China Cracks Down on Illegal Online Wildlife Trade

Eliza Barclay, National Geographic News 29 Feb 08;

Authorities in China recently launched a crackdown on Web sites that openly trade in animal products made from threatened species, experts say.

The move follows pressure from two international wildlife advocacy groups, which found thousands of items made from protected species for sale on major Chinese Internet auction sites in 2007.

As a result of the investigation, Chinese officials have already shut down several online auctions selling banned goods, said Grace Gabriel, Asia regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), who is based in Beijing.

"There has been progress in identifying auctions selling illegal products," she said.

"But Chinese authorities still need a lot of help with enforcement."

(Related news: "Wildlife Trade Booming in Burmese Casino Town" [February 28, 2008].)

Thousands of Ads

IFAW and TRAFFIC, the international wildlife-trade monitoring network, conducted two recent studies of China's Internet auctions that led to this year's crackdown.

Between February and December 2007, IFAW found sites selling 1,973 items from 30 species protected by Chinese environmental law and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

China has been a member of CITES, an international treaty that regulates trade in protected species, since 1981.

TRAFFIC published a similar study in July 2007 that found 4,291 advertisements for illegal wildlife products on auction sites serving mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan over an eight-month period.

Porter Erisman is a spokesperson for Alibaba, an e-commerce company and Yahoo partner that owns the Chinese auction site Taobao, which saw some of its bids shuttered by the Chinese government.

"Any postings of products banned by CITES are prohibited on our sites, and we will take them down as soon as we become aware [if our own filtering systems happened to miss them]," Erisman told National Geographic News in an email.

But Joyce Wu, in TRAFFIC's East Asia office in Taipei, said the companies need to do more.

"The major Web site companies should be more proactive and take the responsibility for the products sold on their Web site," Wu said.

Mother, or Elephant?

IFAW's Gabriel noted that the two most popular wildlife products traded online in China are elephant ivory and items made from tiger bone.

Ivory products include decorative and religious-themed carved figurines, chopsticks, and jewelry. They are sold among collectors, who are mostly white-collar and well educated, Gabriel said.

Tiger bone, which has been banned in China for the past 15 years, has been used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat rheumatism.

Some manufacturers still produce tiger-bone wine and claim that it has magical powers and benefits for the skin.

The market for tiger-bone products generally consists of lower-income people in rural areas who shop at local vendors, though a small market for tiger-bone products exists online, Gabriel noted.

Rhino horn, tortoise shell, and antelope horn are also banned from being traded online.

One of the key challenges to policing online trade in illegal products, the conservationists note, is Chinese vendors' ability to tweak the language to manipulate descriptions of their products.

"In other languages it might be difficult, but Chinese is tonal, and if you change the tone it could be a different word," Gabriel said.

For example, the word "ma" has four different meanings in Chinese depending on the tone and the character used. In one tone, it means "elephant" and in another tone it means "mother."

This allows vendors to advertise in a kind of code, using different characters to imply a different pronunciation of "ma" and disguise an ivory product.

IFAW therefore supplies Chinese law enforcement with identification manuals so they will recognize illegal products when they see them in markets or online.

Burden of Proof

Awareness of the illegal nature of the products and their impact on threatened wildlife populations is on the rise in China, according to Gabriel.

But recent IFAW polls, still unpublished, show that most people in China, for example, do not know that elephants must be killed to obtain ivory. (See related photos of elephants massacred in Chad for their tusks. Warning: graphic images.)

And even if authorities find a suspect product, they have to prove to the courts that it was obtained illegally, which "makes it ineffective and holds up the process," Gabriel said.

In the United States the Endangered Species Act makes it illegal just to advertise sales of protected species, much less be in possession of a banned product, said Sandra Cleva, spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Gabriel said she would like to see a similar policy enacted in China. Until then, she noted, authorities can tell sites like Taobao to remove postings, but will still have trouble prosecuting the individuals who sell illegal items.

Meanwhile, other wildlife advocacy organizations say that China's online trade in animal products is relatively rare and that most illegal transactions still take place in physical markets.

"Multiple issues affect this, from the credibility of and trust in online trading through to the fact that much [animal product] trade is still conducted by people with no day-to-day access to the Internet or knowledge of it," said Steve Trent, president of the international animal welfare group WildAid.

Currently the United States is the top destination for illegal wildlife products bought on U.S. and international auction sites, the USFWS's Cleva noted.

But China had 210 million Internet users in 2007, according to the China Internet Networks Information Center, and will surpass the United States' 215 million users in 2008.