Western Fujian Research Articles

Kumamotoa, an early Late Cretaceous non-marine bivalve, from Fujian, south China

The non-marine bivalve species Trigonioides ( Kumamotoa) quadratus Gu and Ma is described from the Fourth Member of the Hekou Formation in western Fujian, southeastern China. This species previously was regarded to belong to the subgenus Trigonioides (s.s.), which is restricted to the Early Cretaceous. Herein, it is included into the subgenus Kumamotoa. It is compared to Cenomanian (early Late Cretaceous) species from Japan and Korea such as Trigonioides ( Kumamotoa) mifunensis Tamura, Trigonioides ( Kumamotoa) matsumotoi Kobayashi and Suzuki and Trigonioides ( Kumamotoa) paucisulcatus Suzuki. The age of the Fourth Member of the Hekou Formation is discussed.

The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture and Conservation in China. By Chris Coggins. [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. xi +339 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8248-2506-3.

Much of this book is based on extensive fieldwork in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve (and nearby protected areas) of western Fujian as well as substantial examination of relevant historical records. Its basic purpose is to explore the interaction between people (in this case Hakka) and their surrounding ecological environments as influenced by their culture. The study is set within a long-term historical context stretching in the case of the tiger over approximately 2000 years. The chronicling of the status of the tiger illustrates how culture and ecological conditions are intertwined. While the tiger is a focal point in this book, it is not the only ecological case analysed in considering how and why ecological conditions have altered in this part of China as a result of variations in local cultural, social and economic conditions.The basic thesis of this book is that culture dominates man-induced ecological change. Hence, little or no progress can be made in understanding ecological change without a thorough study of the way cultural factors influence attitudes to nature. It is especially important to do this at the local level, particularly in China.There are two reasons why this is a desirable approach. First, in-depth local studies can enhance understanding of the national situation. Local or regional studies can be very valuable even when their results cannot be completely transferred to other parts of the country. Secondly, Coggins argues that local people are often the final arbiters of ecological change and that nature conservation can make little progress without local support and knowledge (for example, p. 283).

The tiger and the pangolin: nature, culture, and conservation in China

This original and wide-ranging work examines historical perceptions of nature in China and the relationship between insider and outsider, state and village, top-down conservation policy and community autonomy. After an introduction to the history of wildlife conservation and nature reserve management in China, the book places recent tiger conservation efforts in the context of a two-thousand-year gazetteer of tiger attacks - the longest running documentation of human-wildlife encounters for any region in the world. This record offers a unique perspective on the history of the tiger as a dynamic force in the political culture of China. While the tiger has long been identified with political authority, the Chinese pangolin and its eathly magic have exerted a powerful influence in the everyday lives of those working and living in the fields and forests. Today the tiger and the pangolin, government officials and village communities; must work together closely if wildlife habitat conservation programs are to succeed. Extensive fieldwork in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve and other protected areas of western Fujian have led the author to advocate a landscape ecological approach to habitat conservation. By linking economic development to land use practices, he makes a strong case for integrating nature conservation efforts with land tenure and other socio-ecological issues in China and beyond.

An outline of Quaternary development of Fagus forest in China: palynological and ecological perspectives

Summary China is abundant in beech species. Five of ten species from the genus Fagus are distributed in southern China. Beeches are confined to the subtropical zone and mixed with evergreen trees, deciduous broad-leaved trees and conifers in China, which is quite different from North America, Europe and Japan. Fagus was distributed much further north during the late Tertiary in China. Even in Northeast China where the current vegetation is mixed conifer-deciduous broad-leaved forest, Fagus species were co-dominants at that time. During the early Quaternary, Fagus declined and even disappeared in northern China, but expanded in western Fujian Province in subtropical southern China. During the middle Pleistocene, Fagus was observed to expand in some sites, such as in northern and central Taiwan Island. The Last Glacial caused Fagus to move downward from mountainous areas, but expansion of Fagus still happened in eastern Fujian Province. Low values of Fagus pollen occurred in subtropical China during the early Holocene. It expanded in Fanjingshan, Guizhou Province, during the Holocene megathermal, and in Shengnongjia, the center of the subtropical China, after about 3800 BP. Warmth and humidity conditions were both critical to the development of Fagus forests. In comparison with other broad-leaved tree species, Fagus has a requirement for medium warmth and medium to high humidity. Only under a suitable warmth and humidity combination did Fagus become dominant, leading to a limited expansion of Fagus in some mountainous areas during the Quaternary period. In Japan, Fagus instead of Quercus spread northward after the Last Glacial due to the more humid climate. In Europe and North America, several explanations, such as decreased seasonality, human disturbance, interspecies competition and change of fire intervals have been suggested for Fagus migration. With the development of monsoon after the late Tertiary, precipitation declined and climate became more continental in northern China, preventing the northward migration of Fagus to temperate China. As a shade-tolerant species, the low regeneration ability of Fagus in forests with low coverage in the temperate zone might be an additional reason.

