In the snow-covered wilderness of the Tibetan plateau, forest police in an old Chinese-made jeep are chasing a gang of poachers in four-wheel-drive Pajeros.
The poachers open fire with their automatic rifles and hit one of the policemen. The team stops to treat the wounded officer, while the poachers speed away.
Their prey is the Tibetan antelope, or chiru, whose hair is smuggled into Kashmir and made into shahtoosh shawls that can cost up to US$40,000 (HK$310,400) in London, Paris and Hong Kong.
After years of poaching, between 50,000 and 70,000 of the animals remain on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau about 4,600 metres above sea level, a fraction of the million roaming there in the early 1900s. At the current rate of killing, the animals will be extinct in five years.
Beijing is worried. In 1988 it put the chiru on the priority list of protected species and sent forest police to patrol their vast habitat in Tibet and Qinghai. Since 1990, they have seized 20,000 hides and 1,100 kilograms of hair as well as 400 guns, 190,000 rounds of ammunition and 171 vehicles, and arrested nearly 3,000 poachers.
In April, the authorities mobilised 170 police from three provinces in a three-week sweep, in the largest operation of its kind.