley, that described a particular problem (erosion caused by slash and burn) and offer a particular solution (agroforestry).

Agroforestry is a set of techniques employed to raise certain kinds of trees together with crops. It aims to reduce the erosion associated with farming on steep slopes, and to increase the available nutrients by growing tree species that fertilize the crops. Agroforestry is particularly designed to address soil degradation and soil erosion in developing countries (Nair Reference Nair, McDonald and Lassoie1996). In part, it was intended to provide a substitute for slash and burn agriculture, which was seen as a rising threat.

Bentley's report articulated this global concern about soil erosion, a well-established development narrative (Roe Reference Roe1991), with local data and examples. Because the beliefs around this narrative were so hegemonic among development and conservation NGOs, scientists rarely felt compelled to explain a number of assumptions embedded in the reigning paradigm. Instead, such assumptions were built, invisibly, into the development narrative. Thus, Bentley did not try to defend or explain underlying rationales. Rather, his mission was to find Yunnan data to support the foregone conclusions. These data, in turn, were framed within a series of declarations and causal suppositions, many of which were borrowed from his colleagues. For example, he stated that “shifting agriculture with less fallow time between declining yields on severely eroded mountainsides continues to cause the need for ever larger families” (Bentley Reference Bentley1990).Footnote ⁵ Bentley did not describe the reasons why lowering yields led to a larger family size; many of his colleagues elsewhere made similar claims, especially in international discourses about slash and burn (O'Brien Reference O'Brien2002). It was likely assumed that with declining yields, families would want more children to farm greater areas of land, or gain more workers for existing plots. To what degree this actually happened in Yunnan is entirely unclear.

Although some scholars have shown how powerful organizations such as the World Bank create a monopoly on authoritative knowledge about the conditions in a given country (Goldman Reference Goldman2001), this was not the case in Yunnan. Bentley did not rely on WWF scientists to produce the facts for his report. Even though WWF was one of the world's largest conservation organizations, WWF scientists did not carry out any ecological research in Yunnan. Instead, he assembled facts recently produced by Chinese scientists and combined them in an attempt to “localize” global development narratives. Like many foreigners who examine China's conservation literature but cannot read the language, he tended to ignore sources written in Chinese, instead focusing on the relatively few texts already translated into English.Footnote ⁶ Thus, he relied heavily on bilingual Chinese scientists, who carried out field studies and published their reports in English. Their work created the conditions of possibility for Bentley to assert his claim using local facts as evidence.

Bentley and MacKinnon's suspicions about rapid land degradation were reinforced by regional officials and scientists. To look through Bentley and MacKinnon's reports is to be confronted by a dizzying array of statistics, all of them “found” by Chinese scientists. In turn, MacKinnon and Bentley used these statistics to support their thesis about catastrophic land degradation, as seen here:

1. 1. “39% of Yunnan suffers from a serious erosion problem and 10% has a very serious problem” (Bentley Reference Bentley1990, 2).

2. 2. “One act of swidden loses 149 years of soil accumulation” (Bentley Reference Bentley1990, 2).

3. 3. “[Wasteland] now makes up almost half of the land in [Xishuangbanna] prefecture” (Cheung and MacKinnon Reference Cheung and MacKinnon1991, 23).

Like “population pressure,” notions of land degradation were so self-evident to conservationists at the time that few thought to challenge these assertions. During the 1980s, there is little evidence that scientists questioned these percentages or the definition of categories such as “serious erosion” or “wasteland,” in China or elsewhere (Leach and Mearns Reference Leach and Mearns1996; Showers Reference Showers2005; Turner and Taylor Reference Turner and Taylor2003). Instead of challenging such data as possibly distorted, these figures bolstered existing notions and heightened fears of an impending crisis.

This convergence between Chinese statistics and WWF's vision represented a substantial change from previous views in Yunnan. During the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, there was little outright concern for protecting “the environment.” State rhetoric praised the inventiveness of rural peasants, and they were hailed as model workers and creative practitioners of socialist science (Bray Reference Bray1986). Officials did not try to wipe out slash and burn, but actually encouraged farmers to expand their land using this method in order to increase grain production. While slash and burn was not valorized per se, officials exhorted rural farmers to increase their total crop yields by any means possible under the mandate of increasing grain production for state coffers (Xu et al. Reference Xu1999). At the time, “wastelands” referred to lands that were not cultivated. During the 1980s, however, interest in “preserving the environment” began to emerge in China, especially concerning the fate of forested lands, and slash and burn became increasingly vilified. The forest became an object to preserve, rather than an object to cultivate. As a result, Chinese descriptions of slash and burn during the 1980s started to resonate with MacKinnon and Bentley's reports (MacKinnon et al. Reference MacKinnon, Sha, Cheung, Carey, Xiang and Melville1996).

