ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the processes through which China’s first national park was built in 2007.
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Yunnan provincial government jointly launched the Yunnan Great River Project (1999-2009), a conservation project, through which TNC brought the Yellowstone National Park model to China as a means to create protected areas in northwestern Yunnan’s ecological landscape, one of the world’s ecological hotspots. One of the key unintended consequences of the project was that an entrepreneurial local county government built the Pudacuo National Park in a way that did not serve the original conservation purpose envisioned by the International NGO and that superseded the central and provincial governmental authorities. In addition to the unique nature of China’s center-periphery relations, the case study sheds light on the workings of the state’s fragmented authoritarianism and its potential to disempower a foreign NGO. While the political and cultural particularities of the ecological spaces in northwest Yunnan influenced TNC to rethink its conservation methods, China’s first national park was established primarily to create economic opportunities for a local government in a location where tourism needs were prioritized over conservation.
