Such growing pollution in the 1990s nearly spelt the end of traditional animal herding in Alasha (also spelt Alxa), as China banned livestock and resettled herders to tame the deserts and restore grasslands.
But community leaders lobbied for their camels – their beasts of burden since time immemorial – to be recognised as a “protected livestock breed”. And camel herding continues to this day.
Success story? It’s not that simple to Dr Thomas White, a researcher who spent years living with the herders to understand what they’re going through. In his recently published book China’s Camel Country, he documented the tensions the herders faced to keep in line with China’s nation-building project. Taboos also emerged as culture courted capitalism to survive – think embellishments for tourism and butchering a treasured species to feed an upscale market.
Dr Thomas White lectures in China and sustainable development at King’s College London. Image: Thomas White.
What does his account of Alasha tell of China’s bid to marry development with sustainability? What lessons do the herders have for communities worldwide, who may be bracing against both development pressures and large-scale conservation schemes at home?
The Eco-Business podcast speaks with White, lecturer in China and sustainable development at King’s College London, to unpack the complexities he uncovered in China’s northwestern frontier.
Tune in as we discuss:
- What camel conservation in Alasha shows about China’s green growth ambitions
- Whether camel herding resulted in net benefits for the environment
- The herders’ “partial success” in preserving their culture amid political and environmental change
- What insights Alasha’s herders hold for other local communities facing pressures from development and sustainability initiatives
Edited transcript:
Tell us about your experience with ethnographic research in Alasha between 2012 and 2019 – what was it like living there, speaking to people, gaining access and trust of both families and local officials? Did you do a bit of herding yourself?
I think I was very lucky. I encountered some extremely welcoming and generous people – very generous with their time, patient with me and my questions, with my linguistic abilities at the beginning.
And I was very lucky in that I was able to stay with a family of Mongolian herders in the countryside. I was also able to visit other families and stay with them for short periods of time. I got to know these families, the challenges they face, their thoughts about the future, their thoughts about what was changing.
I think for a while, they didn’t know what to make of me. They didn’t understand why I would come halfway across the world to live with some rural camel herders. That took a bit of getting used to. But I was also much younger then – this was 12 years ago. I was a young man a long way from home, so perhaps they took pity on me a bit. But I was extremely fortunate to be surrounded by people who were so helpful with me and in my research. It is really through them that I learnt what I know about this place.
I did do some herding. I don’t have much experience; I grew up in the English countryside but not as a farmer. There were things I had to learn about castrating goats, shearing them, chasing errant camels back into pens and these kinds of things. There were lots of things I learnt, but also lots of things I was unskilled in and unable to do as an Englishman.
I recall you speak both Chinese and Mongolian.
That’s right. I learnt Chinese before Mongolian, and I had lived in China before I did this research. But when I started out, my Mongolian was not so good, and I really had to learn it while I was there. That is one of the reasons why I am so grateful to the people I stayed with for their patience and for teaching me the language.
What was it about camel conservation in Alasha that prompted you to take a deeper look? How unique was it as a case study in conservation and cultural politics from the outset – and were there more unexpected findings along the way?
As it often happens with anthropologists conducting long-term fieldwork ethnography, what we find is quite different from what we expected. And we have to be open to that and be willing to change the direction of our research based on what our informants and people we talk to are interested in.
I had initially gone to Alasha to study the religious diversity of this region. But I realised I couldn’t avoid talking about camels because that was what my informants were talking about all the time. About problems they faced as herders, their hopes and pride in camel herding, and so on. It was really through camels that they had a status, and were respected in the region as kind of bearers of cultural heritage. They would meet local officials, and there was pride in what they did.
If you’ve read materials on rural China, the idea that people are proud of what they’re doing and feel on equal terms with people they meet from the city can be quite surprising. Because normally rural life is looked down upon. So this was different from what I had expected reading about the region.
I had also been expecting to find very little pastoralism left, because I’ve been reading a lot about the state’s restrictions on herding in the name of grassland conservation. Indeed there were many restrictions and in some places herders had been moved off the grasslands. There were these increasingly strict limits on the number of sheep and goats herders could keep, but camels were this interesting exception to that story.
It wasn’t just tolerance for camels, but a kind of official acceptance that in some ways they might be a good thing. And so that was unexpected.
To the degree to which this was unique, I certainly hadn’t read about things that were similar to it. But having looked around, there are other examples in Inner Mongolia of similar initiatives to conserve local breeds of livestock as a way of defending pastoralism.
In other parts you see an emphasis on horses, and yet others again on camels. So I think it’s a kind of broader phenomenon, even though I’m discussing it in a particular part of inner Mongolia.
One of the joys of doing ethnography, I guess, is that you’re constantly confronting the unexpected. Things change rapidly. I mean, this is always true of China, and it was no exception in this part of Inner Mongolia.