Ferns and Fire: Village Subsistence, Landscape Change, and Nature Conservation in China's Southeast Uplands

Anthropogenic fire has shaped mountain landscapes in southern China since prehistoric times. Early Han settlers adopted periodic burning techniques from non-Han swidden agriculturalists, adapting them to suit their own cultural needs. In the early 1900s, Western observers noted the ubiquity of firing, but its historical role in village subsistence remained enigmatic. Research in western Fujian shows that in high mountain areas fire maintained montane grasslands and wet meadows within a mosaic of broadleaf forests, bamboo, and rice paddies. Meadows were prime grazing areas for cattle and provided bracken fern (Pteridiiim aquilimim) rhizomes, an important source of dietary starch in an area with low rice yields. Wildlife surveys show that grasslands, wet meadows, and other clearings are good habitats for wild ungulates, but widespread burning at lower elevations, where forest cover was sparse, often caused erosion, flooding, and ecological degradation. Following state bans on burning, beginning in the 1950s, biologically impoverished pine monocultures spread rapidly. High elevation grasslands and some wet meadows have been replaced by dense stands of short pines. Local people's involvement with selective pine forest clearance and the protection of broadleaf and mixed forests could contribute to habitat heterogeneity, improve degraded lands, and strengthen community-based conservation practices. The history of the planet is unintelligible without the history of fire. Stephen J. Pyne, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth

Wildlife Conservation and Bamboo Management in China's Southeast Uplands

ABSTRACT. The subtropical forests, grasslands, and wetlands of Southeast China's WuyiDaiyun Mountain Range provide essential habitats for diverse wildlife, including a dwindling population of tigers. Three primary protected areas, the Meihuashan, Wuyishan, and Longxishan Nature Reserves, contain varied wildlife habitats and also provide natural resources for 7,000 people in several dozen villages. A field-based study of land use and habitat quality in these reserves shows that anthropogenic bamboo forests are among the least valuable habitats for wildlife but that, as the primary source of household income, bamboo monoculture is spreading rapidly and replacing habitats of greater ecological value. Although authorities in Meihuashan have demarcated the many broadleaf forest patches for strict protection, household income and bamboo-management research in all three reserves suggests that successful habitat conservation may ultimately depend on more equitable systems of land tenure, improved cooperative cottage industries, and greater local economic diversification. Keywords: bamboo management, China, political ecology, wildlife conservation, Wuyi-Daiyun Mountain Range. With an area encompassing more than 6 percent of the earth's land surface and a tremendous diversity of topographic features and climates, China is biologically among the richest countries in the world (MacKinnon 1996, 14; CI 1998). [1] Recognizing the urgent need to protect China's natural heritage, government agencies at all levels have established more than 900 nature reserves in the past twenty years. By 1998 more than 930 reserves covered 7.7 percent of the country's land area (Benewick and Donald 1999). More than half of the reserves, most of them containing human settlements, are in the biologically and culturally diverse tropics and subtropics of the south (Schaller 1993; Zhou 1995; Daniels 1996). Unlike northern and western China, where most rural, nonagricultural, and nonpastoral lands are under government jurisdiction, large tracts of mountain lands in southern China are managed by villages, households, or individuals. Greater local control of forest resources in subtropical China is a legacy of centuries of wet-rice cultivation and settlement in marginal upland valleys, where villagers also managed bamboo stands, forests, and grasslands on surrounding slopes, ridges, and peaks. Although many traditions of regional land use and tenure were altered during the periods of collectivization and communization (1957-1981), state-directed economic reforms between 1979 and 1981 mandated a return of collective agricultural lands to individual households under contract, which facilitated the revival of individualistic resource-management systems and private entrepreneurialism (Muldavin 1996). In today's economic liberalization and political pluralization, villages adopt different methods for dividing and alloc ating land and natural resources to individual households. The origin, diffusion, and impacts of village-level systems of resource control and household bamboo-management strategies are a critical local conservation issue. Unlike bamboo species that sustain the giant panda populations of western China, pure stands of mao bamboo, sometimes known as brush bamboo (Phyllostachys pubescens Mazel ex H. De Lahaie var. pubescens), are human formed, an anthropogenic vegetation type with great economic value but little value as a wildlife habitat. In economic terms mao bamboo is the most important of the 200 species of bamboo in China, with the most widespread distribution and the greatest total forest area. However, without intensive management by humans, which entails frequent clearing of surrounding vegetation, bamboo stands are quickly overtaken by more biologically diverse broadleaf and mixed forests (Huang 1992; MacKinnon 1996, 147). In this study I examine the relationship between the conservation of wildlife habitats and village bamboo management in the Meihuashan, Wuyishan, and Longxishan Nature Reserves, which lie in the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountain Range of western Fujian Province, in China's Southeast Uplands (Figure 1). …

