China has more species of plants than any other country except Brazil or Columbia. Its faunal diversity is remarkable as well; it has more than 2000 species of terrestrial vertebrates, not to mention uncounted fish and invertebrate species. One reason for this high species diversity is China's great variety of ecosystems, ranging from wet to dry, coastal to continental and lowland to alpine. About half of the species found in China are found nowhere else on the planet, and many are rare. With assistance, advice and funding from Western NGOs, the Beijing government has set aside over 2400 nature reserves, resulting in some level of protection for more than 15 percent of its territory.
Although its record of reserve-based biodiversity conservation is striking, Beijing's approach to the conservation of living natural resources outside reserves is less impressive. Pressures for economic development often eclipse complex ecological and cultural factors. This is especially true on the Tibetan plateau, where China's political agenda collides with a complex and vulnerable ecological and cultural landscape. The Tibetan highlands constitute the world's largest, highest and youngest plateau. Because the plateau is situated at the junction of two continental plates, it hosts representatives of two of the world's major floras, which evolved separately and came together only fairly recently in geological time. The ecological influence of the plateau extends far beyond its borders, because it is upstream of two-fifths of the world's population and contains the headwaters of several of Asia's major rivers. Geographically, the plateau comprises not only the Tibetan Autonomous Region but parts of Nepal, India and Bhutan, as well as several parts of China: all of Qinghai province and parts of Sichuan, Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.
The large size and topographic variation of the Tibetan plateau create a complex landscape that supports many plant communities, ranging from mountain forests and sub-tropical valleys to high-elevation steppe and desert. Many writers describe this region as 'harsh,' 'forbidding' or 'bleak', but this only reflects the perspective of outsiders, rather than that of Tibetans towards their homeland. The plateau supports plants, wildlife and cultures that have developed remarkable adaptations to the challenges posed by their unique setting. Wild yaks, chiru (Tibetan antelope), kiang (Tibetan wild ass), Tibetan argali (a species of wild sheep), blue sheep (actually a type of goat), gazelles and white-lipped deer all feed on the grasses, sedges and shrubs, and are in turn preyed upon by snow leopards, brown bears and wolves.
Sometime within the last 10,000 years, people of the plateau developed an economy based on grazing domesticated yaks, sheep, goats, cattle and horses. These animals supplied pastoralists with meat; butter, yoghurt and cheese; leather, felt and wool; fuel; and tools, as well as transportation. Supplemented with medicinal herbs and products obtained by trading and raiding, this lifestyle formed the basis of a sustainable, and sometimes prosperous, economy. Nomads moved their herds to summer pasture during the short period when green forage was available, and shifted to areas that supplied dry forage for the rest of the year. Particularly in western Tibet, these movements were constrained by a feudal system in which nomads owed allegiance, labour and taxes to monasteries or aristocratic families that allocated pastures to households, which owned their livestock but not the lands on which they grazed. Periodically, the allocation of pastureland was re-evaluated and adjusted on the basis of herd size. This flexible system allowed nomads to cope with the inevitable mortality of livestock from weather and disease, and to adjust grazing pressure in accordance with unpredictable changes in herd size. Paradoxically, this autocratic arrangement was similar to communal management in that it allocated resources to households on the basis of need.