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Book Review
| The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China. By Chris Coggins. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. xi + 330 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00.
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| Tigers are an endangered species in China. Known there as "the lord of the hundred beasts," tigers have figured prominently in Chinese conceptions of the natural order, in mythologies, and in people's relations to the natural world. As recently as the 1940s, there may have been thousands of tigers in Southeast China, while today there are at most dozens. The pangolin—a scaly ant-eater that lives in neat burrows in the ground—does not sit at the top of the food chain, and is not even tiger prey, but because of its connection with the earth, is considered to have magical qualities. In this book, the tiger and the pangolin not only are real subjects—Coggins is concerned with their fates in the South China province of Fujian—but they also represent a larger dynamic: tigers, the distant central state (whether imperial or Communist) with its interests and habits, the pangolin, the local rustics with their knowledge of local conditions. So in this book, Coggins sets out to examine the history and present conditions that interweave the lives of rural peoples, tigers, pangolins (and other wildlife), and the state. |
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Most importantly, Coggins is concerned with examining the question of whether the three tiger preserves that were established in the mountainous regions of western Fujian province in the 1980s have any chance of succeeding in their goal. Coggins thus examines the histories of land use, changes in the landscape, relations between people and wildlife (tigers included), indigenous conceptions of nature and the environment, and hunting, both Chinese and foreign, of large and small game. For this part of the book, Coggins uses Chinese-language sources. In Part II, based largely on field work conducted in the 1990s, Coggins looks at the ecology and history of the tiger preserves, and in Part III he assesses the conservation steps that have been taken, and makes policy recommendations that he thinks will be needed to assure success. |
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This is a good book, and the findings are important. Besides a wealth of historical detail about the South China tiger, the kinds of forests in the area, hunting techniques, and the culture of the mountain people, Coggins demonstrates that changes in land tenure regimes in the PRC, most particularly the reforms since the 1980s that effectively put land ownership into private hands, have resulted in the expansion of cultivated bamboo forests, which turn out to be extremely poor environments for ungulates or other prey for tigers, but a major source of income for the poor mountain dwellers. The reason this is important is that the tiger preserves are not devoid of humans, but have been carved out of inhabited land. Villagers thus continue to destroy tiger habitat, even in the preserve. |
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Coggins is hopeful that the tiger preserves will succeed, especially if the Chinese state recognizes the wealth of local knowledge about the environment, employs locals, and stops trying to impose its vision of what has to happen in the remote mountains of western Fujian. The last chapter is filled with recommendations of what "should" be done, the sum total of which constitute a mountain of contingencies that do not bode well for the fate of the South China tiger. |
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Reviewed by Robert B. Marks, Deihl Professor of History at Whittier College, and the author most recently of Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge 1998) and The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
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