Mirror-image thrusting in the South China Orogenic Belt: tectonic evidence from western Fujian, southeastern China

The Mesozoic orogenic belt in south China is readily divided into two fold and thrust belts and a central multiply-deformed zone of ductile deformation dominated by folds with steeply dipping axial planes. Southeast-directed thrusting in the eastern belt and northwest-directed thrusting in the western belt resulted in a mirror image of one another during the Mesozoic. The eastern fold and thrust belt can be further divided into three domains that overlap one another and exhibit a southeast-verging wedge-like geometry and kinematics. Deviatoric stress has been calculated from quartz dislocation density at 91.5 MPa, 74.5 MPa and 73.8 MPa, decreasing toward the southeast. Upper Devonian and Lower Carboniferous sandstones have been used to constrain bed length for cross-section balancing to estimate crustal shortening from three typical areas. These indicate 45%, 41.6% and 37.3% shortening and suggest that 110 km of contraction has been achieved as a result of thrusting. This orogen correlates with the Ogcheon Belt in South Korea to the northeast. To the southwest it appears to correlate with a thrust belt in western Guangdong. This southeast-verging thrusting may be at least partially controlled by Cathaysia to the east.

Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma Family Businesses of Sibao, Fujian

Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma Family Businesses of Sibao, Fujian* Cynthia J. Brokaw (bio) The history of the book and the impact of print culture are relatively new subjects in scholarship on late imperial China. While some work has already been done on the literary aspects of these subjects—on questions of authorship and genre, on literacy and reading audiences, on the transmission of values and beliefs through print, and so forth—less attention has been paid to the economic and social organization of the publishing industry. The present study focuses on just this subject: the economic and social organization of the family publishing firms of the Zou and Ma descent groups that flourished in Sibao, western Fujian, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 1 Sibao, to be sure, never achieved fame or even much in the way of recognition as a publishing center; nor are the Zou and Ma names at all well-known among Chinese bibliophiles. There are very few references to the [End Page 49] Zou and Ma publishing industries in either contemporary sources—gazetteers, local biji, and literary collections—or modern secondary scholarship on the history of publishing in China. 2 Reasons for this obscurity are easy enough to find: The isolation of Sibao, located in a mountainous, not-easily-accessible area of western Fujian, far distant from the capital, meant that it was unlikely to come to literati or official notice. Since the Zou and Ma publishers did not specialize in fine, expensive editions, neither Qing collectors nor modern bibliophiles have been drawn to the study of Sibao imprints. Moreover, by far the greatest number of surviving imprints are relatively recent products, dating from the high or late Qing, thus not qualifying as rare editions deserving the attention of modern book scholars. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that Sibao was, despite its apparent obscurity, a publishing center of some importance in south China through most of the Qing dynasty. Signs of past prosperity can be found in Sibao itself in the great mansions built by the wealthier publishers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is still possible to visit the small, stall-like rooms within these houses that were used as printing workshops (and now as pigsties or storerooms) and to see outside them the large stone tubs used in the past to hold the printing ink. Moreover, the Zou and Ma genealogies and other family documents allude relatively frequently to the families’ publishing histories. More reliably, surviving woodblocks and Sibao imprints reveal that the Zou and Ma produced a long list of titles in a wide range of different subject categories. The Classics, particularly editions of the Four Books, and children’s educational texts like the Three Character Classic (Sanzi jing), the Hundred Family Names (Baijia xing), and the Treasury of Knowledge for Children (Youxue gushi qionglin) were the staples of their collection, presumably because, given the importance of the examination system, they could count on a steady demand for such texts. But the Zou and Ma produced histories, poetry and essay collections, vernacular fiction, household encyclopedias, guides to everyday etiquette and family ritual, collections of rhymed couplets, medical [End Page 50] and prescription handbooks, morality books, almanacs, and manuals of geomancy as well—in short, the whole range of texts associated with the varied demands of the increasingly literate population of Qing China. 3 While these facts do not necessarily validate Zheng Zhenduo’s claim that Sibao was, with Beijing, Nanjing, and Xuwan (Jiangxi), “one of the four great bases of woodblock printing” in the Qing, 4 they do suggest that the Zou and Ma publishers are worthy of study as commercial publishers of the late imperial era. Research on the commercial publishing houses of Sibao has just begun; it will be years before a comprehensive picture of the scope of the Zou and Ma businesses and the cultural significance of their publications can be drawn. This introductory essay describes and analyzes the organization and operation of the Zou and Ma businesses; in particular, I am interested in the ways in which the family nature of the businesses shaped and possibly encouraged their success as publishing...

