On a short stretch of the Yangtze River, three sleek grey porpoises twist in muddy waters near the city of Nanjing, protected from passing barges and ships by a row of yellow buoys.
With only 1,000 remaining, the Yangtze finless porpoise is a symbol of the damage done to China’s longest river in a decades-long campaign to tame floods, reclaim farmland and industrialize the regions along its banks.
President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) call for sustainable growth in the Yangtze “economic belt” has raised hopes that the river’s last surviving mammal can become an emblem of China’s environmental revival.
Photo: Reuters
“It has now been scientifically proven that the Yangtze porpoise is a unique species,” said Jiang Meng, secretary general of the Nanjing Yangtze Finless Porpoise Conservation Association, a group that oversees the porpoise safe haven at Nanjing.
“If it isn’t protected well, the Chinese government will be under pressure,” Jiang said.
The safe zone is tucked behind a “ecological red line” that bans construction on 88 sq km of territory along the shore.
Photo: Reuters
Rows of fish farms have been replaced by lotus ponds teeming with migratory birds. Fishing is restricted and ships are routed away from the zone, which is patrolled daily.
“We chase them away — this is a core area so we can’t let them fish here,” said Yang Jinlong, a fisherman-turned-conservationist.
China counted 1,012 Yangtze porpoises in its last census in 2017, down from 2,500 in 1991, and the numbers are falling by about 10 percent a year, officials said.
The porpoise can still be saved, Jiang said.
“The numbers are still falling but the rate of decline is slowing,” he said.
It’s been done before, activists say. A decades-long conservation effort saved the giant panda, China’s national symbol, from the brink of extinction. There are around 1,900 giant pandas today, and their numbers are rising.
“It may be too little too late, but what they are doing is unprecedented,” Todd Robeck, author of a recent study into the Yangtze porpoise, said of the effort to save the mammal.
“They are putting in the right pieces to keep this animal from going extinct,” said Robeck, vice president of conservation research at SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment in Orlando, Florida.
From its origins in the glaciers of Tibet to its delta in Shanghai on the eastern coast, the 6,437km Yangtze provides water to a third of China’s population.
It has been the scene of profound and destructive environmental changes over the past 70 years, caused not only by giant feats of engineering like the Three Gorges Dam, but also a Mao Zedong (毛澤東)-era campaign to drain lakes and wetlands.
For decades, its complex ecosystem was sacrificed in a frantic rush for economic growth.
The “baiji” or white-finned dolphin, a larger cousin of the porpoise, was declared “functionally extinct” in 2006. The Chinese sturgeon is also on the brink of annihilation, with fish stocks plunging 90 percent in the last few decades.
Many porpoises are killed in collisions with boats because noise pollution affects their echolocation, while a degraded habitat and polluted water exposes them to contagious diseases.
A 10-year government action plan released in 2016 blamed “intensified human activities” for the fall in porpoise numbers and said past protection efforts failed to arrest the decline.
However, the action plan was limited in scope, aiming only to “stabilize” porpoise populations, improve monitoring, raise public awareness and deepen genetic and stem cell research.
Nanjing is considered a model protection zone, and it has spent around 30 million yuan since it opened in 2014 on surveillance equipment and a full-time staff of 20.
Elsewhere, authorities last month imposed a 10-year fishing ban from 2021 at Poyang, China’s largest freshwater lake and another home to finless porpoises. The ban will affect 100,000 fishermen, Xinhua news agency reported.
And a 64km stretch of the Yangtze at Anqing, in Anhui Province, has been declared a porpoise safe haven and off limits for fishing.
“We are optimistic because the state has made protection a priority,” said Chen Shouwen, a conservation official at Anqing’s rural affairs bureau.
Activists hope publicity will help save the porpoise, but some campaigns can misfire. Conservationists were enraged last year when authorities captured 14 wild porpoises and put them on display in marine parks in Shanghai and along the east coast.
Researchers have had some success in breeding porpoises artificially, but the numbers are small. China may be forced to preserve the species by storing reproductive cells and repopulating the river when conditions improve.
“I don’t think it will ever return to the way it was, but there might be some mitigation efforts where they can thrive quite normally in the Yangtze,” Robeck said. “I’m really hopeful their efforts will be an example for what can be done in the future.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist