ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of China's terrestrial biodiversity and species loss, with a brief history of people, plants, and wildlife since imperial times; the rise of a national nature conservation system that articulates with global networks of transnational nature conservation; and how the emerging system affects the protection of biodiversity at local and regional levels. As a foundation for understanding and protecting the stunning array of landscapes, ecosystems, habitats and organisms that compose China's biological heritage, biodiversity is generating new ways of understanding the world and what it means to be human, even as it articulates with older forms of reverence for nature. Biodiversity is 'the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes [genetic] diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems'.
