The Photo from Quan Ding
Mountains of Gibbons and the Lisu People
The Lisu people dwell and constantly travel on the Sino-Myanmar border. In the mountainous area, they have formed complex and intimate relationships with non-human lives, including the newly identified Skywalker hoolock gibbon (Hoolock tianxing).
Understand the High Mountain Landscapes
Conservation
Biodiversity conservation, constructed by natural-science based narratives, affect the Lisu people's daily life. They are struggling to face the conservation governancing system embodied with power structure.
Mobility, agroforests and development
Between High mountain area and coastal cities in China, the Lisu people and businessmen from urban areas narrate the stories about Market-based economy together.
Multi-species relations
The Lisu people, Skywalker Gibbon, Chinese alder, Bamboo shoots, Cardamom, and cattle, connected and built subtle relations within their shared high mountain forest landscape as time went by.
Please click this eye.
Entangled Landscape
This project aims to provide a broader understanding of the Lisu livelihood and gibbon conservation in modern China.
While experiencing great social upheaval during various modernization interventions, the Lisu people still have deep connections with the landscape where their ancestors have lived for generations, their movement has crossed different boundaries, and their ecological knowledge has constantly been put into practice.
We advocate that bring conservation leadership back to communities, especially the women’s and children’s groups can help shift traditional, top-down, male-dominated conservation models toward more inclusive, community-driven strategies.
Reflection on conservation values and power structure within natural science-based narratives
Jingyu Chen
MA, Anthropology,
National Tsing Hua University
I graduated from the Institute of Anthropology at National Tsing Hua University and am currently conducting research on community-based conservation of the Skywalker Hoolock Gibbon (Hoolock tianxing) and Hainan Gibbon (Nomascus hainanus) in China. Since 2018, I have been working as a project manager for Cloud Mountain Conservation, a grassroots NGO, where I focus on the conservation of Skywalker Gibbons and other non-human primates.
Now, I am pursuing my second master’s degree at University of Cambridge, MPhil in Conservation Leadership. My research, which is practice-oriented and grounded in social anthropology, offers a broader understanding of ethnic minority communities' livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in contemporary China.
By critically analyzing China’s conservation policies and examining how ethnic minority communities engage with and challenge top-down, science-based conservation approaches, my study advocates for a participatory framework that integrates local ecological knowledge and traditional land-use practices—thereby enhancing the equity in decision-making process toward the global biodiversity framework.
“Our ancestors came here with Apu.
At that time, it was all deep in the mountains, and no one was there.
They stayed here until now.”
― A Lisu Headman