Bianma Village in Niuigou Township is 50 kilometers from Qilian County, Qinghai Province. The only highway through here is Provincial Highway S215, also known as the "two Ga highway", which extends all the way to the northwest from Gahai on the shores of Qinghai Lake to the Qilian Mountains at an altitude of 4,300 meters, the two fingers of the Hara Mountain pass.

"Bison" and "border flax", one of the most common wildlife on the grasslands wild yak, a cattle and sheep like to eat the grass jinlumei, here is the southern foot of the Qilian Mountains, the traditional pastoral area. Most of the year, the Er Ga highway is very cold, but in July it is exceptionally lively, the tourist season of the self-driving car is often blocked in the middle of the road by herds of cows and sheep. This is the centralized "transhumance season" for herders in Bianma village, where more than 100 herdsmen need to walk along the highway for dozens of kilometers with their cows and sheep.

Cattle and sheep in transhumance in Bianma village, Niuigou township, Qilian county, Qinghai province, July 7, 2019, China. (This article's images are surging news Shi Yangkun picture picture editing Zhou Pinglang)

The local people manage different seasons of pasture as "nest", July transhumance is to move from the "winter nest" to the "autumn nest". "The first thing you need to do is to get to a place where you can get to a place where you can be happy. In the border hemp village, winter nest is the base camp, lower altitude, fertile soil, grass is sufficient, cattle and sheep can spend the long winter on the plateau. Autumn dens are at a higher altitude and are mainly used for rotational grazing. Every summer, people, cattle and sheep will spend a month and a half there, leaving enough time for the winter pasture to recover livestock.

On July 8, 2019, herdsmen in Bianma Village, Youniugou Township, Qilian County, Qinghai Province, are "transiting". Every July, they relocate from their respective winter pastures to fall pastures, a traditional form of rotational grazing.

This is the traditional wisdom of the grasslands. "Always eat in one place, not enough grass, sheep are not fat, can not produce cubs," 34-year-old Ma Jingui is the village head of Bianma village, the early years of their ancestors from Huangzhong County, Xining City, fled to the village of Bianma, divided into pastures to put up cows and goats, to him has been the third generation.

Ma Jingui, 34, the village head of Bianma village, in the transit break, he would lie on the grass to brush the jitterbug.

Ma Jingui has lost count of the number of times he has been on the transit road. his 14-year-old son, who just graduated from elementary school this year, was also pulled into the July army, wanting him to "suffer so that he can go back to his studies and change his destiny".

In recent years, Ma Jingui smelled the beginnings of change. 2017, Gansu and Qinghai provinces announced the inclusion of 50,200 square kilometers of land in the Qilian Mountains National Park pilot, a part of the village of Bianma was also allocated to it. The question in front of the Ma Jingui people is whether they can continue to graze, and whether they should continue to do so.

July 8, 2019, the herdsmen stationed tents in the process of transhumance, transhumance generally take three or five days ranging, en route to the herdsmen to set up a temporary tent on the roadside public **** pastoral road camping, and then continue the journey the next day.

Ravine in the "small Hong Kong"

Bian Ma village belongs to Qilian County, the earliest in the Han Dynasty before, here is the Qiang pastoral. In the second half of the last century, outside the traditional nomadic life, another narrative line is also intertwined with the people of Bianma Village.

Qilian County is a resource-rich county, there are more than 40 kinds of proven mining resources. Metallic minerals including iron, manganese, chromium, lead, copper, alluvial gold, etc., non-metallic minerals also include asbestos, graphite, dolomite, limestone, clay, gypsum, marble and so on. In the 1980s, Qilian County once realized financial self-sufficiency.

"In the 1990s, people outside called it 'Little Hong Kong'. The ravine is full of mines. Trucks were pulling rocks out by the truckload," said Ma Guoliang, a station chief at the Bison Gully Conservation Station, who returned from the army in the 1990s and was assigned to the forest here.

