Stop the Illegal Wildlife Trade: How China’s overseas Special Economic Zones risk helping traffickers
Stop the Illegal Wildlife Trade: How China’s overseas Special Economic
Zones risk helping traffickers
William Yang, The Independent
April 6, 2021
See link
https://www.independent.co.uk/stop-the-illegal-wildlife-trade/china-sezs-illegal-wildlife-trade-b1827128.html
for photo & graphic.
Over the last few decades, China has rapidly established special economic
zones (SEZ) not only within its borders but also in different parts of the
world. While initial efforts focused on using domestic SEZs as a way to
facilitate its market-oriented reforms, a large number of regional SEZs
have emerged since the beginning of the 21st century.
However, as China expands its economic footprints and influence across the
world through SEZs, experts told the Independent that regions with high
levels of Chinese investment face the risk of environmental degradation and
flouting of local and international laws.
“Investors rarely care very much about the local environment,” said John
Walsh, an expert on regional economic development in Southeast Asia. “They
may link their activities with timber clearing, monocropping plantations or
even bananas in northern Myanmar and generally moving local people out of
the way.”
Mr Walsh claimed SEZs in Myanmar and Laos have become “overseas enclaves of
China”, with Chinese money, Chinese language and Chinese laws being the
dominant currency, language and laws within the zones. “Local people are
made to feel like second-class citizens and their employment status
reflects that,” he added.
In a research paper published in 2018, Mr Walsh and two other academics
used a SEZ in Boten, Laos, as an example to document how China uses SEZs
along its border to facilitate illegal wildlife trade. The study found that
medical use is the most dominant purpose for wildlife trade in the SEZ.
“The findings confirm the important and active role Boten plays in the
illegal wildlife trade, where an inherent link with China was apparent,”
the paper concluded. “Lao’s economic zones are known to cater to largely
Chinese markets, including for the illegal sale of wildlife.”
Steve Galster, chair of the Freeland Foundation, said SEZs had a history of
facilitating illegal wildlife trade. “These SEZs reduce custom inspection,
which allows trade to be sped up,” he told the Independent.
“Within China, the government doesn’t let these stories out as much as
other countries. It’s not open about the internal conflicts, investigations
or discoveries about who is behind the trade.”
Mr Galster said medicines and potions – animals parts packaged and marketed
as traditional cures – made up the majority of the illegal wildlife trade
in SEZs. Other less common goods trafficked include ornaments or live
animals.
“Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, the one trade that has
been allowed to persist and it probably will be for a while, is the
medicine trade,” he said. “It’s anything that you can keep for a long
period and bag up, whether it’s pangolin scale or Ginseng.”
Mr Walsh points out that not all of China’s overseas SEZs are generating
negative impacts on the hosting country. According to him, large projects
in well-regulated areas in Thailand, Chinese companies can compete against
international firms in a transparent and coherent manner.
It is in less well-regulated areas that Chinese companies might structure
deals to their advantages due to lack of competitions. According to
Jonathan Hillman, author of “The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project
of the Century”, a book about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, it is
common for China to renegotiate a deal and try to defer the debt.
“Something problematic about this is that as you have countries with debt
distress, some of the Chinese negotiations are happening bilaterally and
behind closed doors,” he said. “There’s no transparency.”
Mr Hillman told the Independent China might ask other countries for
preferred access to natural resources or preferred access to future
contracts. “They want to be first in line for those in the future,” he
explained. “They could be asking for support on diplomatic issues. All of
those things are more likely as they are less likely to have a smoking gun.”
According to China’s official data, Beijing currently has 33 SEZs across
the world. While some SEZs are well-regulated and transparent, Mr Walsh
said there are others where low-skilled workers on low wages are exploited.
He pointed out that SEZs are generally spatial areas in which capital is
valued over labour as local government agencies generally want to attract
foreign money. “However, there are also incentives for the government
agencies to close their eyes to exploitation of labour or the production of
negative externalities such as pollution,” Mr Walsh told the Independent.
And in order to find land for SEZs in desirable locations, local residents
will often be forced to move to distant parts of the country. “In the case
of Dawei SEZ in Myanmar, those inhabitants were removed to a relatively
distant part of the country where agricultural conditions were unfamiliar,”
Mr Walsh explained.
As countries around the world still struggle to contain the coronavirus
outbreak, some experts think the pandemic serves as a warning connectivity
is not always a good thing. “Flows of goods and people and other things are
not purely good,” said Mr Hillman.
“There is potential for increased criminal activity in places where you’re
setting up new trading hubs, sometimes in very remote places. Sometimes
these are places with weak institutions and all of that is a recipe for
these illicit flows to increase as well.”
One of the examples mentioned by Mr Hillman is the port of Piraeus in
Greece, which is mostly owned by China’s state-owned COSCO Shipping. In
2018, authorities from the European Union and Italy launched an
investigation into suspected wide-scale tax fraud by Chinese criminal gangs
importing goods via the port.
At the time, Italian authorities said the Chinese criminal gangs completely
evaded the VAT, which caused serious damage to Italy’s national tax
authorities and to the community. The criminal gangs reportedly imported
counterfeit clothing and footwear through the port of Piraeus.
Meanwhile, a report published by the UK-based Environmental Investigation
Agency in 2015 pointed out how visitors to the Golden Triangle SEZ in Laos
can openly buy products made from endangered species including tigers,
leopards, elephants, rhinos, pangolins, helmeted hornbills, snakes, and
bears smuggled from Asia and Africa.
“The unchecked illegal wildlife trade in the Golden Triangle SEZ is
illustrative of illegal wildlife trade across the region, catering to
growing numbers of Chinese visitors,” EIA wrote in the report. “The
government of China is acutely aware of the footprint of Chinese businesses
and consumers in relation to poaching, trafficking, and the consumption of
illegal wildlife.”