On the other hand, as WWF and other international NGOs carried out their work in Yunnan, they also played a role in fostering the social production of knowledge. At least since the late 1980s, negative characterizations of slash and burn had become more commonplace, and this form of agriculture was described as wasteful, destructive, and threatening. Regional authorities were starting to promote laws against slash and burn, but these laws had not gained much social force or momentum. While WWF did not directly carry out their own studies, they funded the salaries and equipment used in some of these Chinese scientific studies. In particular, they bought GIS equipment and vehicles, helped nature reserve officials and scientists attend conferences and workshops abroad, and directly sponsored a number of development workers in Yunnan. Thus, WWF's efforts worked to further legitimate and fortify the stance against swidden agriculture that was already growing among Chinese officials. International organizations promoted conferences such as “Alternatives to Slash and Burn,” and offered opportunities for international prestige and collaboration to Chinese scholars who attended, presented papers, and socialized with their peers from around the world.

Transnational Work and Making Convergences

Although they maintained differing perspectives, staff from WWF, the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve Bureau, and natural scientists from several institutes worked together to create a plan of action. To create a feasible project, representatives from each agency worked hard to make zones of overlap. One of the key interventions in the WWF project was to reduce soil erosion by rural farmers. This choice had numerous advantages, and helped to create a convergence in several ways. First, campaigns against soil erosion had a historical resonance in China. Many Mao-era projects had aimed at conserving and improving agricultural landscapes, and millions of villagers built terraced fields, planted trees, and dug canals to enhance agricultural yields. Thus, WWF's project formed a recognizable bridge into less familiar concerns about protecting “wild nature.”

Second, the choice of working with farmers was expedient because it presented a politically feasible approach. As some scholars have shown, NGOs and other organizations must work within the parameters of acceptability (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1994). In other words, the range of possible interventions was narrowed by WWF's concerns about confronting the Chinese state. Seeing farmers as the problem did not threaten the state and, in fact, meshed with the state's existing narratives that the main cause of erosion was peasants, who were in need of training and reform. Conversely, while MacKinnon privately condemned the spread of rubber plantations into natural forests, WWF determined that it could not complain about the plantations. WWF was concerned with its vulnerability vis-à-vis the state and thus did not dare openly confront the state-run rubber industry. MacKinnon also wanted to promote greater enforcement of birth control and initiate gun control, but his colleagues feared these topics would offend Chinese officials. Teaching peasants scientific forms of agriculture, however, in no way threatened state sovereignty, and sat well with state visions and projects. Overall, these forms of maneuvering by WWF fostered places of correspondence between them and Chinese officials and tried to avoid sites of conflict. I suggest that such maneuvering is prevalent in the ways that international NGOs operate in China and elsewhere. These actions play a critical role in opening up and trying to maintain a space of collaboration.

Third, and more importantly, a focus on erosion was advantageous because it was an internationally prominent development narrative (Roe Reference Roe1991). In order to attract NGO attention, local reserve staff in Xishuangbanna and Yunnanese scientists needed to make their statements about ecological problems and solutions recognizable. Likewise, international NGOs working in China and elsewhere needed to frame local conditions in terms of major global concerns in order to obtain support from multinational funders. WWF's version of erosion and its causes was easily recognizable by international organizations, and just as importantly, it was considered acceptable and even desirable by local Chinese government officials. Thus, few groups were interested in challenging this thesis or exerting the hard work required to offer counter-narratives. This was particularly true for Chinese scientists, almost all of whom were based at state-run institutes and colleges and therefore feared serious reproach if their research challenged the state's conventional wisdom. Of course, some scientists quietly worked against dominant frameworks, but they often found themselves without the publications, grants, and job security gained by peers who embraced such narratives.

Fourth, soil erosion offered a specific and practical intervention for the project. For NGOs, attracting funding meant not only describing a problem, but also offering a solution. Thus, in a number of ways, these strategies converged enough that WWF's plans were seen as logical, politically feasible, and doable.

