It's been called China's new Shangri-La, a region on the edge of Tibet where four of Asia's mightiest rivers drop off some of the world's highest mountains to flow through the continent's southeast nations. But this remote region also bubbles with environmental issues of global proportion.

It's also where Duke University cultural anthropologist Ralph Litzinger (photo at right) will be headed for a year's study as a Fulbright Scholar.

Litzinger, who has secured a Fulbright-Hays faculty research grant and a second Fulbright grant through the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, plans to document and analyze how an American environmental group -- The Nature Conservancy -- is working with Chinese government officials, conservation leaders, environmental activists and indigenous Chinese minority groups to create a national park system to preserve the region. The Nature Conservancy has dubbed the effort the Yunnan Great Rivers Development and Conservation Project.

"It's a unique opportunity to look at something that is about local development and conservation issues, but it is also about new forms of globalization and especially global environmental activism in China," said Litzinger, "I'm trying to bring those two strands together in the research."

Home to some 10,000 plant species and 500 bird species, as well as several endangered species of animals, the northwest portion of China's Yunnan Province (see map below) has been recognized as one of China's most important biodiversity regions. The government banned logging in the area in 1999, after realizing massive flooding along the Yangtze River was a byproduct of deforestation during the Maoist period in China, spanning the1950s, '60s and '70s.

What seems like a simple solution for a sound environment triggered a cascade of complex cultural and political issues.

"Seems right and good, because there's been 30-40 years of indiscriminate deforestation. The problem is," Litzinger explained, "logging and the timber industry was one of the main sources of income to the minority people living in the region, so now there's been an economic crisis, which has given rise to new debates about the relationship between land use, biodiversity, conservation and development.

"What are they going to do to generate new sources of income? Government officials have turned to tourism for the answer."

Tourism, he said, could replace the income of the minority groups, but questions of what types of tourism create the great challenge facing the Great Rivers Project. Workshops have brought together Tibetan officials, forestry officials and other conservationists to plan ways of convincing the Chinese government and National Sports Federation to halt permits for mountain climbing in the proposed national park. Tibetan people consider the Meili Snow Mountain (photo below) sacred and the move would respect indigenous religious beliefs but that would limit "adventure" tourism and mountaineering.

Talk now centers on other options for eco-tourism, such as developing destinations and bringing the tourists into the area.

"But many people see this as a really remote area -- there's no airport, it's a 10-hour small bus ride on dirt roads to get up in this area. So should they develop roads? Is infrastructural development the answer? Once they get people up there, where do they stay? Should they build big hotels at scenic view spots? What should they do to develop tourism so people can continue to deal with the economic crisis that's come with the logging ban?

"You can see how conservation issues are complexly and intricately tied up with developmental issues and poverty alleviation issues," Litzinger said. "You have a confluence of these different interests coming together and the future of what's going to happen in this region is very unclear. ... No one knows if the national park will become a reality."

Litzinger's current interest grew from previous research on the Yao and other ethnic minority groups in China. Last fall he produced a book, Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press), which dealt with socialist history and post-socialist reform agendas, and issues of cultural representation in minority regions of China.

Research on China's minority groups in the 1950s and '60s was "very much geared to understanding class tensions," he said, and created situations of arbitrary classification systems imposed on communities. The reforms in the 1980s "allowed people to rethink local realities and local histories against the grain of that previous class-based research" and opened a new interest in local cultural practices that had been considered politically dangerous or backward. Now Litzinger sees another danger in ethnic study, the tendency to romanticize minorities as the guardians of China's most ancient traditions.

"In the 1980s you started to find these really romantic depictions of minorities in museum exhibits and coffee table books ... where the only way in which ethnic groups are presented is in ethnic costume, as if this is the only way you can be ethnic in reform China," he said.

"I also argue the flip side, that this is one of the few avenues available to people now to empower their identities, so you can't totally dismiss this. We have to try to understand how people use different kinds of images to gain a new kind of recognition. ... My point is you can't mistake the form for historical context.

"Part of what makes the Yunnan Great Rivers Project of interest is the way that global environmental agendas tend to see minorities as the guardians of ecological knowledge," Litzinger said. "Minorities and the regions in which they live are being championed as a source for alternative and less environmentally destructive forms of development."

That historical perspective will be a key to his study of how NGOs like The Nature Conservancy work to help manage the natural resources of the Great Rivers area, promote eco-tourism as an alternative economy and also protect the "traditional" cultures of the Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in the region. Litzinger's work will include observing Nature Conservancy staff in their efforts to document indigenous cultural practices and ecological knowledge, seeing how the interviewers perceive and relate to villagers and how they report their findings.

Litzinger, his partner and toddler son will pack up and depart for Yunnan Province in September. When he returns, he plans to write another book, this one tentatively titled The Greening of China.

Written by Karen Hines.