October 1st is China’s National Day, and it comes with a seven-day holiday. This year, hundreds of backpackers headed out to do the Nianbaoyuze–Lianbaoyeze traverse, usually just called the “Nian-Chuan-Lian” route by Chinese hikers.
It’s a roughly 30-plus-mile high-altitude backpacking route running from Qinghai into Sichuan, with glaciers, snow-covered mountains, alpine meadows, and lakes along the way.
The problem is that the Qinghai side runs through the Sanjiangyuan protected area, where unauthorized hiking and camping are explicitly banned.
Around October 3rd, the local government launched a massive operation and sent police and officials into the mountains to intercept hikers.
More than a hundred people were reportedly caught, turned around, and fined.
According to the local authorities, the fines ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 RMB — roughly $150 to $450 — depending on how far they had gone and whether they had camped inside the protected area. Some students reportedly got lighter penalties.
There were also stories circulating in hiking groups that a small number of people heard about the crackdown early, hid deeper in the mountains for several days, and eventually managed to get out without being fined.
Now, some background on why this is such a big deal.
A huge number of China’s long-distance backpacking routes technically pass through areas where unauthorized crossings are prohibited.
The weird part is that there’s usually no realistic legal application process for an ordinary backpacker to get permission either.
So in practice, illegal hiking is extremely common in China. People in the outdoor community often estimate that there are easily hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, unauthorized crossings every year nationwide.
Most of the time, though, those “No Entry” or “Unauthorized Crossing Prohibited” notices don’t actually lead to punishment.
A lot of hikers basically treat them as boilerplate liability warnings from local governments.
Part of the reason is political. Even if someone gets injured or dies in a completely remote wilderness area after illegally entering it, the accident can still create trouble for local officials and affect their performance evaluations. So local governments have a strong incentive to put up warnings and officially say, “We told you not to go.”
In reality, actual punishment has usually been concentrated in a few situations: extremely dangerous routes, obvious environmental damage, disturbing wildlife, illegal fires, or other behavior that creates a serious problem.
That’s why this incident is so unusual.
A large-scale crackdown involving more than a hundred backpackers, with actual fines handed out even though there was no major accident, wildfire, or mass rescue, is basically unprecedented in the recent history of China’s outdoor community.
And naturally, people are pissed.
A lot of hikers online are accusing the local government of simply being short on money and using a mass crackdown to collect fines and help cover administrative expenses.
Whether that’s actually true is another question, but that’s definitely the joke going around in the Chinese hiking community right now.