July 7, 2019, rangers at the Qilian Mountains National Park Ranger Station work on a mountain patrol.

When he was young, Ma Guoliang also went down to the river to fish for gold. When Little Hong Kong was at its most bustling, outsiders gathered in the upper reaches, foreign bosses, foreign miners, large and small mines. Often gravel downstream, local villagers in the river "pick up". "When the cattle and sheep are still not sold on the price, pick up a piece of you earned."

Most of the villagers have mixed feelings about the mine. "At first all think (mining) is a good thing, the mine is usually deep in the mountains, and did not encroach on my pasture. There are more people from outside the area, and we can sell more specialties and make some money. But then it turned out to be bad."

It started with air pollution; for a while there were asbestos fibers floating in the air all the time, and "when I smelled it, I knew that the asbestos factory was open," in addition to water pollution and soil erosion. Mountain mining, cut-off power generation and overloaded grazing, the grassland was once scarred.

The most important river in Qilian County is the Black River, which originates from the "Bayi Glacier" in Niuigou Township. The Black River is China's second largest inland river, but also the Hexi Corridor "mother river". The Black River, known as the "Weak Water", has been cut off many times, mainly due to over-cultivation in the upper and middle reaches, and the destruction of the mountains by mines along the route.

In 2001, the Black River source ecological emergency management project began, Qinghai Province, the black soil beach sandy grassland management, artificial afforestation, grassland fencing and sealing, river management and tailings restoration work.

But it wasn't until recent years that the mines were completely removed from the scope of what is now a national park.In 2014 Surfing News reported on the Muli Coal Mine in Tianjun, Linxian County. The town of Muli in Tianjun County has proven reserves of 3.5 billion tons of coal, and has rapidly become a coal base in a decade or so, with open-pit mining severely damaging the surface, causing water pollution, soil erosion and air pollution, and squeezing the ecology of pastoral areas.

Qilian Mountain National Park pilot area was established, Qinghai retired the range of mines. Qilian Mountain National Park Management Authority in Qinghai Province Management Office Director Zhang Yu said in an interview with the surging news, the complexity of mine clearance is the historical legacy of the problem, many mines are still "legal", complete licenses, leases have not expired. Currently, Qinghai Province is developing specific compensation methods for mine clearance.

Farewell to the noise of the "Little Hong Kong" era, the village of Bianma returned to calm. As the head of the care station, Ma Guoliang still has to "keep an eye on the river" in his daily paging, in case someone steals the ore.

July 7, 2019, rangers at the Qilian Mountains National Park Ranger Station meet before their daily patrols, which include fire prevention, garbage pickup and poaching prevention.

"The rock sheep ate my grass, what about my sheep?"

A number of ecological restoration and management projects, including the Heiheyuan Ecological Emergency Management Project, have changed the environment of Bianma Village for the better.

Ma Jingui said the most direct change is the wildlife. "We've become accustomed to tourists getting out of their cars to take photos when they see rock sheep (岩羊). Rock sheep, Tibetan wild asses, elk deer ......"

He has yet to see a snow leopard, the flagship species of the Qilian Mountains National Park, which usually lives above the snow line. But in May 2018, infrared cameras captured five snow leopards in the same frame at the Oil Gourd Care Station, adjacent to Bianma Village.

With more wildlife comes more human-animal conflict, and almost every national park faces similar problems. A villager once asked Ma Jingui what a national park was, "At first I couldn't answer, I could only say that it means that animals are not allowed to be hunted and killed."

Generations of nomadic herding, the people of Bianma village have experience in dealing with wild animals, such as "wolf damage" and "bear damage". In winter, when there is not enough food in the mountains, wolves will come down and break into the herders' homes, attacking the family sheep.

"Wolves love to eat offal, but they're so bad that it's not enough for them to gut one sheep, they'll bite many more. Bears, too, will run into a herdsman's house when people are not on guard, drink their ghee and eat their tsampa, and will lie down on people's beds to sleep."