Even while I was there, people’s relations with the camels were clearly changing. There were new initiatives to encourage camel dairying, so that by the end, it appeared to be a very viable development route for the region, for various reasons that I discussed in the last chapter of my book. That was something I couldn’t really have predicted even when I started the research.
You wrote that camel conservation in Alasha provides “a window onto significant shifts during the Xi Jinping era in the way China’s borderlands are incorporated into nation-building projects”. In the book there are also mentions of how nation-building under Xi involved nurturing an “ecological civilisation” (生态文明). Can you share more about how the book can help readers understand China’s approaches to conservation and development today – and why the nuances matter?
China is often held up as an example of what scholars refer to as authoritarian environmentalism – which is top-down, non-participatory and relies on the power of the state to get things done. That contrasts to the kind of environmentalism that emerges from the grassroots as part of social movements.
Authoritarian environmentalism is what scholars have identified in China’s attempt to conserve grasslands in its western regions. It is particularly associated with policies like ecological migration (生态移民), where herders are resettled often where they don’t have access to livestock anymore and have to find other ways of making a living. Scholars have linked this to the nation-building projects in the sense that this resettlement is a way of assimilating them to broader Chinese ways of life, through greater contact with urban areas, markets, the Chinese language and so on.
I suppose my book is trying to show how in some areas, minority groups have tried to push back against this. And they’ve done so by using ideas that are acceptable to the state – ideas of livestock conservation, of heritage, of science and technology. I showed that there was, to some degree, some limited successes.
I don’t want to underplay the significant pressures on herders that were there during my research, and in some ways they have only increased. It is not only state policies, but also climate change. Alasha has had real problems with drought in the last few years, which made things very challenging.
As for why these nuances matter…I wouldn’t even call these nuances. I think this is just what happens when environmental policies meet the road. We need to understand how environmental policies are implemented, what the actual effects are, what unexpected complexities arise and so on.
Things that look a certain way on paper, when implemented, often don’t work out in the way that people intended. People push back, or policies have detrimental effects that weren’t anticipated. This is why I think ethnographic research is important.
There is a case to be made that having this awareness of how policies work out after being implemented may help make better policies. Theoretically, it also tells us important things about the nature of environmental state power in China and its relations with minorities.
Overall, would you consider Alasha a success story in a local community navigating the risks and complexities of large-scale conservation and development conundrums? The book touched on issues such as technology being possibly both a boon and bane to the herders, and also how culture became commodified – though in place of other destructive activities such as mining.
I’d hesitate to call it a success story.
I think the story I’m trying to tell is one of people grappling with uncertainty, but still hanging on, and trying to imagine ways in which their ways of life might be viable. I was trying to see things from their perspective, not just from the perspective of top-down policies that are implemented on them.
I think it is very important to stress this uncertainty that the people faced. It on onelevel came from state policies, which often from people’s perspective seem to suddenly change, or implemented in different ways. That can be very difficult for people to cope and plan. Meanwhile, they have this uncertainty over climate change and drought.
On technology – take the GPS collars for camels – this is part of what I termed “techno-pastoralism”. I was trying to identify the ways in which the people defending camel husbandry were trying to use this language of science and technology, which is so important in China, to make a case that herding wasn’t backward, something outside of modernity, a relic of the past, but was instead totally compatible.
Such technology was used to argue on elements of herding that were traditionally objectionable to the state. So with GPS collars, herders could say that the fences can be taken down, and camels can be allowed to roam freely because they can be monitored via the GPS collars. So, in a way, they were making arguments to defend the practices of mobility and extensive husbandry.
But there are also problems, in that it devalues the labour of herders themselves. It suggests that what really needs to be done is for herders to move into the city and not live in the countryside anymore. But to herders, what they find most important and meaningful is training camels to be ridden. So these kinds of more intimate engagement with the animal have no place in the vision of techno-pastoralism. I should also point out that techno-pastoralism is a kind of ideal vision, rather than something that was ever fully implemented.
The book focused a lot on how the local herders tried to preserve their way of life and culture through the Bactrian camel, against a state-led push for grassland conservation. Did this benefit, or limit, the success of the conservation efforts for the grasslands?
I think what is important to remember is how the Chinese state has tried to manage its grasslands over the past few decades, not only through reducing the number of animals, but also through encouraging herders to erect fences and privatise land tenure to the household level.
This was done to address the idea of the tragedy of the commons – that if you let people graze their animals on common land, they have no incentives to avoid accumulating large herds and destroying the common resource.
But lots of scholars have pointed out, in the West and China, that there are problems with this way of fencing and privatisation. Because less mobility in this part of the world is a bad thing. Less mobility of livestock means that animals are confined to small areas and they end up trampling the land. If they could move, there wouldn’t be these intensive pressures on particular locations.