Sr, Nd, and Pb isotopes of ultramafic xenoliths in volcanic rocks of Eastern China: enriched components EMI and EMII in subcontinental lithosphere

The U-Th-Pb, Sm-Nd, and Rb-Sr isotopic systematics of mafic and ultramafic xenolithic rocks and associated megacrystic inclusions of aluminous augite and garnet, that occur in three alkalic volcanic suites: Kuandian in eastern Liaoning Province, Hanluoba in Hebei Province, and Minxi in western Fujian Province, China are described. In various isotopic data plots, the inclusion data invariably fall outside the isotopic ranges displayed by the host volcanic rocks, testifying to the true xenolithic nature of the inclusions. The major element partitioning data on Ca, Mg, Fe, and Al among the coexisting silicate minerals of the xenoliths establish their growth at ambient mantle temperatures of 1000–1100°C and possible depths of 70–80 km in the subcontinental lithosphere. Although the partitioning of these elements reflects equilibrium between coexisting minerals, equilibria of the Pb, Nd, and Sr isotopic systems among the minerals were not preserved. The disequilibria are most notable with respect to the 206Pb/ 204Pb ratios of the minerals. On a Nd-Sr isotopic diagram, the inclusion data plot in a wider area than that for oceanic basalts from a distinctly more depleted component than MORB with higher 143Nd/ 144Nd and a much broader range of 87Sr/ 86Sr values, paralleling the theoretical trajectory of a sea-water altered lithosphere in Nd-Sr space. The garnets consistently show lowerμ andκ values than the pyroxenes and pyroxenites, whereas a phlogopite shows the highestμ andκ values among all the minerals and rocks studied. In a plot ofΔ207 andΔ208, the host basalts for all three areas show lowerΔ207 and higherΔ208 values than do the xenoliths, indicating derivation of basalts from Th-rich (relative to U) sources and xenoliths from U-rich sources. The xenolith data trends toward the enriched mantle components, EMI and EMII-like, characterized by high 87Sr/ 86Sr andΔ207 values but with slightly higher 143Nd/ 144Nd. The EMI trend is shown more distinctly by the host basalts. The EMII mantle domain may be present in the Chinese continental lithosphere just above the EMI domain of the basalt source at the lower part of the lithosphere. We argue that the ancient depleted continental lithosphere was metasomatized, imparting the EMI signature, in earlier times ( > 1000 m.y.), and U migrated upward, resulting in highTh/U ratios in the lower portion of the lithosphere. Observed highTh/U,Rb/Sr, 87Sr/ 86Sr andΔ208, lowSm/Nd ratios, and a large negativeɛ Nd in phlogopite pyroxenite with a depleted mantle model age of 2.9 Ga, support our contention that metasomatized continental lower mantle lithosphere is the source for the EMI component. We also suggest that the EMII signature may have been introduced later (less than ∼ 500 Ma) by another metasomatic event during the subduction of an oceanic plate, which was partially responsible for some of the observed inter-mineral isotopic disequilibria.

Thermal structure of the lithosphere in Fujian, China

The principal thermal parameters of the lithosphere (average reduced heat flow, heat production, and heat production depth parameter) have been determined from an analysis of silica heat flow estimates in Fujian, China. Silica data indicate that relative to western Fujian, heat flow is higher in eastern Fujian, with thinner lithosphere, a shallower depth to the Curie isotherm (about 27 km), and slightly higher geothermal activity. However, even in eastern Fujian, the thermal anomaly is small, no anomalous heat source is indicated, and conditions are not thought to be favorable for geothermal resources related to magma chambers, hydrothermal reservoirs, or hot dry rock. Widespread thermal springs in this region are heated by deep circulation of groundwater along faults in association with a slightly elevated geothermal gradient.