china: Saving the Great Wall
“It was amazing to me that such a political icon of China had no laws to protect it”, said Lindesay, founder and director of International Friends of the Great Wall.
“Since the mid-1990s with all the entrepreneurship taking hold in China, locals were exploiting the absence of a law to protect the Wall and in the process destroying much of its beauty”, he told journalists.
Tourists, both local and international, have increasingly flocked to undeveloped and unmanaged portions of the Wall, to hike on the crumbling remnants, and villagers and farmers living near the structure have developed an unregulated cottage industry catering for growing tourist needs, while charging access and climbing fees.
Ramshackle shops have been set up in the Wall towers, while eateries, bungalows and trinket sellers have built structures next to the fabled edifice.
Disputes between tourists and unlicensed vendors and fee-takers are frequent and often dangerous.
The deterioration of the structure is now so bad that the part of the Wall nearest to the capital has been listed as one of the world’s 100 most endangered cultural sites by the World Monument Funds in 2002.
Lindesay’s group backed the listing.
The Great Wall is made up of at least 16 different and distinct portions built along the scenic mountain ridges of North China from between 300 BC to the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 to protect the capital and the South from ‘barbarian’ invaders.
The new law only covers the 629 kilometers of that part of the Wall constructed under the Ming in the Beijing municipality, and while intending to do away with the unlicensed development around the structure, it is full of loopholes and vagaries, Lindesay noted.
“The enactment of the law does promise greater improvements, but we can’t expect change overnight.
“The regulations are very complex, and it is still left up to the people to take action... it is a good start”.
The Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau will be in charge of implementing and publicizing the law, while residents will be required to formulate a plan on how they intend to manage and preserve parts of the Wall before such sections can be developed for tourism.
The police will only “assist” in implementing the law, while locals and tourists should document violations of the law and inform the Cultural Relics Bureau, which will be responsible for investigating.
“The scale of the Great Wall is enormous”, Lindesay said. “So what the law intends to do is to have a different approach for different places, access to some fragile parts of the wall will be strictly forbidden, while others will be developed for mass tourism”.
In between will be a middle range of sites that must get official approval before people will be allowed to visit.
At present in Beijing only 20 kilometers of the Wall is managed and developed for mass tourism, including the sites of Badaling and Mutianyu, where the wall has been refurbished.
A visit includes such Disneyland-like attractions as cable cars, zoos, bungee jumping, hotels, restaurants and cinemas.
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