This convergence and the space of collaboration that it allowed, however, soon came to an end. Unbeknownst to MacKinnon and Bentley, some of the major narratives supporting their project began to be seriously questioned. While a richer analysis of these changes is beyond the scope of the present paper (see Hathaway n.d.), it is important to note that after the first stage of the WWF project was complete, a project evaluation exposed major changes in the perception of the rainforest and the role of rural villagers. Whereas WWF's later reports suggest that these massive shifts in perspective were attributable to a “better understanding of local realities,” I suggest that WWF's changed perception of Xishuangbanna was in fact more contingent on global shifts in understandings of local people, nature, and the state. Thus, even though WWF was able to form a temporary space of collaboration with different Chinese government officials, this space itself changed as WWF, along with other conservation groups, began to move away from their previous visions of land and people.

These shifts were in part connected to increasing interests in linking nature conservation and social justice. In particular, advocacy groups pressured conservation NGOs to support indigenous people (Chapin Reference Chapin2004). Many rural farmers who had been labeled as destructive slash and burn peasants were now seen as indigenous peoples who practiced “shifting cultivation,” a more neutral or even positive term. The evaluation team sent by WWF's major project donor, the EU, said that MacKinnon and Bentley greatly misunderstood the situation. The EU team, in fact, said that these farmers did not use slash and burn, but rather carried out “indigenous shifting cultivation.” The EU team offered the following counsel:

In this remarkable change of vision, the EU evaluators wrote of a “general rule” comparing indigenous shifting agriculture to other alternatives. Eight years earlier, when WWF's project was just starting, such a statement was virtually unheard of within the development literature. Earlier, when development agencies carried out agroforestry projects, they almost always referred to a set of techniques developed and exported from research institutes, not techniques that were found locally (Nair Reference Nair, McDonald and Lassoie1996). In other fields, scholars had long documented “indigenous agroforestry,” but such practices were not visible to major development organizations, and thus not available as a model. A whole new set of “facts” around slash and burn emerged. Many researchers around the globe began to conduct experiments and suggest that shifting cultivation was not environmentally degrading (Kleinman, Pimentel, and Bryant Reference Kleinman, Pimentel and Bryant1995). Their research began to challenge the almost hegemonic sense that “slash and burn,” itself a much more pejorative term, was a practice that needed to be eliminated.

At this time, conservation groups began to consider new understandings of the landscapes they wished to protect. Before, almost all of these landscapes had been seen as natural and degraded by human action, but a new vision emerged that regarded landscapes as the product of long-term human interactions. These changing perspectives fostered transformations in how conservation was imagined and carried out.

Perhaps most importantly, the previous structure of transnational conservation alliances began to disarticulate. No longer did NGOs see the state as the ultimate ally, united with NGOs against the peasants' predatory and reckless actions. With this rethinking, the state emerged as an unreliable partner, and some conservationists began to describe the state, not the peasants, as the most egregious environmental threat. The state, it was now pointed out, sponsored large-scale forms of destructive development such as industrial logging and tree plantations. In the 1980s, WWF staff privately remarked that much rainforest was being destroyed and replaced with state-led rubber plantations, but they saw such statements as politically contentious, and did not wish to alienate the Chinese state, their main partner (Wang, personal communication, October 2001). By the 1990s, however, conservation NGOs were more likely to confront and challenge the state and its projects. In 1996, WWF's report drew critical attention to the increasing number of rubber plantations, and by 2000, when I returned, other international organizations such as Germany's bilateral agency, GTZ, publicly agreed that such plantations were a major environmental problem.

Whereas previously, many staff in international conservation agencies mostly took it for granted that they worked directly with state agencies, more began to regard local people not as adversaries, but as potential partners and allies. For many development agencies during the 1990s, it became quickly established orthodoxy that, given the means or incentive to do so, local people wanted to protect their immediate surroundings.

It should be stressed that these transformations did not constitute a paradigm shift. Not all conservationists and their organizations changed their understandings in a deep and systematic way, but there was a significant challenge to some older assumptions found in global conservation efforts. However, even by the early 2000s, some scholars argued that interest in community-based conservation efforts was already waning after an initial wave of support (Brosius and Russell Reference Brosius and Russell2003). Although some fear a reentrenchment of older approaches, it is likely that new and diverse configurations of global conservation will arise (Wilshusen et al. Reference Wilshusen, Brechin, Fortwangler and West2002).