China reverses ban on medical use of tiger and rhino products

China reverses tiger and rhino products ban - CNN Video

It's hard not to see this as a really bad moment I think.

 

Bloody disgusting, I'd just seen this and was about to post a link but Funky beat me to it!

I really don't see how they can justify this, especially when they want to be seen as equal/better when compared to the West!? This is a huge step backwards, both for conservation and the Chinese civilisation. There's just no need for this, these traditional medicines have been debunked, so what, exactly, is the point in this?

The angriest I've been on ZooChat for a long time!

 

With the new Brazilian president, Donald Trump and this news I despair.

 

@Funky Gibbon: Sad news indeed. Hope you won't get troubles in the country you're located by posting this...

 

This is the worst conservation news I've heard in a long time.

 

What is the point in this.

 

Does anyone know the extent to which this will have an effect on the trade? Obviously, tiger and rhino parts were still flowing into China, being used for TCM and decimating wild populations while the decades-long ban was in place...

To clarify, I'm not saying I think it was the right move; I'm appalled and outraged as well. I just wonder how this will play out on a practical level.

 

TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) is still ubiquitous in mainland China, and most people swear by it. It is used in conjunction with, not as an alternative to, modern medicine. I'm quite certain it is of significant benefit in many respects (not limited to the placebo effect). But there is no doubt that TCM also contains a lot of hokum, in terms of outdated medical practices and views, of which the disastrous and totally discredited use of animal parts is only one aspect.

TCM is seen as a part of China's cultural heritage; for this reason and, one suspects, the financial interests of the big TCM companies, it is given a sort of protected status where criticism isn't really accepted and is seen as unpatriotic.

To give a recent example, there is a brand of herbal liquour which has been running ads for a while to the effect that it is literally a panacea to any health problem an old person might experience. A doctor posted somewhere on social media that this was total rubbish, and after a fairly murky process (not just judicially, it was left alone for a while until outcry somehow generated) got into trouble. Telling, one of the things he admitted to was something along the line of 'offending the sensibilities of the Chinese people'.

China is modernising fast and is already a world leader in some technologies, whilst still lagging massively behind in other areas. Whilst modernisation inevitably leads to some adoption of western attitudes, it also leads to some level of backlash to these ideas. China wants to be seen as an equal, but on her own terms, not through the 'imposition' of a western value measurement system. Really this just means China doesn't want to be criticised by the West.

I happen to think that this decision is driven by economics rather than politics however. Environmentalism is on the rise in China and there are also nationalist pressures that work in favour of conservationism. If those could be harnessed in favour of tigers for example...

 

Thank you very much for this post FG, quite a lot of important information in there that I wasn't aware. It's also nice to know it comes from a Westerner's point who happens to live in China so it is more detailed and subdued than my own knee-jerk reaction. There's a few points I want to ask about but I'm knackered so I'll come back to this tomorrow, all bright eyed and bushy tailed!

 

Honestly, the United States is a great example of a Western country where many people still do and believe ridiculous things that have harmful effects, so the fact that China has aspects of its culture that are like that is to be expected, I think. I agree that it doesn't make sense from anything except an economic perspective, although I actually did not realize that TCM in China was corporatized to any extent. @FunkyGibbon do you know exactly what that looks like? Are these companies selling products in grocery stores?

 

Many pharmacies are divided in half. One side sells modern medicine, the other TCM. The other side looks exactly like a western pharmacy, the traditional sides is all wooden draws and lacquer and big glass jars with weird shaped roots suspended in liquid...

There are plenty of pharmacies that specialise in one or the other though.

 

Historically speaking, I think this will be terrible for rhinos. If we look at the example of ivory, lots of groups have connected poaching spikes to one-off legal sales and larger-scale legalization and regularization measures. The reverse is also true - shutting down of the legal markets has had an impact on demand, since China's actually quite good (relatively speaking) at enforcement... or, at least, the perception of enforcement, which affects incentive structures for buyers and traders.

