China’s Conservation Strategy Must Reconcile Its Contemporary Wildlife Use and Trade Practices

Abstract

China’s supply-side conservation efforts in the past decades have led to two bewildering juxtapositions: a rapidly expanding farming industry vs. overexploitation, which remains one of the main threats to Chinese vertebrates. COVID-19 was also the second large-scale zoonotic disease outbreak since the 2002 SARS. Here, we reflect on China’s supply-side conservation strategy by examining its policies, laws, and practices concerning wildlife protection and utilization, and identify the unintended consequences that likely have undermined this strategy and made it ineffective in protecting threatened wildlife and preventing zoonotic diseases. We call for China to overhaul its conservation strategy to limit and phase out risky and unsustainable utilization, while improving legislation and enforcement to establish full chain-of-custody regulation over existing utilization.