July 7, 2019, rangers at the Qilian Mountains National Park Ranger Station are assembling before their daily patrols, which mainly include fire prevention, garbage pickup, and prevention of poaching and theft.

In the early years, Ma's grandparents had joined forces with a number of herdsmen to form a spontaneous "wolf team," but it wasn't long before the team was disbanded with the collection and control of firearms and the emphasis on wildlife protection.

Ma Jingui recalled that for a while, the wolves could not be beaten, and people could only watch, and then take the rest of the meat to be disposed of. Later, there was a policy of compensation. 2012, according to the Wildlife Protection Law, Qinghai Province issued the "Qinghai Province key protection of terrestrial wildlife caused by personal property damage compensation measures", by the wolf and bear damage to the herdsmen can be reported to the Forest Public Security Bureau, assessment of the loss, in accordance with the market price of cattle and sheep, by the provincial treasury to bear 50 percent of the compensation.

But these compensations still fail to cover some ambiguous areas. Part of Bianma Village is zoned into the Qilian Mountain National Park, which has both a core area and a general control area. Some herdsmen's pastures are located deep in the mountains and ditches, and wild rock sheep often "invade" their pastures in large groups.

"What will happen to my sheep when the rock sheep eat my grass?" some villagers asked village chief Ma Jingui. Some villagers asked village chief Ma Jingui. As a second-grade wild animal, people can't kill them, and it's pointless to drive them away -- "The pasture is right there, and if you drive them away today, they'll come back tomorrow and the day after."

Rock sheep live in mountainous areas and are strong jumpers, able to easily climb over mesh fences. In recent years, in order to leave migratory corridors for wildlife, the national park pilot program has required the removal of net fences. Some herders' pastures have been "occupied" by rock sheep in disguise.

If wolf and bear damage can be calculated by the number of cattle and sheep killed or injured, the damage caused by the "invasion" of rock sheep is difficult to quantify.

Most of the affected pastures are herders' "autumn nest", where cattle and sheep spend less than two months each year, a relatively short period of time, but it is extremely necessary for the winter pastures to restore animal power.

"The rock sheep eat and go, a short period of time to see the change, the grass is still the grass. But the grass left for the domestic sheep to eat less, which will affect the lambing." Ma Jingui calculated an account, assuming that 200 ewes can produce 150 lambs, affected by the rock sheep, now can only produce less than 100, many ewes do not have enough milk, the birth rate is not high.

The loss of wildlife to livestock is difficult to quantify, and Bianma Village is not an isolated case. National parks are divided into core areas and general control areas, the latter generally located in areas where human and wildlife activity overlap.

Qilian Mountain National Park

In May this year, the Global Environment Institute (GEI) conducted research in the Qinghai Province section of the Qilian Mountain National Park. Peng Kui, the project leader, said that many villages throughout the Qinghai provincial slice have encountered similar troubles. Some herders have expressed the hope that their pastures, which have been infested by rock goats, will be "ceded" to them and included in the core area of the national park.

Peng Kui said, "This is of course the simple idea of the herders, the national park area delimitation has its own ecological basis, but the national park should make corresponding ecological compensation for these herdsmen."

For those losses that are hard to be quantified, like some other national park pilots, Qilianshan is trying to make ecological compensation through other channels, such as giving priority to these herders whose interests are damaged when recruiting ecological caretakers to become staff members of the national park.

Ecological compensation is not only in accordance with the scope of the national park, according to the core area, the general control area and outside the park graded, this is also a problem. According to Zhang Yu, "Wild animals don't recognize boundary markers and stakes, they are active and will run out, so if only villages within the park's boundaries are compensated, what about neighboring villages outside the park?"

Zhang Yu said, at present, the Qilianshan National Park is still refining the specific ecological compensation approach.

Core area of the "no grazing problem"

Rock sheep infestation, some other factors also let Ma Jingui people worry about, the sheep whip can continue to take.

