China’s government has belatedly issued rules to its foreign logging ventures, a too little too late response to being identified as the heart of a global trade for lumber from illegal logging [search] that it sells to markets in the United States and Europe. Efforts to date by the Chinese government to address their role in providing the market for much of the illegally logged ancient forest timbers are inadequate because they do not address the purchase of timbers from companies of other nationalities — and Malaysian and Indonesian logging companies [search] do much of the dirty work of actually ruthlessly stealing logs for the Chinese market.

Even more troublingly is that along with WWF, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the World Bank; the Chinese government falsely contends that industrially harvesting ancient forests can be done in a responsible, sustainable manner. Ancient forests cannot be preserved and sustainably logged at the same time. Industrial forest management destroys permanently forest function, structure, composition and dynamics. Yet all these forest power brokers insist we can log our ancient forests and protect them too. The World Bank is even set to suggest that logging ancient forests has carbon benefits — NOT! It is a tragic, deadly myth that if only done correctly and responsibly, millions of years old ancient rainforests can and should be logged in an ecologically acceptable manner.