Importantly, herders and their animals would also be able to respond to drought. If you go to Mongolia, for example, when people encounter drought, they adopt this strategy called otor, which is this long-distance movement often in hundreds of kilometres, to an area not affected by droughts. It’s this kind of mobility that has allowed people to adapt to these environments. It is also not possible with the proliferation of fences.
To that extent, conserving the camel was also in-part an argument against this mode of fencing off the grassland. Camels are highly mobile, they need to roam around a large area. That isn’t really compatible with the kind of enclosed grassland model. So those who defended camel husbandry were also making a broader ecological argument about the necessity of livestock mobility for the health of the grasslands. Their point was that the grasslands have evolved with livestock moving about, spreading dung and nutrients in the soil.
So I don’t think it was just a tool or excuse that herders were using. They sincerely believe that the Mongolian way of livestock herding, with a priority on mobility, is important for healthy ecosystems in this part of the world. And that camels in particular are important for these healthy ecosystems. They would point to areas where the animals had been banned and note that the grass isn’t thriving. And that grasslands were doing fine where the camels were.
Is the book already painting a picture of bygone times, with the crackdown on minority rights in China in recent years?
Every ethnographic monograph, in a sense, is history disguised as current affairs, because by the time it’s published, it’s several years since we had conducted this research.
So it’s important to situate the work within a particular time period. And this was a period, as you note, before some of the crackdowns on minorities in China, in the early 2010s, at the start of the Xi era. After my fieldwork there were, for example, in Inner Mongolia, protests against education reforms that reduced the amount of Mongolian taught in schools.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that the period when I was doing research was some kind of golden age either. There were restrictions on what was acceptable to say and do as a minority. But it’s hard for me to say because I haven’t been back since 2019, since before the protests. I don’t know how things on the ground have changed.
But I think some examples mentioned in the book, such as the defence of pastoralism as heritage, have been continuing. For example in the east of Inner Mongolia, there’s recently been this listing of the Ar Horqin grassland nomadic system as a kind of globally important agricultural heritage system. This is a concept led by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and China’s very keen on it.
Even in this case, what I suggest is to view the way in which locality is increasingly emphasised over nationality, the Mongol nationality. It isn’t about all of Mongolian pastoralism being considered as heritage. It’s confined to particular places. In this sense, this bears out what I was discussing in the book, from 10 years ago.
Are there lessons that local community leaders elsewhere can draw from your account of Alasha’s herders, on how they can best respond to development or conservation brought upon them?
There are so many particularities to the Chinese context that I’m not sure how well their experience would translate to other contexts. In a sense, the book is making a point that local people have sophisticated understandings of their political context and are sometimes able to find wriggle room, in surprising ways, that people looking from the outside wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify.
It’s not perhaps very useful or original, but I think it would be the local community leaders who themselves would know best. They have an in-depth understanding of how things work in their particular contexts. The kinds of tools, strategies and concepts we might bring from outside that circulate globally – ideas such as human rights – might not be the ones that work best to defend local interests.
A more hypothetical question – grassland conservation could one day feature on a larger scale in the development of carbon projects, funded by selling carbon offsets to businesses. Would such a business model be compatible with upholding local herder livelihoods and cultures in places like Alasha?
In a sense, this isn’t hypothetical. There are many instances of large scale afforestation projects in Inner Mongolia and in Alasha. Sadly these do often involve herders losing access to their land.
I currently work in Mongolia, not China, and there I know of international conservation organisations trying to develop carbon offsetting, carbon sequestration projects, which can then be sold as green investments to businesses.
My key question is, do herders benefit from this? Can herders benefit from this? This is a key question of the just transition – will it simply involve them being excluded from land they traditionally have used? Because if so, then it seems a straightforward case of ecological imperialism, in the sense that rich countries emit carbon then go around the world in the form of international organisations and capital, and find the land of other people to offset the emissions. That, I think, is patently unjust.
There was this mention of how there were ecosystem services payment in Alasha if people would abandon herding, though there were exceptions for camels.
Again, it is one of those things that on paper can make sense. But when it gets implemented, all sorts of things can go wrong with it. For instance herders end up not getting the money, not getting it when they expect to, or not being able to access it. In some cases herders prefer to have access to their animals rather than being forced to buy food on the market and face the shifting prices there.
I think the jury is out on whether the ecosystem services payment actually works.
What are your wishes for the people in Alasha moving forward?
Well I’m very worried from what I hear about Alasha at the moment, because I hear about drought – several years of very significant drought. And I hear things about the herders not being able to sell meat they way they are used to, the price of meat decreasing. Rural livelihood seems to be more and more challenging in the face of climate change and other policies – such as China’s import of Australian meat and the implications for herders.
I wish they are able to find a way through these challenges, and I sincerely hope they are supported in doing so, that no unnecessary obstacles are placed in their way, and that they are able to practice their livelihoods as they would wish.
