Chinese Rain Forest Imperiledd by Familiar Adversary

Deep in an oasis of lush greenery, where monkeys cavort and wild peacocks strut, the isolated rain forest of southernmost China is threatened by a familiar adversary.

As with its counterparts around the world, the Xishuangbanna rain forest has suffered from the encroachment and neglect of humans. Its tropical vegetation cover, sprouting with rubber and banana trees, is steadily shrinking.

The denuding of the broad expanse in southern Yunnan province has been of official concern for decades, but only recently has the government begun to protect some of China’s most spectacular scenery.

Legend has it that Xishuangbanna was discovered thousands of years ago by hunters chasing a golden deer. More than half of its area is rain forest, the rest valleys and hills that from the air appear sculpted by the terracing of grain cultivation.

Bisecting the region is the upper Mekong River, known in China as the Lancang, which meanders south across the border into the infamous opium-producing region called the Golden Triangle at the junction of the borders of Laos, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Thailand.

Long popular with backpacking foreign tourists, the region’s poor roads and backwardness have prevented the voracious commercial exploitation that has destroyed other rain forests. Much of the damage has been done by impoverished peasants simply trying to eke out a living from the land.

But the isolation also gave a false sense of security that led to decades of official neglect.

“We have been trying to protect this area since the 1950s,” said Zhang Yunsheng, deputy director of the Tropical Products Research Institute in Jinghong, the region’s biggest city. “But we have only had the legal means to protect it in the past five years.”

Working with botanical researchers from Kunming, the provincial capital, the institute’s 1,100 staffers focus primarily on exploiting rubber trees and other economic resources, but they have found a concurrent need to study conservation.

On the institute grounds, where graceful gardens of fruit trees and blooming plants flourish, they have created a rain forest in miniature as a laboratory for the bigger expanse outside. They also grow their own hybrid of coffee, which is served to visitors.

“We’re looking at the different stages of the forest,” Zhang said. “We can create different heights of vegetation to study what happens to the plants.”

The forest holds about 4,000 named species of plant life and hundreds more unidentified. Deep within its tree cover, tigers, monkeys, peacocks and even a few dozen wild elephant still roam.

But the region also is home to some of China’s poorest people, many members of a dozen ethnic minorities with annual incomes of less than $100. The most numerous are the Dai, whose colorful dress, language and customs are closer to Thailand than China.

Many still employ ancient slash-and-burn farming, or simply cut trees as firewood or for sale, officials say.

The legal regulations that took effect in 1985 set aside 600,000 acres, just over half the forest, as a nature reserve, forbidding unauthorized uses. But the government has also resorted to controlling the human population.

About 15,000 people live in 100 villages within the reserve, but officials each year evict about 2,000 settlers who move into the area without permission. Some set up dwellings and cut trees to farm; others chop wood to sell.

“Every year we have to go through the forest to clear out people who don’t belong there,” said Zhang, noting that the program, including forest patrols, costs several hundred thousand dollars.

Still, the forest has shrunk from 50% of the region three decades ago to about 30% now. Some species face extinction, including one tree that soars to 110 feet but has been placed on the United Nations list of endangered species.

“Everyone knows there’s a lot of space, so they move in,” said Li Junhong, one of the institute’s researchers.

The institute itself does what Zhang calls “controlled pruning” for firewood and other commercial applications, but it confines most of its work to its grounds.

Along with experiments on fruit, including a thin-skinned peelable pineapple grown with technology imported from Taiwan, the institute also runs a tiny rubber plantation and factory.