Part of the Bianma Village range is set aside as a national park, some in the core area and some in the general control area. According to the policy of the pilot period of the national park, in principle, human activities are prohibited in the core area, while the general control area restricts human activities, and the original residents located in the core area need to be relocated, but this has encountered difficulties.

Some herdsmen have their homes and pastures zoned for the core area, and many have told Ma Jingui that they are willing to move their homes out of the core area but want to remain there to graze their animals. They don't know where to go if grazing is completely banned.

In addition, many of the pastures have complex tenure, which requires a more refined resettlement and compensation approach. Liu Yihua, deputy director of the Qinghai Provincial Management Office of the Qilian Mountains National Park Administration, said that in some villages, the collective grassland is assigned to the core area. Its ownership belongs to the village collective, but the population involved is very wide, if only according to the ownership of compensation, these herdsmen can get very little compensation. Some villages are assigned to the core area for rotational grazing, which may cause further degradation of the grassland if rotational grazing is not possible.

Unlike national parks in the United States, which were left with endless wilderness as a result of the early expulsion of Indians. But in China, national parks have been populated from the start. In traditional pastoral areas such as Bianma Village, the older generation of herders received little modern education and had no labor skills other than herding.

Are there any other options besides a strict ban on grazing in the core areas across the board?

Peng Kui said that after generations of human activity, pastoralists have formed a whole system with nature, and moderate human activity does not damage the ecology. Over the years, "grass to set livestock, classification guidance, according to local conditions, and strictly prevent overloading grazing" is the grassland green development of the red line.

"If the cows and sheep are withdrawn and the grass grows too high, there may be fire hazards," said Ma Guoliang, who worked in a state-owned forest before becoming head of the station. The edges of the woodlands intersected with grasslands, and mesh fences were used to separate them from neighboring herdsmen in order to protect them from livestock.

But the grass grows too tall, and during the dry season it is easy to start fires and even cause forest fires. Faced with strict forest protection policies, the Ma Guoliangs have found some compromise solutions to deal with the situation, where herdsmen can enter the woodland and manually cut the grass to replenish it for their own livestock for free.

"In China's pilot national parks, we don't want to see artificially created 'no man's land'," Peng Kui claims.

But if a certain level of human activity is allowed to continue, detailed and strict limits need to be proposed. This includes a series of questions: what is the maximum carrying capacity of the pasture? If the population is not moved out, is there a need to set a population ceiling for the core area? In what way will the herders have to graze their animals? Can new facilities be built, and what should be done with the aging ones?

Right now, the people of Bianma Village are encountering production and life problems. In order to avoid the construction project to bring damage to the pasture and pollution, here temporarily called a halt to all kinds of construction activities, sheep shed can not be refurbished, dangerous houses can not be transformed, which affects dozens of people. The goat sheds and dangerous houses are just symptoms, according to Peng Kui, behind which are the demands placed on nature by population growth. "Not only is the growth in the number (of population), but also the change in demand, the beginning is to increase the tents, then will be divided, sheep hut, winter nests will be increased accordingly, the development of the late stage will also require the opening of factories, do water conservancy, the development of tourism, the amount of growth and development of the demand, this kind of pressure (of people on the ecology) is twofold."

Currently, the Institute for Global Environmental Studies is working with the Qinghai section of the Qilian Mountains National Park to study the possibility of an agreement to protect it. Previously, Punch News reported on the giant panda national park pilot, the Shan Shui Nature Conservation Center and the local community signed a "protection agreement", the villagers of the behavior of the strict constraints, and in accordance with the agreement on rewards and punishments.

Peng Kui said that by drawing up the agreement, the community is included as a partner in the national park, and people will develop new behavioral norms.

Possibilities beyond the whip

It may be easy to change where you live, but it's difficult to change the way you've been producing for generations. Similar to the "wave of farmers moving up the ladder" on the mainland, herders in traditional pastoral areas are facing the challenge of switching production to employment.