With things like TCM, I think demand-side reduction is far more important and effective than the supply-side measures. Chinese demand is a behemoth that the wildlife protection apparatus in most African source and transit countries just cannot match. For one, legalization of this kind can send a signal to poaching syndicates that it is worth making the long-term investments that make them so difficult to combat, including upgrading their weaponry/equipment and buying off more politicians. Furthermore, any kind of "traditional" use demand is going to be super resilient; it's a hard-enough venture to try to get people weaned off of these remedies when they're illegal, and it's going to be 100x harder when it's legal.

For tigers - we've actually had poaching and trade reduce in India/Nepal over the past several years, although I'm not sure how things are in Southeast Asia and Siberia. Northeast India's tigers and rhinos are worst affected, because it's so easy to smuggle their body parts across the land borders into China through Myanmar/Tibet/Nepal. Again, it's very difficult for us to police this on the supply side. I'm venturing into the realm of personal opinion here but I think Chinese/Tibetan cooperation in demand-side reduction has been the unsung hero here. Sad to see it reversed.

 

This is really interesting, would you be able to explain more how nationalism is working in favor of conservation in China? Speaking from an Indian perspective, the prevalent thought process here on China is that they're heavily vested in protecting "national icon" species like the panda, but that it more or less stops there.

 

I'm back, with follow up questions!

I never realised that, I did genuinely think that rhino horn had no medicinal value (being keratin), same goes for tiger bones but I was less confident on that fact.

As with @Coelacanth18 I always assumed TCM was a market stall commodity, I never realised it was commercially sold in main stream pharmacies. Every day is a school day!

What is the Chinese opinion on the South China Tiger? It seems a bit of a one step forward, two steps back situation since (I've read) that they want to re-introduce the South African stock back into the wild in China, which probably isn't going to end well.

 

Would it be possible to establish rhino and tiger farms in China?

 

Rhino farming has been brought up before and dismissed, rhino's reproduce slowly and also grow horns slowly too, not really feasible when they can just go and kill wild rhino's without putting in the effort involved with raising and breeding them.

As for tigers, I'm pretty sure certain "zoos" in the PRC are covers for tiger farms. I remember reading an article, many years ago, about a place where they bred tigers so fast that they were using pigs and dogs for suckling the cubs!

 

TCM isn't limited to animal products, it also includes plants and minerals. Therefore there will be many genuine benefits of some TCMs as many plants obviously have medicinal properties. Also TCM includes traditional practices such as acupuncture.

With regards to conservation and nationalism/patriotism, as @Mbwamwitu suggests that would obviously revolve around large charismatic species, although with a little work it could be extended to lesser known animals as well. It should be pointed out that there are many people working and caring passionately about conservation in China, but they are a minority. Economic forces are still going to win out in most decisions at the moment.

The South China Tiger is extinct in the wild and although I may be wrong I don't think there is any reasonable amount of habitat it could be reintroduced to. However, it seems that China is working quite seriously to look after its Amur Tigers in the north. The Indochinese tigers in the south could probably be brought back from the brink by an intense push involving cooperation with ASEAN countries but that seems more than a little optimistic.

 

What Asian countries have widespread use of TCM?

I know for sure that it´s very popular in Vietnam too. All the busted smuggling cases of rhino and tiger parts in the Czech republic in last few years, including slaughter of captive tigers and production of bone/meat extract was coordinated/organised by local Vietnamese mafia and target market was always Vietnam, not China (and Vietnamese minority in Europe to minor degree).

 

This is just sad.

 

Well Vietnam (along with Burma and Hong Kong and no doubt others) is one of the main entry points to the Chinese mainland for smuggled products, so it's quite possible that this is the intention with stuff coming from Czechia as well.

I would assume that any country with an ethnically Chinese minority population (Malaysia etc) would have significant amounts of TCM use. I also assume that countries like Vietnam and Korea which have historically fallen within China's sphere of influence also have or had a lot of use. That is pure supposition though; a tiny bit of research doesn't throw up anything about this.

@baboon Since I know you have seen this thread do you have anything to add, correct or comment on?