Before the establishment of the national park, Bianma Village had "ecological immigrants", who mainly came from farming teams. In the early years, some of the villagers were not able to get a share of the pasture, was organized into the farm animal team, farming grass, resold to the farmers in need. Some also dug wormwood and started small businesses in the county or went to work abroad.

On July 8, 2019, Ma Jingui's son, 14, who had just graduated from elementary school, returned to the village from the county town for the summer to help his family along with the transhumance, the second transhumance he had been involved in. Ma Jingui said his family three generations are herders, hope that his son seriously study, later can get out of this grassland.

After 2014, with the development of tourism in Qilian County and the policy of precise poverty alleviation, some people moved to the townships and county cities to work, working as forest rangeland caretakers, parking lot administrators, cashiers in supermarkets, or selling tickets at scenic spots. Those who did not have access to land in the past have acquired the skills to make a living during their years of "odd jobs", while the herders are worried about the sudden change.

For the older generation of herders, adapting to the transition is extremely difficult. According to Zhang Yu, it has been a difficult leap for them to put down their sheep whips and pick up their scythes, not to mention entering the tertiary sector and engaging in the service industry. "If you want to develop tourism, catering, accommodation, hospitality, all these seemingly insignificant skills cannot be acquired through one or two trainings."

In an effort to help the poor, Qilian County has organized training courses for conversion to employment, such as tailoring and chef classes, but Peng Kui said these sporadic training courses are often a formality. "One or two trainings, the funds for the activities run out, and there are no more, so can you really train chefs this way? The locals don't believe it either."

And younger generations such as Ma Jingui's are already trying to find possibilities beyond the goat whip.

Nature education is one. In some pilot villages, the Qinghai Forestry and Grassland Bureau works with village committees and village branches. They have compiled an ecological classroom tutorial to provide nature education in a group of primary and secondary schools. Wang Enguang, deputy director of the Qinghai Forestry and Grassland Bureau, said the model of "village committees +" can open up the "last kilometer" of effective ecological protection.

And eco-tourism is another way to think about it.

In 2014, Qilian County's tourism industry gradually developed, due to the snow-capped mountains, meadows and landscape, and even the name of the "Oriental small Switzerland", the county's souvenir stores to sell yellow mushrooms and beef and mutton to tourists, Ma Jingui's beef and mutton purchase price has increased by a lot. The company's business is also a major player in the market," said Mr. Kennedy.

Young people in many villages have begun to develop tourist routes, such as the Hundred Mile Flower Sea in Menyuan in Linxian County, the Grand Canyon of Donghaigou in Laolongwan Village, and the Zhuoer Mountain Scenic Spot in Qilian County. These attractions have been linked to the Qinghai Lake self-driving tour route, and the number of foreign vehicles on the Er Ga highway has increased in July and August each year.

But Peng Kui said the established tourism industry is still very traditional.

"When you think of tourism, what comes to mind is to enclose it, make attractions, sell tickets, that is, to build lodgings and trestles. But why do you need to repair these facilities? Who is your customer base? Where do you want to attract people to come, no one can say clearly. That's why you can see the trestles and promenades, appearing on the plateau meadows, very abruptly, which is a direct copy of the city. Is it really attractive?"

In contrast to hardware facilities such as trestles and exhibition halls, many local governments aren't clear on how ecotourism should operate. How to set up hiking routes, how to design the content of nature observation, how to train locals to become interpreters, and how to design a code of conduct for tourists ...... These "invisible" tasks require long-term investment.

Currently, the Institute for Global Environmental Studies is working with the Qinghai section of Qilian Mountain National Park, and Guo Mi Village in Qilian County and Lao Long Wan Village in Menyuan County have been selected as pilot sites where they will explore agreements with communities for conservation and ecotourism planning to create entry communities to the national park.

"Superficial poverty alleviation may seem quick, but is it really effective?" Peng Kui said institutional and attitudinal changes are also needed for conversion to employment to have a long-term effect.